Originally Posted by John Forester
As a practical matter, if you can make your necessary and desired journeys under nice conditions, OK, but that limits your travel to those routes, and hence the destinations reachable by those routes. If you want to generally travel throughout all of the area within reachable distance, then you will have to accept some unpleasant conditions because society cannot provide for pleasant travel everywhere.
I can agree with most of that, and, like I said, I am certainly capable of safely riding in unpleasant conditions.
I just disagree with the extent to which society can provide more pleasant conditions. Maybe I got spoiled from living in Madison for two years, but I think society can do a lot more.