I personally come from New York, and while the boroughs are doing a somewhat decent job at listening to people's cries for bike lanes in new places (whether or not they actually happen is completely different, at the rate the city gets things done it could take 15 years to mark down 15 feet of extra asphalt -_-), ever since I've moved out to Long Island, there's so little infrastructure for things like bike lanes it's like living in the wilderness. And aside from biking for leisure, Long Island has laughable public transportation to begin with, so it's really unfair, especially for people who commute locally on bike or foot (the group is not small at all), to accept cars as the only objects that exist on the road. Trying to find bike racks is even worse. I walk/bike to and from school if I can't get a ride, and I bike around to run personal errands too, sometimes distances of 10-15+ miles roundtrip if I have to, and yeah sure, it might be scenic and calm for the first ten minutes in a residential area, but it's such a pain in the neck to be squished inches by cars moving at 30+ mph as soon as you hit a major turnpike (plus it takes forever to wait at the intersection in a 4+ lane road…), and I've came pretty close quite a few times, both at the faults of myself and drivers. Like this past Monday, I was riding home from Target, and the traffic was so bad at some points that I was out until 10PM, pitch-black in the middle of a lightning storm, hoping that people would at least notice my reflectors and slow down a tiny bit (because believe me, I'm not 1% that gutsy to be in perfect shape during a situation like that, haha). Albeit I don't bike in the road completely most of the time (I bike where I'm supposed to outside the white line), but it's still really close between the lanes and the rest of the road, like a foot or two on some roads, there's simply not enough pavement to go on. There aren't many sidewalks around where I live, but in more populated/trafficked areas where there are sidewalks, there's usually nobody on them, so I'll take sidewalks, cut across parking lots, and do whatever I have to in order to minimize the time getting from A to B. If I'm just riding around for the heck of it though, I'll just stay close to home where there aren't many cars, or sometimes I'll even take paths in the woods, so it's never really been a problem for me there.