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Because our road systems are designed around cars. This means that it's dangerous and impeding when a cyclist shares the road. Unfortunately, we just keep building bigger roads and removing bike lanes. This just serves to make it more of a pain in the ass for literally everyone because bikers have to use the car lanes instead of just paving an extra 6 feet of road.
TL;DR america will pave every natural surface for traffic, but won't mark any sliver of it for bikes.
And American “sidewalks” are narrower than my grandmas garden path and end just as abruptly
Don't forget: you need 6 feet and also a meridian to divide them from cars. Drivers will not see the squishy person but they will avoid trees and shrubs.
I'm in Europe now walking down streets that are wide enough for a single car seeing other hikers and bikers and cars stopping for each other. Agreed these roads aren't designed for cars hitting top speed with wide margins around them, but at least some of these comments are written in this thread are US is special / there needs to be an ideal design for bicycles or nothing is just aggregating to read
I think the problem is that roads not designed for bikes in Europe are also old enough to have not been originally designed for cars, so things usually end up working out to some degree.
In the US (especially for infrastructure built from scratch in the 1900s onward, i.e. most of the US except for some parts of the east coast) most roads and town layouts were designed specifically around cars and travelling at car speeds, and are explicitly hostile to anyone who isn't travelling in the biggest truck you've ever seen in your life. Blame oil/motor companies for bribing politicians throughout the 1900s (and honestly still today)
The monsterous cars more than most people choose only make those.problems worse and in many cases prevent retrofitting old roads to accomodate bikes too. America needs an urban planning and car design Renaissance and then maybe our bike infrastructure can be half as safe as a normal country.