the nice thing about southern Texas is that we don't have to worry about walking/biking, not gonna happen in 105 degrees.

I'm so much more comfortable in here compared to Seattle. Car AC is great for my allergies, and I'm no longer a sweaty mess.

To be honest 40C is quite doable, as long as you have shade (trees) water features (lakes/rivers) and a distance of a couple of km - I’ve cycled like that for fun, not just to get to a destination.

Now I would never do that on such an asphalt desert of course, a car is way more comfortable, the question remains why would you turn a lush greenery (as I’d imagine a texan climate could be) into something you’re only comfortable crossing in heavy and expensive survival gear. Especially if living in that gear leads to all the allergies you’ve mentioned.

Where I live if I wanted to cycle the worst would be snow followed by cycles of thawing and freezing, which leaves the routes a miserable mess, so I have to fire up my trusty corolla, but apart from that (20% of the time) I prefer biking for sure.

And I live in the shithole of the european union, the poorest of the member states, and am constantly amazed how much better the city planning is here, even with all of its flaws.

For example a UK colleague when visiting sent a picture how he got lost in a wilderness forest, on his way on foot from the downtown hotel to the office, since the capital itself is littered with small pockets of lush (and I mean really lush) greenery.

I can’t imagine what great things could be accomplished if you had the resources of a place like texas… You could make your city be so great, people go there as a tourist just to enjoy being there, and not for the novelty.

Texas in the summer is not only hot, but humid. Humidity on a typical summer day falls in the range between "miserable" and "oppressive".

Physical exertion when the dew point is in the upper 70s is simply unhealthy. It's a bad idea.

Ya most Texans are pretty soft ;)

So as a suburban area, it is generally not optimized for biking as a mode of transportation. Suburbs absolutely cater to cars, and this road is no exception. There are significant and wide-reaching bike trails across the surrounding county, but if you're going to and from work in the area, you have a car, almost exclusively.

The very nature of the fact that very little of the surrounding area caters to pedestrian traffic, the road would do a bad job if it was optimized for that.

That's the case for most suburban areas in the US. In places like Germany it's still not great, but there are many more provisions for other modes of travel especially as a pedestrian and they're not unused.

The Netherlands has great bike paths in their suburban areas.