This pattern is sadly typical of our political discourse. "I know that {socialized health care, gun bans, public transit, labor rights, paid pregnancy leave} work great in every other first-world country, but it Can't Work Here, because Reasons".
However if you can easily find pictures of Amsterdam in the 1970s where the streets look just as crammed with cars as any other city of that time. What happened is that people decided this wasn't working at all and they simply made a choice and they made a change to their spending priorities. Anyone can do this. All that is needed is the political will to make it a priority.
Amsterdam has average temps (in F) from the mid 30's to the mid 60's[0]. That's prime bike weather. That's pretty much in line with San Francisco, which is a good city for biking. Even Manhattan and Brooklyn have reasonably overall pleasant weather for biking.
But compare SF to somewhere like Washington, DC, or Austin, TX. For 3-4 months of the year, DC feels like a swamp. Same with Austin. It's much more preferable to use public transit or drive than bike in that weather.
Credit where credit is due, I stole most of my ideas about this from [0]. It's a non-prestigious contrarian blog that's easy to mock, but he seems to be correct on the merits about cities.
[0] http://www.newworldeconomics.com/archives/2008/072008.html