I live in a college town in Michigan and work for a company in San Francisco.
I don't find biking to be uncomfortable here whatsoever. In fact there are maybe a half dozen to a dozen coffee shops I can work from that are around two miles away from my house and I bike to them all the time- even in the winter if the roads aren't icy.
Or if you want something more concrete to work with: how many mile lanes of protected bike lanes or off-street bike paths are there in your town? How does that compare to the number of mile lanes for sidewalks or general vehicle lanes? What percentage of controlled intersections use a protected design? How wide are the roads? What's the speed limit, and how fast do people actually drive? How common are pedestrian islands? How sharp are the curb corners? How many of the painted bike lanes in the door zone? How common are walk/bike cut-throughs? What percentage of intersection lights have a marker for bikes?
Most cyclists who talk about how comfortable they are in the US don't realize just how bad it is there. Yes, you can still often get by; I certainly managed, in the bay area, and Seattle, and Utah, and even Alabama. But it was still total garbage compared to the places that take biking seriously (which is exactly why so few people do it in the states).
We live in an area that is, by most Americans' standards, fairly dense, and yet we started having our son bike to school a mile away, by himself, when he was 7, and he started biking alongside us to a kindergarten 2 miles away when he was 5. He's 8 now, and he sometimes bikes himself to a friend's house, or a park, or a grocery store or bakery for an errand. That kind of thing is almost unheard of in the US these days.