Dear Sydney, you mystify me

You are a totally clean, totally beautiful, entirely lovely city thus far.  After my tired commute and post race "what's next in life" blackout, you re-lit my fire.

After bike building, organizing my packing, and drinking coffee this morning, I fit in 7 hours of riding today by exploring north through the bike routes out to the beautiful 'burbs, then past into the national forests.  Once there I had seemingly endless kilometers of riding with hardly a car to bother with, which was nice relaxation from trying to cope with this whole left hand side of the road ordeal that's thoroughly challenging my well established road habits programming.  Ku-ring-gai Chase park and Garigal park are cycling wonderland about an hour by bike from town.  The temperatures are beautiful, the skies a mix of overcast and times of direct sun.  Your coffee shop employees brew it strong.  Even when the sky showers us, it doesn't reduce a person's temperature at all, only wearing a jersey.  It was supremely fun as the less-than-killer volume of the race plus a day off means my legs feel like steel (plus the riding alone to self pace never hurts).

Yet on the three post Wildside email threads going with all the locals and their friends, encompassing at least two dozen people, it seems many are making riding plans conditional on the rain?  The politicians on TV are debating how much to spend and how to go about reducing CO2 emissions?  When I ride back into downtown between 5 and 6pm there's only a handful of people going opposite way bike commuting home from work?

Which begs the question - what am I missing?  The climate, layout, path design, path rules (ie. no impractical/useless rules I can see posted), path flow and signage when winding through those ritzy areas, plus the nearby terrain are heaven on earth from this cyclists perspective.  Traffic looked like it totally sucked in line with other many million person cities. 

Why don't more of you ride bikes/bike commute?  I've only experienced a day of climate, but I'm hazarding a guess that you don't need to perform any -35C single speed with goggles/snowboard helmet/full face mask rides.  I suppose there's days when the rain does feel cold... but you're a tough enough bunch for that, non?  As far as I can tell, this city is as easy and enjoyable as they come for cycling.