> living in a bike friendly neighborhood

I don't think it would matter. (to put it into perspective, the average U.S. commute is about the equivalent of Rotterdam to Amsterdam, about a 3 and a half hour bike ride).

I actually live in a pretty bike friendly suburb right now. We have something like 10-12 miles of trails in my neighborhood and nearby links to a very nice and flat 35 mile dedicated bike trail right now -- we even have a very nice bike shop I can comfortably walk to.

You see people biking around on weekends and nice weather evenings. But for what I need to do to live here (hold down a job) biking to work is so far from a possibility that even thinking of it seems absurd. On that days I telecommute, I don't need to bike, and when I'm not telecommuting a 40-120 mile round trip on hard high speed highway with cars moving at over 60mph is a suicide mission. The infrastructure is simply not there and I'd estimate it would take hundreds of billions of dollars to reform even small high density parts of the metro area to accommodate mass biking in any sort impactful numbers.

In one of the major city centers here, there is a big bike movement, but my friends who live there describe it as "dodging bullets in Iraq or NYC bike courier" in terms of rider safety.

So if I had a shower and a changing area at the closest work site, I'd still need about 11 miles of dedicated bike lane to get there instead of riding on a very dangerous shoulder and my trip would take about twice to three times as long. Looking at how expensive it is to get minor road widenings done around here, I'd estimate the infrastructure cost of just that one short leg to be in the $100-200 million dollar range.

The differences in the U.S. to accommodate Netherlands style biking are unbelievably vast. Painting some bike lane markers is not really even remotely a solution.

The principal problem is that fundamentally people don't really live where they work. There's lots of reasons for this, but that's where we're at. Average commute distance and time in the U.S. is tremendous. It seems insane, and in many ways it is. But that's just how the society developed. To really solve the problem will require vast sociological shifts in very big parts of the country. Having very few pre-car cities is another.

There's hope, one of the high density commercial areas is currently being redeveloped due to 4 new subway stops to better accommodate walkability and biking. The plan will take about 40 years. Nobody knows how much it will cost, but the current estimate just for some of the transport infrastructure is around $9 billion. The area has a population of under 20,000 people. The work will allow for 80,000 more residents to live there.

If anybody wants to get a good look at what it takes to reform even a small part of a modern American area, they should give the comprehensive plan a good read through. http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/dpz/comprehensiveplan/area2/tys...

Another nearby center is also very walkable/bikeable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reston,_VA

Eventually both of those two centers will be linked by the same subway system and then, just possibly, we might have one of the better bikeable areas in the U.S. But it's a very long way off still.