Infrastructure and zoning are 99% of the answer to your question.
Safe, segregated bike lanes that go to destinations and connect. A painted shoulder on the road next to a park that ends (the road has zero shoulder suddenly) after 500 feet does not cut it. We all know or should know how autocentric our traffic patterns are, too.
Zoning. Parking minimums and highway-style planning for everything and putting all houses and offices and stores on opposite ends of town and only having sprawling single-family houses along "stroads" will make a typical commute to work or trip to the grocery store be 10 to 40 miles instead of 0.1 to 10 miles.
If a typical commute is 15 miles one way alongside 45 mph traffic on a 4 or 5-lane road, then only daredevils in great physical shape will do this commute on bike.
Pretty much everything Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns says is dead on. Check him out for an engineer's perspective. He doesn't aim ridiculously high (you have to give up somewhat if you want to stay in Anerica) in fixing America, but he sticks to the basics and knows them well. Two great YouTube channels on this topic are CityNerd and NotJustBikes.
NJB has gone from Canadian expat to straight up calling himself an immigrant. He gave up and left. He is blunter, if more abrasive, but does some great comparisons of international environments in his videos. Just skip the ones where he drools over everything Dutch. (The occasional video is just obsessing over cargo bikes or Dutch sanitation, but that's only 1 out of 10 videos).
If a healthy 40-year-old male is stressed and terrified by North Anerican road design, then there is no hope for expecting teenage girls to ride alone in these settings or for children and the elderly to navigate these paths safely or in a reasonable time frame.