A great post. I have lived in many cities in the States and advocated for better structure in all of them. I have toured a couple times in Europe which included a few days in Copenhagen where my bias for design was crystallized.
In my current city, the level of biking is fairly high for a large USA city. The definition of high is at any given time on a busy 25 MPH street near my house that is a primary connector, I will see 5 or so cyclists using it in the mile I am biking on that street. I am never alone on that street. However, I very rarely am riding with someone directly in front or behind me, between the motor traffic. And most importantly, the design does not encourage a significant number of new bicycle commuters who must not feel comfortable in this traffic calming design. (As an aside, our city has a lot of rail trails that have a high frequency of use. But majority of users, will drive to them and only bike the protected rail trail for recreation and I expect commuting, if starting from the parking lot).
Recently, before moving here, the street mentioned above was redesigned in the traffic calming style (speed bumps, etc) vs protected bike lanes. There was an opportunity to build either design but parking would have been eliminated on the street. Consequently, the traffic calming design that eliminated some parking but keeped most of it, won.
I share this example since it impacted my view of getting design done in the Dutch style vs UK/USA style. My current advocacy thought is to eliminate/compromise Level of Service (LoS) as the key design criteria used by street engineers. Until that is achieved, it will be nearly impossible to impact road design in terms of getting Copenhagen level non-motorized traffic volume.
While this is all strategic since I am still working on the effort, I am placing much greater emphasis on parked motor vehicles vs moving ones. Afterall, at least in the example of my current city, the space parked cars command eliminates most of the opportunity for better non-motorized infrastructure. So not only do motor vehicles retain their high LoS while moving, they also retain it while parked. I believe parking has been compromised in London and Paris but I really am still learning about the impact of that.
Minneapolis recently moved to challenging LoS in their design approach . I have not biked there but it is recognized as one of the best cities for non-motorized users, it will be interesting to see the significance of this change in design approach. I do not know their street parking policy for motorized vehicles.
