What a City Would Look Like If It Were Designed for Only Bikes

To address your points: Whatever someone's reasoning, words like 'absurd' create an atmosephere where ridicule and sniping are acceptable, which I think deters more thoughtful discussion. For one, other commenters follow the example and do the same (see my quotes of PG in my other post, above). But also, who wants to put the effort into a thoughtful comment, sharing what they know, when they see that the response may very well be more thoughtless ridicule? It attracts the worse comments and deters the valuable stuff.

> the reporting is done by someone who's just trying to grab pageviews cheaply on someone else's bad content

I see no basis for this statement. The author could have any number of reasons to post it, including that it's an excellent article in their or in other people's eyes.

Cycling becomes significantly harder in hilly or windy (read coastal) locations.

I live somewhere generally considered "flat" as there are no mountains, however there are a lot of undulations (short, steep hills) and a Mediterranean climate (hot, dry summers) with strong, coastal winds in the morning and afternoon. Cycling any distance in summer will involve sweating. Most people opt to drive in an air-conditioned car, even the 1 km to get some milk/bread.

Better/more bike infrastructure is unlikely to change most peoples behavior.

Having said that, there has been a boom in the number of people cycling to work in the last 10 years. There are two main reasons for this. One is the low availability/high cost of car parking in the city and surrounding suburbs. The other is that we get the Tour de France televised on free to air, during prime time for the entire tour. That has driven a huge increase in road cycling and even non-cyclists like to watch and talk about what is happening in the Tour.

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.