Well I don’t think he’s saying it would fail in America because the US is leading, but actually because it’s behind in health. Either way such generalized comme

Well I don’t think he’s saying it would fail in America because the US is leading, but actually because it’s behind in health. Either way such generalized comments are always off target because the US is a hugely large and varied place (in climate, population, terrain, design, etc). It’s hard to say anything categorically will or will not work across the country. The key error here isn’t thinking too highly or badly about this country or another, it’s about making sweeping generalizations. When imagining bike policy, stop thinking nationally in context and start thinking hyper-locally. Maybe if your city matches key elements of one in another country that implemented a successful program to do X, your city could stand to learn a thing or two. To presume that a prescription from Copenhagen would be equally valuable across the the vast scope of conditions in the US as an entire country is a ludicrous assumption from the start. This isn’t a “pride” thing, or an issue of the US accepting something, it’s an issue of scale and comparing apples to oranges. Bike lane policies cannot be a national issue here, they are local issues. Each locality needs to learn how to enable different transport modalities from other cities, yes, but what works in NYC will not be the same solution for Tampa, for example, or Bozeman.