Originally Posted by hamster

Your profile says "location: Arizona". Population density of Maricopa County, AZ is less than one half of population density of Netherlands. Population density of Phoenix is one fourth of the population density of Amsterdam. Your state has to raze hundreds of thousands of single-family houses and replace them with multistory apartments before it can get to the state where bikes start making as much sense as across the pond.

Once you get to that density, you've increased the number of cars in your current system by the factor of 2x to 4x, and you can see that even your well planned roadway system would struggle immensely. At that point local planners can start making decisions whether to continue trying to squeeze in more cars (widen freeways, build overpasses and tunnels, add parking structures) or encourage bike commuting by adding bike lanes & such. The second option is justified if they can reasonably expect high return on investment (spending money would take cars off the roads).

I live near San Diego. Local officials recently approved a $200 million bike infrastructure expansion plan that involves building or completing something like 50 miles of separated bikeways throughout the county. Do I expect these $200 million to make a dent in car-commute rate? I don't, and probably neither do they. Maybe they are extremely forward-thinking and they want to start spending money now in anticipation of hitting population density markers some time closer to 2050 than to this day. Maybe they just think that having bikeways is a good idea.