The city benefited greatly from some disused rail right-of-ways and turned them into completely separated bike highways. Many of the on-street bikeways that have been set up use plastic divider posts to signal to drivers separation. It's much cheaper than building grade-seperated lanes, but gives a real sense of protection to the bikers.
Which just strengthens my point: even quite modest efforts can result in big biking gains. And that's in Minneapolis, who nobody is going to accuse of having great weather for biking.
Though honestly, nearly every street in the city should have at least a painted bike lane.
There are also streets where biking isn't allowed. These are mostly major car arteries. It is imperative to realize there are places where cyclists don't belong. Just like it is imperative to realize that in most places in the city, cyclists do belong.
> Here in the netherlands, cyclist paradise, we don't even have a painted bike lane on nearly every street.
With narrow streets and low speeds, cyclists and cars can effectively mix. It's just that in the US, politically that's an even harder sell than protected bike lanes, most of the time.
Cycling on highways is a total no-go here. I've never heard of it happening, and I'd expect the police to be called whenever someone sees it.
You're right on the narrow streets and low speeds. That is a much bigger cultural / civil-engineering thing. It makes me wonder how cycling infrastructure is done in Rotterdam. It's city centre needed to be completely rebuild after WW2. The result is regarded by some as ugly or 'american'. Perhaps this has affected cycling, or perhaps that was taken into account in the rebuild.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hVXhg8zvkI&ab_channel=Stree...
[0] - http://usa.streetsblog.org/2017/03/08/street-by-street-dc-bu...
I occasionally see people walking to the hospital here, in the lane on a 25 MPH street.
My point is really to just illustrate a mentality difference. If cyclists clamor for a handful of protected bike lanes, they get accused of wanting 'special treatment'. And yet, what they ask for is at least an order of magnitude less than what everyone takes for granted about walking, let alone the resources we allocate to cars.
Nobody would accept having only 'painted walk lanes' on busy streets to get around, much less having them appear and disappear from the road seemingly at random, and yet that's the default state of bike lanes in nearly all US cities.
If biking had as much infrastructure as even walking -- meaning, physically protected lanes on most streets -- Americans would bike in enormous numbers.