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I feel like the bike path insanity of North American suburbs never gets talked about on /n/. And let me tell you boys: It's fucking INSANE.
Now I live in AB, Canada so I can't speak for the rest of the country, but since urban planning is basically an exact replica of American designs, I'm confident the same banality is present everywhere else.
The idea of bike paths in the suburbs is simple: They simple replace the normal sidewalk with a straight section of smooth pavement with a dividing line, and call it a a bike lane. Of course since it's basically just a sidewalk, the lane ends at every. single. block. where it intersects a road, so as a biker you are supposed to *technically* dismount and cross the road as a pedestrian. No one does this of course, because it is insane. The problem with not stopping, however, is that it is dangerous as cars don't see you coming when you're in the bike lane due to the bike lane being close to houses and the driver's visibility being obscured.
But it gets better: These suburban bike lanes have a habit of starting and ending at random intervals, and for no apparent reason whatsoever, being replaced by regular sidewalks (which of course you shouldn't be riding on). In the attached picture of a typical suburban intersection you can see how the bike path on the top left ends for no fucking reason whatsoever once you cross the street and turns into regular sidewalk. And again, for no reason whatsoever, starts up on the opposite side of the intersection.
The suburban sidewalks, even if you'd like to ride on them, are not ideal for road bikes due to their very peculiar design. They are made with grooves all over them and are divided into slabs of concrete and they are narrower. A very time-consuming and effort-intensive procedure is required to make them, which leads one to wonder: "Why on Earth don't they just make all the sidewalks of smooth concrete, and they can all double as shared bike/pedestrian lanes?"
