It's odd, on one side the USA is very car-centric, and western Europe is very bike centric, and then stuck in-between is the UK which has no idea which one it is.
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 (where I live they're used almost exclusively by bike delivery people and a few people like myself).
The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists (probably helped to no good degree by the likes of people like Jeremy Clarkson / Top Gear which spent a decade joking about and belittling cyclists).
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.
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.
I think people look down on cyclists on British roads.
Everybody I see driving around me seems in a rush, act as if the roads are exclusively for cars (despite the Highway Code reiterating recently that the pecking order is most to least vulnerable), and get annoyed at some perceived hold up should they be unable to overtake (a minority of the time).
Sometimes I think it might even be as simple as an anti-fitness / jealousy thing. I'm abused more often when I'm running and cycling than any other point in my day. Anecdotally I've heard that the abuse and animosity is even worse for women doing both of these activities, than what I've experienced.
> 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.
It's definitely regional. London has an enormous amount of cyclists whenever I've visited (good rental schemes and useful for the many tourists they have).
In Leeds, not so much. Not many tourists, the bike lanes aren't universal enough to convince some people who don't want to ever be on the roads, and there's a very car-heavy culture, even in city centers.
It's only pretty recent (post-covid) that it's really taken off in Dublin; I think it was the installation of semi-segregated bike lanes (separated from the road by flexible bollards or similar) that made people comfortable enough with it for numbers to really increase.
"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.
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.
I've noticed London is a huge outlier when I visit. I haven't seen the same level of cycling elsewhere in the country. I would hazard a guess it's to do with the amount of rental bikes, how they're setup, and the huge amount of tourists who are unlikely to be bringing their car on holiday. It's nice to see.
I'm from Leeds, and while the council has been putting in (some decent, some bad) bike lanes across the city center, I rarely see other cyclists on them. Just the odd commuter and tons of delivery cyclists.
> (some decent, some bad) bike lanes across the city center
Looking at cities like London or Paris there are two thresholds which need to be reached: 1. the infrastructure needs to be consistent and safe-feeling enough that the average resident doesn't feel like they're going to risk their lives at any point; and 2. the infrastructure needs to be widespread enough that they can do the things they need without having to think about it too much. "Surveys show that the lack of safe and contiguous infrastructure is a primary reason why most people don't ride more" (https://momentummag.com/biking-work-barrier-americans/)
That's pretty visible in Paris: there have been rental bikes since 2007, and they've been pretty popular and expanding, but it's as the infrastructure expansions of the bike plans started connecting properly that cycling really exploded.
A hodge-podge of disconnected bits is never going to succeed, because it fails on both safety and utility.
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 (where I live they're used almost exclusively by bike delivery people and a few people like myself).
The roads can be lethal and many drivers have a great deal of animosity towards cyclists (probably helped to no good degree by the likes of people like Jeremy Clarkson / Top Gear which spent a decade joking about and belittling cyclists).