I think the blind spot and empath gap gp is referring to is the attitude of the anti-car crowd. I had this just yesterday in another thread. The attitude of many city folks toward suburbanites is basically "have you considered radically changing your lifestyle, abandoning most of your existing habits and hobbies, and petition your town to put in bike infra where zero room to do so exists?"

They fail to realize that huge swaths of America is pretty much permanently stuck with pedestrian-unfriendly infrastructure.