> It’s not just that it’s a big spend, but it’s a big spend on something 75% of people don’t use even if you did it.
Improving infrastructure for bikes in a serious, not-just-paint-on-a-road kind of way would result in higher density, which is also better for walking, scooters, public transport - basically _all_ forms of transport aside from cars. It would likely _reduce_ costs on infra in the long run, by virtue of having less paved area that has to be maintained.
> But for the other 80% of America, who are old enough that simply falling off of a bike could cause real injuries,
Encouraging greater mobility through walking or biking would likely result is lower obesity and better health for people in general. I have two uncles that bike heavily, both 65+. Neither has ever mentioned serious injuries from biking, but both have had incidents due to having to share the road with large personal vehicles.
> live somewhere not dense enough to really get anywhere this way
That's... the issue in a nutshell and the reason to make serious adjustments to infrastructure?
> or don’t want to ride a bike in the snow, especially in a city that may not be particularly great at removing it (which is almost all but the biggest of them) we’ll still take our cars thank you.
Does investing in biking infra mean people are going to be required to bike year-around or something? Is snow even a serious consideration for the majority of the country? I'm not really understanding your point here. (Heck, I did some googling and the nordic countries do 10% of trips by bike to the US at 1%, so it seems like even countries with a lot of snow can make this work.)
> Cars may be environmentally awful, but they’re great in basically every other way, so let’s just electrify them and build lots of new clean energy and stop trying to make everyone ride a bike.
No, they aren't great in every other way. They encourage terrible urban design that works against every other common mode of transportation. They require parking, which has always been a tremendous waste of space, especially in urban cores or downtown areas. They are safer only for the people inside them, and more dangerous for everyone around that chooses to bike, walk, etc., and this goes double for the ever-larger designs rolled out in the US. Human-powered transport effectively requires reasonable limits on distance - no one is going to be making a 3 or 4 hour commute walking or biking, and yet this isn't even uncommon for places people can get to by car. Cars may be great on the individual scale, taken in isolation; their effects in volume are bad at best.