I lived in the Dutch suburbs and everything you say can’t be done on a bike were pretty normal there.

I think people think bikes don’t work because they’re thinking about the problem, as opposed to trying through the problem.

Ok, I'll bite. How do I get my family to church? 4 kids between 1 and 6. 6 miles from home.

It would be nice if we didn't smell when we arrived.

Assuming you have a partner, each adult has two kids on their bike (one front seat, one back seat). At 6 the eldest can even cycle by themselves if you push. I'm Dutch and this is completely normal here.

I used to have this bike with an extra front seat and regularly cycled places with 4 kids (4-7) by myself (pushing one on their own bike): https://kokfietsen.nl/image/cache/data/Azor%20Catalogus/069-...

But then again, this country is really flat.

Edit: with kids 6 miles is a stretch, not that it's super hard, but you'll often be tempted to just take the car. If you upgrade to an e-bike that temptation will be a LOT less.

Also, that 6 miles probably would be a bit less in a city with less space allotted to on-street parking and car lanes.

Here you go; fits 4 kids easily and is electric so you won’t smell bad: https://bunchbike.com/products/the-original-electric-cargo-b...

Nice! I want one.

If cities weren’t designed around cars, your church wouldn’t be six miles away in the first place.

People in non-auto-centric countries all over the world take their families to church and everywhere else you listed.

Cargo bikes for the 2 adults. It's the norm here in Stockholm. Well, 4 kids is not the norm. But 2 kids in a cargo bike is the norm.

In European cities you usually walk to church because it's not 6 miles away, there aren't massive 6 lane roads taking up valuable city space.

I have a two part response to this. The first is that the goal of bike infrastructure is not to eliminate the car, but instead to give people the option of riding bikes when suitable. Some tasks (transporting large objects) will always be right for cars. But even getting families to shift to 1 car instead of two or three would be a huge resource saver.

But secondly, I would suggest a paradigm shift in how you think about things. You are probably right that for you, in the environment you live in, a bike is not the right choice. But an urban/suburban environment is not a fixed constant, so the question is why is your environment reliant on cars?

To respond to a few of your examples with this framework in mind.

- If your church and your work were closer, biking might make more sense. Suburban sprawl and zoning laws push things (housing, work, and amenities) apart that could be closer together.

- Your kids sound pretty young, but for when they get older if you lived in a place where it was safe to cycle alone, and their friends were closer to you, they could cycle to friends more easily. Unfortunately, with how things are, I wouldn't blame you for keeping them off the roads, as many U.S. roads are unsafe, especially for young kids.

- Again, it's not relevant until your kids are older, but the majority of Dutch children walk or bike to school, rather than being driven. From what I've seen, even elementary school aged kids will travel to school alone.

Now it could be that you just prefer the countryside, in which case of course bike infrastructure is irrelevant to you. But many people are more motivated only by a desire to avoid big cities in which case building out the "missing middle" between sparsely populated car dependent suburbia/countryside and dense urban centers could be the solution.

Yes there are people with kids who don’t own a car. Madness. I guess they just don’t make excuses.

Well, of course there are. My mom used a bike for her first borne. She was poor. She had a lady in her apartment complex watch her daughter during work. She didn't really go out.

As soon as she could afford a car, she got one and her life expanded.

What do other families look like who have multiple kids and no car?

s/car/bike/ is obviously not the solution. Not organizing your life around cars is. This has more impact on one's life than just replacing a car with a bike, as a comparison between, say, a typical north american household lifestyle and a typical dutch household one readily shows.