So you're basically telling me it's my fault for not being rich enough to do what I want. Thanks.

If I had unlimited time and unlimited funds, I could certainly shorten my commute down to the distance from my bedroom to my in-home office, all in my palatial mansion in the heart of a culturally vibrant, crime-free, educated, and thriving city. Unfortunately, living in the real world, there are external constraints upon my decisions that I have no individual control over. Those constraints rule out the fantasy that you seem to have invented wherein I can just choose to be Batman in my Batcave, and the local government begs me for my help via a spotlight, instead of constantly demanding that I jump through whatever idiotic regulatory hoops it cares to set up.

In the real world, the amount I am paid for my work is determined by market conditions. The affordability of housing is determined by market conditions. The cost of living is determined by market conditions. Within those bounds, I make the best decisions I can, according to my own priorities. And yes, I do have higher priorities than being able to walk or bicycle to work. I believe those priorities cannot be greatly altered while still remaining a socially responsible person.

There are more variables involved than just home-office distance and pay rate. You have no idea what it would cost for me to halve my commute distance, or to quarter it. It may well be the difference between retiring at age 75 instead of 67, or not retiring ever. Or it may be the difference between helping my all my kids to pay college tuition, or not. Or maybe it's just the difference between eating fresh ground beef or canned Spam.

This is why I suggest it is foolish to blithely discount all those unseen individual reasons people have for following a particular lifestyle. People generally make the best decisions they can, using the resources they have available, according to the priorities they have established for themselves.

So when someone says, "I wish I could live closer to work," your response probably should not be, "You can, but you obviously don't want it enough." Because what you're conveying is that person is not enough of a selfish prick to make their spouse commute further, send their kids to lower-performing schools, spend more money on an apartment, house, or condo with less relative utility independent of its location, spend more money now at the expense of savings or investments, possibly uproot any existing social networks for other members of the household, maybe adapt to an entirely different culture in the new location, and even physically moving a truckload of accumulated property and possessions over some distance. What that person was really saying, without actually saying it, was, "I wish I could live closer to work without changing into a sociopath, ascetic, hermit, or hobo, and without switching to job that I would hate."

So maybe adopt a new priority, and make sure it ranks higher than biking to work: don't be a dick. That's it. Have some care for the daily struggles of your fellow humans. You might just find that redesigning entire cities to make cyclists happier has a side-effect of making all the non-cyclists absolutely miserable. And maybe the current automobile-centric design of cities is overly unfair to bikers. You can't just ignore bikers because you love driving. You have to consider the impact on everyone, not just your paragons, eidolons, and chosen ones.