i grew up in india riding bicycle almost on a daily basis. i strongly disagree with your comment. for some of us cycling is just freedom and way of life, it has nothing to do with 'weird artifact of wealthy suburbs' or 'Japanese tea ceremony' and i didn't grow up wealthy. it got me places and let me hang out with friends. also as a kid if you wanted to go fast and didnt have motorcycle or money for gas, this was the best approach.
Same in the Netherlands. Rich, poor, young, old, everybody rides bikes as a normal way to get places. Not sure what chip the GP has on their shoulder, but it definitely doesn't match with my experience.
In most of the U.S. biking to get to places is remarkably dangerous if not outright impossible. Your average cyclist is one who drives their bike somewhere to ride like a large state park with little car traffic and smooth hilly roads, rather than a bike commuter. That sort of cyclist tends to be wealthy with all the latest gear and clad in spandex in my experience. Its a nice situation for riders like me, I got a great deal on a roadbike with dura ace components since the seller was hopping on the gravel bike craze at the time and didn't care about selling their pretty nice bike for a huge loss.
I'd say it differently: most people in the US have no safe place to bike for transportation.
Most places are perfectly safe. I for example, have 100 miles of safe trails and rural roads to ride on, here in the American Midwest. But most people live in dense urban environments.
Even in your rural example, those trail routes I find are mostly just scenic rides through parkland rather than anything useful for commuting. People mostly drive their bikes there and ride back to where they parked afterwards. Smaller rural roads might be fine, but I bet you aren't riding along the shoulder of a four lane state highway with a speed limit of 55 miles an hour very often, and those are the main connective roads between job centers and housing among rural and suburban areas in the U.S.
My local town is quite safe and has trails criss-crossing it. But truthfully most Midwestern trails are 'trails-on-rails' and inhabit old railway right-of-ways. Usually pretty far off the beaten path to be sure.
For instance, I can ride 50 miles from my urban center (for what its worth) to the next one north, and be in countryside the whole time.
Well I don’t have any chip on my shoulder. Cycling is an upper class pastime in the United States. That’s just a plain fact. Nothing wrong with it either
