Gear_Admiral 

And that is a problem almost everywhere in North America. The planning and layout are so different from how they are in much of Europe or Asia or even in the USA before 1950. That travel is a big time suck, impractical for anyone not in great shape (a 60-year-old will not pedal as fast as a 20-year-old), and a huge safety concern for many people.

The lack of safety is a bigger problem than any epidemic of sloth. Walking around the streets near your town hall and being on the side of a relatively high speed roadway are different in terms of vehicle speeds and safety from crime.

very business is set back behind a parking lot, which itself is massive and then set back 20 feet from the road. There is little foot traffic. Anyone in a car is going too fast to really understand what one sees for a brief flash of time, let alone to stop and intervene if something happens. Then there is the issue of the night.

On some trips, I have had drug addicts try to stop me on the road and try to block me. If I had been a slower cyclist or a more "attractive target," things could have been different. Bike commuting in Taiwan and Florida are radically different experiences despite having very similar climates. Enough said.

There is a reason that cycling for commutes and for touring skew heavily towards certain demographics and away from others.

Instead of scratching our heads, we can just compare things. Coldness makes biking impossible -- no ... look at Finland; you just need plowing of bike paths and shoulders. Mountains make it too hard -
to bike -- no, look at Switzerland.

Watch Hajimete no Otsukai (called "Old Enough [to do an errand] on Netflix). It is the Japanese show where secretly monitored 4-year-olds run errands around town. Imagine an adult doing these tasks in almost any town in America on foot: going to the seaport to get fish, going to a watch store to pick up a repaired watch, the laundromat for dry cleaning, and then back home. You could not walk all the miles needed.

Many Americans saw this and were also horrified at how dangerous it was for children to walk without their parents or to cross a street because they cannot conceive that crime is far lower and streets are much safer outside of America.

Then, after being scared into crawling in their metal boxes permanently in adolescence, Americans become unable to guess distances in their head, forget the relative speed of a bike, get out of shape, then get lazy, sure, and see no issue with living 15 versus 30 miles away from a grocery store because they drive everywhere anyway.

Every working-age person in America in 2022 came of age *after* the damage was done, so to speak. This is all normal to them. Then we wonder why people don't spontaneously try to buck the norm and cycle 15 miles to work in the sun (no trees in the "clear zone"!) on the shoulder of 4 or 5-lane roads with cars going 52 mph in a 45 mph zone. Those of us who brave the conditions had some bit if luck or privilege or spark to try bike commuting, were abke to enjoy the benefits, and kept on with it, but it isn't a typical story for most people.