46 years ago, when I started my life as a full time member of the workforce, rather than a student, I did it as a bike commuter. I have used the bike for transportation to work at least some of every year since then.
At the start, the motives were economic and physical. I knew I couldn't count on a high income, or necessarily a steady one. I also knew that I like to eat tasty food, and that my family had a tendency to run to fat. Throughout my childhood I listened to my parents complain about their need to diet. Exercise wasn't part of any adult's normal life in the white-collar middle class. Every one of them faced a physical decline considered inevitable. Might as well joke about it, and keep buying bigger pants.
As the 1960s rolled on into the 1970s, exercise for adults became a mainstream thing. Jogging and running emerged as respectable, even cool, pastimes. By the 1980s, fitness centers had become an industry. Rolling parallel to that rode the ten-speed boom, which merged into the mountain bike boom.
During the ten-speed boom, bike touring and transportation cycling offered ways to beat the shocking rise of gasoline prices as they rocketed toward a whole dollar a gallon. We'd flip a U-turn in the middle of a busy six-lane arterial roadway now to get into a gas station selling for a dollar a gallon, but after decades of regular gas at 30 cents a gallon or less, a dollar a gallon seemed like onrushing doom. Even so, biking to work was always a fringe activity.
I'm sure that the petroleum industry has not noticed my absence, despite a lifetime commitment to limit my consumption. I can attest that it has saved me thousands of dollars, but admit that it has limited my returns from the economy that every other human voted to pursue instead.
The stubbornness of motor vehicle culture used to arouse my annoyance and contempt. These are not helpful emotions for advocacy. They're a response to the annoyance and contempt directed at me as a cyclist. They're mostly dulled now, worn out from overstimulation, but also tempered by a broader understanding of the complexity of people's transportation needs. Yes, a vast number of people could use something other than a full-size motor vehicle to move themselves and their stuff around, but that leaves many more whose lives would be much more complicated if they tried to rely entirely on walking, biking, and public transportation.
I love the simplicity of using my car when I need the load capacity, speed, and effortless range that it provides. I just dump my crap in the back and head out, in normal clothes, to zip around 80 or a hundred miles of accumulated errands in a few hours. The same circuit on a bike would take a couple of days. And there is no public transportation where I live.
I still roll my eyes at the pickup truck craze. "Gas is sooo expensive! I need a bigger truck!" I don't want to hear the bitching. Plus I have to fit in the lane with these behemoths. But they do pull a nice draft when they go by.
I don't even know what the proper term is for the disabled now. In my lifetime I have seen their emergence from shut-in and shunned to just another category in the workforce. Lots still to be done, but the debate has now taken the dark turn of almost officially discussing euthanasia. Just kill the wounded and put them out of their misery. Pretty dark. Leaning instead toward accommodation, what's the balance between meatheads like me who are willing to live at least part of the year like it's an extended bike tour or stage race, and people who physically can't?
We debate how to spend public money in a rich country that pretends to be a poor one.
You can't plan for every detail. Some things just have to evolve and adapt as experience accumulates. For the most part, around here, drivers seem to be willing to make the minimal effort to go around rather than over me. Other riders tell me about being hit by a car. I have no answer for that. Riders can make mistakes that put themselves more at risk, but drivers can also either space it or make a malicious choice. As riders, we count on drivers making the choice to steer around us as they overtake. Coming from any other direction than behind us, drivers will be in our field of view. We have tactical options.
Fear of collision has driven many riders to quit using the public roads. There are roads I avoid because of traffic speed and density. Any built up area will have greater traffic density and potentially dangerous speeds. In those circumstances, drivers have less attention and patience for pedalers. Pedalers have less acceleration and speed to work within the traffic flow. Maybe they have route alternatives. Maybe not.
Mountain bikers have to worry about losing access to trails because land owners don't want them around anymore. Road riders don't have to worry about losing access to the public right of way. We just have to worry about encountering the wrong nut job who doesn't want us around anymore.
Road riding has weathered legal challenges, like a Maryland legislative push in the early 1980s that would have cut us off from anything with a speed limit above 30 miles per hour, as I recall. Something crazy like that. These are bound to crop up again. But for the most part the laws seem pretty permissive. They leave it to natural predation to keep our numbers in check. "You don't pay road taxes! I'm going to kill you!"
Transportation cycling can be a beneficial element in the traffic mix. I'm a lot easier to pass when I'm riding my bike than when I'm in my car, stuck in the lane in front of you. Drivers have contempt for cyclists, but real hatred for each other. So, because I am able to ride a bike, I actually help lower the emotional temperature out there. This does change with the number of cyclists and their behavior. Lots of riders give us a bad name with antics that either just look bad to motorists or are outright dangerous.
The "looks bad but is actually good" category presents a challenge, because it includes running stop signs. This doesn't apply to all stop signs all the time. But it's generally better for a rider to be passed on a flowing stretch of road than to have a motorist decide on their own that they can and should squeeze past at an intersection.
Red lights are a different story. Rarely will I run one because I can't be sure that I won't overlook a hazard in my push to flow through. Also, it sets you up to be passed by the same motorists over and over. They get more and more steamed at having not only to stop and go and stop and go, but to accommodate the rider block after block. Cycling fundamentalists will say fuck 'em for being motorists, but fundamentalists at anything only make life worse. You need empathy and flexibility, even if you don't feel like you're getting it in return most of the time. I'll actually fall back a bit at a red light, to get more vehicles past me when they're stopped or moving slowly. At the very least I hold my place so that the ones who have "beaten" me get to keep their medals.
So: If you're able to use a bike some or most of the time, try it. If you're not sure, try it a few times in different contexts to see if you can start to fit it in. If you can't, you can't.
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