A BICYCLIST'S LAMENT

April 29, 2026 - Published

In this city, whenever I tell someone I bike to work, the same emotions cross their face. I can see a mixture of both confusion and surprise. They need time to process a response, as if they've never heard anybody say that. Nobody bikes in America, after all.

To me, it's natural that I bike, because I can't afford a car (despite having a résumé with 3 years of experience in programming and a bachelor's degree, of course). If you can't drive, then you have to walk or bike. It takes 10-20 minutes to walk outside of my neighborhood, and the nearest grocery store is about 30 minutes.

In America, distance is measured by the time it takes to drive a car. I tell my workplace I live 5 minutes away. In reality, just the commute for getting to work and back is a full hour of continuous physical activity. If I take a detour to get groceries, that's usually another hour of my day, and I can only carry whatever fits on my back. I do this regularly to get to my minimum wage job, to afford the groceries I can buy with minimum wage. I don't like imagining what my situation would be if I were disabled.

When I lived with my parents in California, I considered our city to be rather depressing. It was a suburban neighborhood I found to be rather average -- it was definitely car-centric, and being a bicyclist meant you had to choose between biking on the sidewalk or out on the road. There were sometimes bike lanes, though they would often end abruptly, which forced you to either go back onto the sidewalk or have fun with cars on the road.

You would regularly hear about car accidents in America with bicyclists. That may have something to do with the bike lanes being right next to cars running at 25-40 mph, but no matter how many accidents happened, nothing on the roads would be changed. Nobody bikes in America, after all.

Still, I didn't expect the new city I moved into to be considerably worse for bikers. I would consider it a more accurate picture of an average suburban neighborhood -- not as wealthy as California, not run-down by any means -- but still probably on the wealthier side. Of course, that means that roads are wider, bike lanes are more sparse, and sidewalks will abruptly stop with nowhere to go.

I'll often be using Google Maps to get around, and be told to cross the road at a place it finds convenient. A lot of the time, it will tell me to cross 4-5 lanes of traffic without a pedestrian crossing. Even for places designed for pedestrian crossing, there will often be no crosswalks, and sometimes not even any stop signs either. Drivers don't have to worry about pedestrians crossing 6 lanes of traffic without a crosswalk or stop sign, though. Nobody walks in America, after all.

Roads work a bit differently here than in California. Apparently, it's common outside California to have a yellow blinking left turn light, which allows cars to make a left turn if they find it safe to turn. Of course, "safe" means that there are no cars in the way. It's very common for me to be halfway across the road as a pedestrian and have a car take a left turn in front of me, either because they didn't see me, or because they didn't care. I've gotten honked at once for trying to cross the second half of the road while the pedestrian signal was flashing. So, every time I cross the road, I now make sure to look left, right, and behind myself, for cars making a left turn from behind me. Pedestrians only have right of way if drivers care, after all.

It's also very common here for roads to have no-stop right turn lanes. That's great for cars who don't feel like stopping before making a right turn, but it's not fun for pedestrians. I once tried to cross the road in front of a pickup truck whose hood was taller than me, because it was slowing down. It turned out that they weren't actually slowing down for me, because they kept going, and stopped inches away from me once they noticed. Since then, I never try to challenge cars on the right turn lanes, and as a fun activity, I always count how many cars pass by while I'm waiting to cross (my high score is 6!). Pedestrians only have right of way if drivers care, after all.

Then of course, there's all the little things. I have to bike through snow, but not everyone cleans up the snow off the sidewalks. Someone suggested I get snow treads, but they cost too much for me. Bike racks are almost impossible to find, and the few that do exist have no cover from rain, requiring me to bike through the rain with a soaked seat and helmet. I'll often see rocks strewn around sidewalks, and people will have their enormous cars in their driveway blocking half the sidewalk off.

But the worst thing is that my struggle is invisible. A lot of people just don't understand how much everything adds up, and they could never understand until they were in my shoes. I know it could be worse, but how am I supposed to feel when this genuinely well-off neighborhood treats me and my spaces as trash? How am I supposed to feel when cars would rather run me over than slow down to a stop for 3 seconds? How am I supposed to feel when people say that America doesn't need to add more biking infrastructure because "America just doesn't have biking culture"?

But, you know, maybe I'm just making a big deal out of nothing.

Nobody bikes in America, after all.