The solution is bike lockers. It’s an important piece of public infrastructure that often gets overlooked.

Bike thieves move fast, and a lot of time they are in cars, it's not always some random guy on the street. I saw a brand new Lexus pull up to a bike at a red light in a fancy neighborhood, guy was actively in the road and parked blocking the lane, and stole the bike in literally 40seconds and was gone. No license plates. I called it in but I doubt they did anything about it. And I'll never risk my life for a bike lol.

Not gonna lie, I wouldn't know how to manage seeing a guy use a grinder on some bikes.

I wanted a folding bike for this purpose but it would only be good for going to work and back. I can't just walk around a mall or something carrying a folding bike :/

I keep around a few beater bikes. If one gets stolen then oh well I'm out $75, which is less than 1 tank of gas.

While it doesn't really help with the stolen part, it helps with the recovery: put a tracker on it.

I would legitimately love a study on whether this makes drivers more or less likely to be angry, because anything other than complete neutrality would be hilarious.

Like a decoy to a duck, the problems only start when the car attempts to mate with it

Can the SUV go in 7 different directions?

It's not representative because the average ridership is below 2. It's not about how many people can fit, it's about how many people are using it. The car realistically seated at most 2 people. Each bicycle seated exactly 1 person, so 7 people in the same space.

You can fit 7 people in an SUV if they’re all going to the same place. You could say “isn’t that what a bus is?” but a bus has way more space, is happy to frequently stop, is much more fuel efficient per pserson, and is part of a larger network.

Depends on the SUV as well. My RAV-4 is considered an SUV, but uncomfortably fits only 5 unless you also want 2 people to squash themselves into the trunk, and it's big brother, the Highlander, isn't much better. My dad just replaced his Yukon (also known as a Suburban or Escalade depending on the brand and time it was made), and that could fit 8 people relatively comfortably, but it's also a bigger car than the one pictured - bigger even than the 4-door Tachoma he replaced it with.

That assumes every seat is filled.

Aside from what everyone else said, not every spot is taken up in that bike rack, and the SUV is still larger than that bike rack.

Can it go in 7 different directions at once?

The average SUV out there doesn't hold 7 people at all times