Anon missed the biggest sin of all:
Monetizable, but only at two or three orders of magnitude less than automobiles.
TL;DR: "He's cheating because he's not spending as much as I am."
They're cheaper in every conceivable way than cars, and that's why the worst people out there hate them. Once you see the systems in place to equate personal validity and social values with what wealth may be extracted, it's impossible to look back. Bikes are effectively a form of protest by way of scaling back one's economic interaction, because of this.