This isn’t Holland, never will be.
Yes it is! Well, part of Britain is Holland. It says it on the O on the top of the road signs, "Holland County Council".
There's another reason why we prefer to sit in traffic jams, which is antisocial behaviour. Everybody has had the experience of being stuck in a bus or a train with a bunch of rowdy hooligans and said to themselves "Never again... next time I'll take the car!"
I haven't. Why doesn't everybody have my experience of having some fascinating conversations with strangers on buses and trains and platforms? On the way back from
the Cyclenation/CyclingUK conference on Saturday, I had a somewhat confused chat on the platform at noisy New Street and a better one on the train home. Probably the main reason there wasn't much chat on the way in was that the train was very quiet until Leicester and anyway I was failing to fix a puncture (burst tube). And that sort of stuff happens most journeys on my own, unlike motoring where I'm all alone with only the radio for company - that sort of isolation happening too frequently can't be good for people, can it?
I think it’s also seen as a poor mans mode of transportation.
Except when discussing transport policy, when cycling is seen as for
"the privileged bourgeoisie"
Many years ago mum would walk the four or five miles to the nearest big town to do the shopping, and get the bus back. It was a very pleasant walk along a canal, and she'd regularly turn down offers of a lift from well meaning neighbours. The neighbours thought she was decidedly odd. (Actually, they weren't wrong but that's another story).
We used to have the same, living in Kewstoke and going into Weston-super-Mare. More often I rode the 3 miles around the hill, but it's only 1⅓ miles from the edge of Kewstoke to the High Street in Weston and a lovely walk up the 20' carriageway (actually a bridleway!) through the woods, down some posh hillside streets and through Grove Park (which contains the Jill Dando memorial garden). Yet it was very rare we saw any other villagers walking it and not unusual to be offered a lift during our short walk from our house to the edge of the village.
Britain is not built for cars. As others have said, most settlements were built for people, horses and carts and are ill-suited to cars. Much better for cycles, but we need our dear leaders to realise that before they butcher all our historic places and rebuild them for cars - probably just as their unsustainability is driven home hard!