This is broken at the top and bottom. Your elected representatives don't know that a bicycle network even exists. Safer roads for cars are their only transportation priority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bicycle_Route_Sy...

Wow. It’s fun to compare the US bicycle routes to the bicycle routes in the Netherlands.

Here’s the first Wikipedia photo of USBR 1:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Bicycle_Route_1#/media/...

Look, it’s a road on which is possible, but not necessarily desirable, to ride a bike.

The Netherlands has at least two systems:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LF-routes

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered-node_cycle_network

and neither article emphasizes the dramatic difference between these and the US system, possibly because it’s utterly obvious to anyone who has ever used the Dutch system: the Dutch bike routes are far, far higher quality. You can bike from almost anywhere to almost anywhere with the bulk of the route (at least outside of a city center) on paths are well separated from cars or even nowhere near a road at all. A lot of them even separate pedestrians from bikes or separate fast bikes from slow bikes. Even the worse bike paths are better than most bike paths in the US. If you ride the bike paths to a major store or a mall, you will generally find that the dedicated bike parking is closer than the car parking. If you go to a smaller store, a cafe or a house, you will be able to get from the nearest bike path to the building without crossing a traffic lane. If you go to a busy area, you might find a double decker bike parking lot!

This works well in a country with more bikes than people. Those paths are heavily utilized.

The US has excellent bike paths as well, but they are largely the exception, not the norm, and the almost entirely fail to connect into a cohesive system on which you can safely bike from point A to point B without ending up on nasty roads for large fractions of the trip.