Bikes are not a viable replacement for cars for most people in most cities.
Bikes work as primary transportation for active 20-somethings who live in cities near work. They do not work for the vast majority of people, and never will. Wanting to make cities bike-friendly is fine. Wanting to do so at the expense of the 80% of the population that needs a car is addle-brained.
1. Take your kids to school on a bike?
If you're living in a dense metro area, your school in within walking distance. So yes. You could bike there, but more likely you'll walk with them. If they go to a further away school, they'll take the subway or a bus.
2. Ride in a business suit?
Yes, I see it all the time with Citibikes. Even on Wall Street.
3. Go to Ikea or Costco?
Sure you'll go there, but you'll have your items delivered like any sane person who doesn't live in BFE.
4. Going to ride in from the suburbs?
People do it every day. You'd be surprised how many showers and locker rooms are right next to corporate bike rooms.
Just because you can't imagine something doesn't mean it isn't normal in another part of the country.
Not everyone wants to live in a dense city like Manhattan (or any of NY city).
I bike to Costco and Ikea all the time, but sure you do have to get big stuff delivered unless you have a trailer (https://www.bikesatwork.com/blog/move-it-by-bike-moving-serv...). I used to commute to downtown from the suburbs daily. When I was young my dad used to bike me to daycare/school all the time. If you need to be somewhere in a suit you bike in pants + undershirt and add the rest when you get there.
All of these things are possible, admittedly there is a real limitation of needing to live within a 15-20 mile radius of work. The best data I can find suggests about 23% of commuters have a commute of more than 20 miles. So I would say cycling is a perfectly reasonable solution for the majority of people.
How did all your siblings fit? Or did your Dad make multiple trips?
> live within a 15-20 mile radius of work
You really think people want to bike 20 miles? That's going to cost you about 2,000 calories (round trip). That's completely unrealistic for most people. They would have to double their food, plus end up exhausted every day at work.
And that's for perfectly flat terrain!
(The weirdest part is the extra food costs more than the equivalent gasoline, and produces more CO2.)
After you get used to it you don't really feel exhausted. Yes commuting 20 miles by bike is definitely an upper limit, at least for me, but I do know people with longer bike commutes.
So assuming you fuel yourself with pure beef, the most unsustainable food I could find, you'd need about .85 kg to get 2000 calories. On average the production of beef releases about 13.3 kg of CO2 per kg of beef, so we're looking at 11.305 kg of CO2 per commute. The average CO2 produced for a medium sized car is about .5 kg per mile. So for the same 40 mile commute you're looking at around 20 kg of emissions. So even if you choose to only eat the most unsustainable food it's still better than driving. If you switch to pork or poultry you can reduce that 11.305 kg of CO2 by about 75%. Cars just don't even come close.
This is patently absurd. A more gross generalization could hardly be made.
And the average between this and reality is worse than the status quo, so when politicians compromise, we get worse off overall.
Irrational people...
I bike two miles to work, I work, I bike home. I walk or bike to a grocery store, and carry my goods back. I walk or bike to bars, and come back.
If a car is absolutely essential for getting into work, either you or your company is doing it wrong.
EDIT: Ah yes, and this is in probably one of the sprawliest, least bike-friendly cities in the US.
A friend of mine was killed riding her bike when a cop ran into her. I live in a relatively small city, and traffic was not busy at the time.
It's a simple fact that cycling with automobile traffic is far more dangerous than driving. Take that risk if you want to; it's your life (though if you're killed by a car, it could be your fault, and it could ruin the driver's life too). It's not wrong to refuse to take that extra, unnecessary risk!
If you think that everyone should do what you do or else they're "doing it wrong", you are thinking wrongly.
Indeed, if biking is so dangerous, I propose that there is something wrong with the traffic rules--there's a great writeup about how streets were (at the beginning of the 20th century) almost completely mixed-mode transportation and that car companies pushed for redefining norms to plant the idea that they were only for cars.
You've been brainwashed.