Why Biking in NYC Still Has a Lot of Room For Improvement
My headline isn’t going to get as many clicks as the one at the top of this Thrillist article, so click through and read reporter Dave Infante’s take on the challenges of building better bike lanes in New York. Here’s one of my favorite passages:
Reengineering the city’s 6,000 miles of roadways to be more equitable is the DOT’s job, and it’s a big one. “City streets are all a balancing act,” Wright, the DOT greenway director, patiently told me in a phone interview. “You’re trying to make everything work on this small curb-to-curb place.” As noted earlier, the imbalance exists because the system was designed for motor vehicles, but it persists because it’s beneficial to the very people who hold the power to change it: car owners.
Emphasis mine.
I’m quoted in the piece along with a few other names you might recognize.
Brooklyn Spoke 
My short answer to the headline: because almost every piece of “bike infrastructure” in New York is garbage, usually blocked by cars, and does not contribute to an overall comfortable cycling network. Even the “protected lanes” are too narrow (why did they start with wider ones and then make them worse?), have a very poor road surface, and dump you out on the street in Midtown.
How are we in the future going to communicate the safety of bicycling in a way that is not true today?
Yah, but JSK was able to do it.
Each person is concerned primarily with whatever is most important to them as well as whatever works best for them.
So long as such is in order for any given individual, said individual isn’t going to look any further than their own satisfactions and whatever benefits they are currently receiving from the present situation. This includes not being too overly concerned about the effects the present conditions may be having on others around them, or whether or not others may or may not be adversely impacted by the same situations and circumstances that are otherwise yielding advantages for them.