They don’t ride bikes and they don’t see many people riding them for practical uses (work, shopping etc) so for them it’s hard to sell the idea of bike infrastructure (that they think is for mainly recreational riders) making their commute slower and taking up tax money that could be used on other projects.

I get how this is flawed thinking and I want more pedestrian and bike friendly areas, but that is their perspective.

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Many good answers have been given already. One more is that many people understand it would be better for the environment and their own health if they biked instead of driving a car. Yet getting a car was one of the symbols of having the means for a good life. If you are able to let go of your car, it shows that you have held pointless things as important parts of your identity. You don’t want to have been a moron, do you?

So, you suppress the idea that you could be doing something else than what you are doing. And other people bicycling is kind of in-your-face. They show that you could have an alternative, and that causes a feeling of guilt in you. And that feeling of guilt is uncomfortable, and the people riding their bicycles are what have triggered that feeling. In other words: They have ruined your day by making you feel guilt. A completely self-created guilt, but an annoying feeling all the same. And then you hate everything that is connected to those people that keep ruining your days by the virtue of visibly existing.

This is not necessarily the reason for all of the people opposing bike infrastructure, but it is one of the important reasons for many.

Where I live, building bike infrastructure means removing a lane of traffic, or parking, to install a bunch of curbs, poles, and large rocks, to create a bike lane that largely goes unused, while traffic is substantially worsened.

Here’s an example of a work in progress. When this was taken they hadn’t yet filled the holes they’d dug in the road with the rocks.

I think some of why is related to how most people in a traffic jam go “damn this traffic” not “damn, I’m making this worse”

In short, it’s selfish myopothy. “I don’t see how this will immediately and directly benefit me so I oppose it and, now that I have made my uninformed knee-jerk decision, I refuse to listen to opposing arguments that might cause me to admit that I was ever wrong about anything.”

You might recognize this behavior in other aspects of society. It is not isolated to transportation infrastructure.

There is no logical reason to be ideologically pro car

🤷 People often do or say things that make no sense.

Because conservatives ultimately do not believe in anything beyond helping the in ground and hurting the out group. That is it. Everything else is just window dressing.

because, overwhelmingly, they’re dumb and selfish and ignorant, and they choose to be that way.

some aren’t. some are willing to be educated. but not most.

They think of it as a zero-sum game. There is either a bike lane or two car lanes. The number of cyclists is fixed and the number of drivers is fixed. If there is one less lane to drive in, there is more traffic. If you spend limited tax dollars on bike infrastructure, driving infrastructure will not receive necessary maintenance.

It would also mean more bikes on the road, and drivers don’t like sharing the road with anything.

That very thing you said at the end is usually already too much thinking for car brains

I think it’s mostly pavlovian.

It’s not that they follow some chain of reasoning to arrive at opposition to bike infrastructure, but that the mere idea triggers anger, and the position follows the mindless emotional response

See also: pretty much everything that they consider “woke.”

Because they lived in world of lies. They don’t care about facts or studies, they only care about being angry at someone and the media they consume say that cyclists are the problem