It's not just that the distances are larger (My shortest commute ever, which people saw as luxuriously short, was 9km!), but also weather: We have an average of

It's not just that the distances are larger (My shortest commute ever, which people saw as luxuriously short, was 9km!), but also weather: We have an average of 90 days a year below freezing, and 40 over 32C. I don't know about you, but I don't call either one of those to be nice biking weather. So we have bikes, but they are for recreational purposes, in the times and days of the year you want: Heck, most people put the bicycles IN THE CAR, go to the place where they want to ride, typically a very large park and then they do the riding! San Francisco actually has some decent support for bikes, and a lot of my coworkers that in the SF office go by bike, but that's because they are both dense enough and have such nice weather.