Comment by sjw987

Right?! Also on many online forums. I get why and how, but it remains pretty weird to see/read from a country where everyone is "a cyclist". It just comes across as very low IQ. It's like making fun of people that have breakfast or something.

> Local governments here try to encourage cycling by putting in as many dedicated bike lanes as they can, but they never seem to get much use

Might be a regional or urban/rural thing? In Ireland bike lanes in central and near-central Dublin are often very heavily used these days, especially since covid (to the point that I think they're going to have to rethink traffic control for some of them), but bike lanes in outer suburbs seem to be mostly empty.

> western Europe is very bike centric

Bike usage is relatively low, hardly comparable to the amount of cars. Maybe more popular than USA, but definitely far from it being bike-centric. Just a handful of cities (such as Amsterdam) have more people commuting via bicycles than cars.

"The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists" --- which is why bike lanes don't get much use: sooner or later you will have to share the road with cars for a while, and I personally don't feel safe at all doing that.

It varies massively from place to place.

Where I live in London, and in many other cities, cycling to get around is massively popular and growing fast.

But other towns and cities are much more like you describe.

Anecdotally this seems like somewhat of a demographic thing and places that skew younger, university educated[/ing], and dare I say left wing tend toward much higher rates of cycling vs other forms of transport.