I have been commuting by bicycle in the US (Sioux Falls, SD and Chicago, IL) for thirty years, from age twelve to forty-two. It has never been a point of conflict with anyone in my life, law enforcement, or employers. I really don’t know what you mean by “controversial” here; it doesn’t match my experience.

You can thank the vehicular cycling movement of the 1970s for selling the idea that bicycles should operate like cars on American roadways.

(To anyone at all interested in this topic, I highly recommend reading the linked article for more context. Or watching the Not Just Bikes video in Boomer Humor Doomergod’s comment if that’s more your speed.)

I commute on electric bike, literally work at a participation endurance sport company and have only gotten gentle teasing, no hate from the hardcore bikers. I tell them I literally hate riding a bike and that this one cost less than their racing bike, and I am comfortable on it, so use it for grocery shopping and stuff like that.

There is not enough infrastructure for bikes. I am careful and polite, if I have to take the sidewalk I get off and walk around pedestrians, walk it across intersections. If I’m in the road I wait for a big break in traffic or periodically get off the road so cars can pass (there is no bike lane going to work). I see bikers weaving through traffic and understand the frustration drivers have. And have had cars make illegal left turns almost into me and understand bikers being frustrated too.

I blame lycra. It threatens men.

Ask GM, Firestone, and Standard Oil.

Our roads are designed around cars, it’s very often extremely frustrating and unsafe to have to share the road with bikes.

As an example, most of my commute is along a 2 lane road (1 lane each direction) that’s winding, poorly lit, and has almost no shoulder. The speed limit is 35mph, which isn’t a speed most cyclists can keep up for very long if they can reach it at all.

If there’s traffic coming the opposite direction, it’s often difficult or impossible to pass that cyclist safely so very often I’ve been stuck driving 10 under the speed limit around a cyclist I can’t get around.

And again, it’s a windy, poorly lit road, coming around a corner it would be very easy to hit a cyclist if I wasn’t being careful (which I am, but many are not)

To add insult to injury in my particular case, there’s actually a very nice bike path that runs directly parallel to the road, you can actually see it from the road for much of its length, and there’s lots of places to get on and off of it, it’s paved, it’s actually almost as wide as the road itself.

There’s also the issue that a lot of them don’t always follow the rules of the road, you see a lot of the lane-splitting, running red lights, etc.

And there’s good reasons for some of that behavior, I’ve heard them, I don’t disagree with them, but the fact of the matter is that it makes them unpredictable, which is the last thing you want to be on the road.

Some also ride at night without proper lights and reflectors, which is really a problem with some idiots and shouldn’t be generalized to bikes in general, but some people are going to do that

There’s also Americans’ love of big SUVs with big blindspots that makes bikes harder to see when they’re around you in traffic.

As for ebikes, I have a love-hate relationship with them.

They can keep up with traffic a lot better, which helps my first point a lot.

They’ve also gotten a lot of people out on bikes who wouldn’t have otherwise, which is great, but it also means that a lot of those people are going from not having ridden a bike since they were like 10 years old to feeling bold enough to be out in traffic because their bike can keep up but never really learned how to coexist with traffic on a bike, so we’re doubling down on the unpredictability.

There’s also the issue that out of traffic, in spaces where e bikes coexist with pedestrians and regular bikes on trails and such they’re often zooming around at unsafe speeds.

And there’s the usual patchwork of laws and regulations from one state to another, and a lot of shady imported brands selling bikes that don’t meet those regulations. A lot of the e bikes on the road around me are overpowered and too fast for what the laws allow. And people also let their kids ride them which also isn’t allowed.

I’m all for more people riding bikes in general , but the current situation with infrastructure, regulations, enforcement, and education here make it a really unsafe and frustrating to share the road with bikes.

Because our road systems are designed around cars. This means that it’s dangerous and impeding when a cyclist shares the road. Unfortunately, we just keep building bigger roads and removing bike lanes. This just serves to make it more of a pain in the ass for literally everyone because bikers have to use the car lanes instead of just paving an extra 6 feet of road.

TL;DR america will pave every natural surface for traffic, but won’t mark any sliver of it for bikes.

I rarely bike at all.

Road bikers are usually assholes, probably because they have a chip on their shoulder about cars being impatient with them. Getting behind a road biker on a busy two-way street is really annoying.

I haven’t seen commuter cyclists get much crap but they’re probably pissed off at how motorists treat them.

Mountain bikers only hate e-bikers because they’re “cheating”, far as I can tell. Kids also ride e-bikes around here like morons and cause lots of accidents.

Anyway, most of the US just isn’t built to handle bikes and it causes tensions to flare, best as I can tell.

Not Just Bikes just did a video about one guy who was a major influence for how bikes are perceived in the US.

It’s pretty long but the tl;dw is one weirdo lobbied hard to treat bikes like cars - “vehicular cycling” - and looked down on bike paths, comfortable seats, and not being a jerk.

Car and oil lobby very big yes

Big car = big strong masculine man

Bicycle = weak and effiminate

Bike get in way of my 14000 lb child crusher, make me go slow 😔

Bike bad

In other words, the car and oil lobby has not only designed our roads around cars making using a bike dangerous and uncomfortable but it has also infested our minds. Americans also get irrationally angry at the mildest inconveniences especially when driving.

My guess is that the amount of sprawl in America is a big contributor. It means there’s a higher barrier to biking, which in turn means that fewer people do it, which then means that there’s less effort put into biking infrastructure (and the sprawl also directly makes building infrastructure more expensive), and so then the people who do bike have to be more intrusive on other traffic. So then there’s tension between the drivers who end up inconvenienced by bikers, and bikers who feel threatened by drivers.

Dude, I’ve found car drivers far more aggravating than bicyclists. The most a bicyclist has ever annoyed me is when they don’t make their presence known enough. I just happen to sometimes, find them near seconds of almost hitting them and I hate that. When I rode bikes, I tried having devices or things that make my bike have features a car would, even turn signaling.

But drivers? The level of entitlement and selfishness of a driver is off the charts.

You really don’t understand the depths of propaganda this country endures.

i don’t get it either. i prefer road bikes. I used to commute 14 miles a day in Seattle and I loved the hell out of it. Motorists are usually the worst kind of bike haters.

I didn’t notice much hate from other types of cyclists but one of my friends in Portland Oregon would call me lame for needing two wheels. he would unicycle everywhere. even mt biking! he once won some crazy competition from a unicycle mud race!

Car obsessed culture. Their brains rotted out with all the propaganda they’re fed 24/7. Being raised by TV did not do any favours.