Cyclist here. Didn’t earn my license until the age of 28, when I moved to a city that had even shittier infrastructure for bikes.

If we are going to place blame where it is due, look no further than the engineer, John Forester. John Forester was a wannabe bike racer out in California that wanted bikes to be treated like cars because dip shit thought he was sonic; he wanted to go fast. His concern was that bikes would get relegated to sidewalks and paths where they couldn’t go fast if bike infrastructure was implemented. He was against bike infrastructure during post war 1970’s CA where lots of urban planning was happening.

When it comes to walking and bicycling, most state DOTs and most local DOTs wait until there is a demonstrated demand before implementing bike infrastructure. Meaning stuff doesn’t get done until there’s a worn path on the side of the road where people are walking, or — as dark and morbid as it sounds — enough people are killed crossing a multi-lane road that eventually action is warranted. Many cities like the city where I am from were incorporated in the late 1600’s early 1700’s, and no one was thinking about bike infrastructure then. Roads were built with horse carts in mind, which evolved into cars. For older cities making the changes is a major cost vs urban planning to include bikes when a city is new and being built.

Another key difference between the USA, and European/Asian nations that have better bike infrastructure, is the fact that the later believes in science. In the early 2000s, the city of Paris, France, started a major push to roll out bike infrastructure to encourage cycling because air pollution was such a huge problem. Between 2005 and 2024, levels of nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter — two of the most harmful pollutants to human health — have been slashed by 50% and 55%, respectively. Amsterdam and Copenhagen are other examples of cities that built out bike infrastructure to reduce reliance on cars. Despite the environmental benefits seen in the USA when traffic plummeted during covid, most state and local governments would rather pretend that air pollution caused by cars isn’t that bad.

Then there is the whole, if you build it, they will come, mentality. Most people in the USA don’t consider cycling viable because there is no infrastructure. It doesn’t occur to them that riding a bike is even an option because the infrastructure isn’t there. If the infrastructure were there, it might encourage more people to try cycling instead of driving. I work in a busy downtown area for my state government. The infrastructure for bikes here is god awful. There are just 3 roads in my entire town that have bike lanes, and they are often riddled with cars that have double parked in the downtown area. Once you get about 3 miles away from the downtown area, the bike lanes disappear from each road. My job has no protected locations for locking up bikes. I used to lock mine right to a tree outside of my job, and it was stolen. The ONLY reason why the guy was caught was because he stole from in front of a state government building and there were cameras everywhere. I bought a new bike, and an insane lock, and my bike was sabotaged in the new spot on street I found to park. (Someone cut small holes in my rear tire, to the point I couldn’t identify there was a breach in the tire when I had a flat because the hole was so small. I’d eventually figure it out, buy a new tire, and kept riding. The last time my bike was sabotaged, the culprit used a knife to cut the rubber of the inner tube stem, which is something that can’t be patched, and isn’t obvious until you take it apart to look for the problem. Another police report resulting in camera footage being pulled once again showed there was a asshole vandalizing bikes when he couldn’t steal them.)

Finally, shitty infrastructure will destroy your bike. The shoulders of the roads up here are littered with potholes worse than the street, like so bad when I hit one, it flipped me over the handlebars onto the pavement. When it’s raining, you can’t tell if a puddle is just a puddle or a massive pothole. I hit so hard it popped the tire AND bent my rim. Then there’s all the glass, and random industrial waste in the shoulder too. It got so bad I started collecting the bolts, nuts, and other random pieces of metal in the road I mailed into our city’s DOT with my complaint about the state of the roads. During a bad month, I might have 4 flats, that’s almost $50 of new inner tubes, plus my time to make repairs.