I used to ride a bike every day for 15 years, I’m currently a car driver.

The big problem is when design desisions are made without considering all users.

For example where I used to live they divided the pavment into two, one side for pedestrians one for bikes. The only thing making this divide was a line of paint. This meant that you had to dodge pedestrians who didn’t like the bikes encroaching on their area whilst also having to deal with crossing junctions.

If you stuck to the road in the same area you could get a much higher speed as you didn’t have to deal with obsticals. The big problem was now in the eyes of the car drivers you weren’t supposed to be on the road as you had your own lane on the pavement.

Similarly, in a nearby area they decided to try and take a lane away from the cars to make a cycle lane. The issue being they ignored the fact that most people needed to take a turn that crossed the lanes, the only way to do that was to leave the cycle lane and join the cars, but again you have your own lane and the car drivers don’t think you’re allowed in theirs anymore and you’ve made their traffic worse.

This kind of infrastructure led to so many negative encounters for me that I gave up riding all together.

The problem tends to be that these kinds of infrastructure changes are only done as token gestures and are rarely well thought out. When these kinds of changes are done well it can be fantastic but those occurrences are rare so everyone defaults to the defeatist stance of the changes will cause more problems than they solve.

It’s a catch 22, you need to build new infrastructure that is good and works, to stop people being against it but it can’t be built because people only know the bad examples that have been built in the past.