As a European I was really surprised at how cycle-friendly San Francisco and Palo Alto (especially Stanford campus) are- its much better than you might expect. Room for improvement, but no worse than many cities over here.
As a resident of Copenhagen this was not really my impression. Yes, Palo Alto is cycleable, kinda in the same way any small town in the world is cycleable - low amount of traffic and comparatively wide streets. San Francisco is cycleable because it is 7x7 miles large so not that much space to sprawl but cycling infrastructure is basically completely absent.
What surprised me though is how overall passable public transport in San Francisco was. MUNI and BART are pretty okay for getting around even if locals don't believe so. Unsurprisingly whenever I was in trams, they were full of other European tourists.
MUNI's shortcomings are visible during rush hour due to system collapse, and off-hours / on secondary routes due to missing runs or too-infrequent scheduling.
Moving around the most urban cores outside of rush hour, you typically won't see the worst of the warts.
from what i hear about copenhagen, no city in the world can compete with how cyclefriendly it is. even dutch cities struggle to keep up. so naturally, you won't have a good impression of any other place. i don't blame you. i am jealous. :-)
In Munich, where I live, for example, we have bike lanes on the sides of most streets throughout the town, and dedicated bike paths in the countryside. It's wonderful - cyclists can drive safely the speed they'd like to, without interfering with neither cars nor pedestrians. I use my bicycle almost exclusively for anything up to 20km.
Bike lanes on the sides of streets present problems for cyclists where there are frequent intersections. At those intersections, cyclists need to check for traffic overtaking them and then immediately making a right turn in front of them, traffic entering the roadway and encroaching in the bike lane, and oncoming traffic making a left turn across the bike lane.
I am also interested in moving to Munich at some point, could you tell me more about the state of the biking infrastructure? Is it practical to use cycling as your main transportation method around the city? What about recreationally - i.e. biking outside the city, to a nearby village?
Don't trust your feelings. The problem with the way cyclists and cycling transportation have been used politically is that it is now impossible to have any serious conversation about it, it's just like climate change. The experience of cyclists riding on roads have been quietly dismissed so that the establishment can get away with their bike lane agenda.
