oh, absolutely. I’ve never really lived in a proper city (bigger towns, maybe) so it’s still possible now, but the culture has def moved on. I mean, I see the occasional kids on bikes, but when I was a kid (80’s - 90’s) pretty much every kid had a bike and this was just the default.
Actually the area I lived was pretty rural, that was precisely the problem. Roads were high speed, car exclusive roads with no sidewalk and if there was one people would look at you like you were a criminal for not being in a car so it felt wrong to use them anyways.
It didn’t matter if there was awesome woods to roam around in 5 minutes down the road, walking/bicycling there not only felt like doing something wrong based on the behavior of 100% of the adults around me, it also was extraordinarily dangerous and just not worth the discomfort of feeling like I was going to die any second from a 4000 pound metal box slamming into me at 45mph (and running me over because the hood is 5 feet off the ground for no reason other than it looks cool or something).
The lack of traffic on rural roads just made this problem worse because instead of a line of cars all seeing the cars in front of them move out of the way of something on the side of the road, or the general presence of traffic keeping people driving from absolutely as fast as they could possibly go, you would just have a car whip around the corner every once in awhile going near highway speeds on a windy back road in a way that left them zero chance to swerve out of the way and not hit you if they weren’t paying attention. I also remember literally being yelled at and taunted by (usually pickup truck) drivers the few times I did ride a bicycle on a road because that seemed to make them angry.
There was plenty of space around you, iffff you had a car. If you didn’t, you might as well have been stranded on a space station.
