agreed, but far better than on the sidewalk. It's significantly more dangerous for everyone involved INCLUDING CARS to have bicycles on sidewalks. people get in accidents turning into bikes on sidewalks cuz they're not paying attention to it.
The US is poorly setup for bikes in general though, most of our cities were built, or at least really expanded after the advent of cars so you get these sprawing urban areas outside of the older cities like boston new York, philly and Chicago, where your LA's and houstons and atlantas etc are huge and sometimes hours across in a car. Every road modification and add-on is just to accommodate even more cars. It's getting better though. Or it was til the current backslide into the sewers