Getting people to ride their bikes

With the After Dark expansion to Cities: Skylines, bike paths and bike lanes were added. In my opinion this alone made the DLC worth buying, as I'm a huge fan of cycling infrastructure.

So in this experiment, what I set out to do was create a low density suburb type area that was all residential and connect it to the industrial and commercial sections primarily through bike paths. I have a very broken roundabout that is two way for some reason (it came with the map) coming off the highway. There is one road from the roundabout to the residential area and then one road which leads to the commercial and industrial area. The fact pretty much all motorized traffic has to go through one traffic circle (and a broken one at that) caused an absolute traffic disaster. This, however, was fine by me because I wanted people to ride bikes from the residential zone to the rest of the city, and I figured if taking a car was a huge pain, it would encourage more cyclists.

Here's a picture of the general layout of this bike suburbs part of the city. I've added a bunch of other stuff, such as the highway interchange and roads going to other places, but the basic idea of the original bike suburb is still there.

The part on the left is all residential while the top right is industrial and bottom right is commercial. So obviously for people who live in the bottom left, if they wanted to get to the bottom right commercial area, it's a long drive but a very short bike ride. When I first started building this, the bike paths were flooded with bikes. It seemed my experiment in traffic terror was working at encouraging cycling. I put in bike lanes on major roads in order to facilitate cycle-commuting and the number of cyclists continued to grow:

Then I had the idea that I should put in a bus route along the one road connecting the residential zone to the other two zones. There were some issues with not enough workers, so I figured that the game probably has it programmed that only a certain percentage of people can ride a bike or something. So I added the bus line, that you can see here in red, and it caused even more traffic problems on the one road. I thought, "ha, cycling is now an even better way to get around!"

But apparently cims would rather wait around for a bus that never comes because it's stuck in traffic all day than ride their bikes! As soon as I put in the bus line, the number of cyclists plummeted! This was the scene at all of the bus stops in the residential area:

Even worse, as I sat there and watched people, eventually they would spawn cars and drive into the traffic circle of doom, making traffic even worse! Apparently cims love public transport so much that they would rather walk across half the city and wait around all day then take a short bike ride to get to their destination. All this with with the encourage cycling policy activated too.

I'm not sure what is causing this behaviour, but perhaps my cycling paths are too short. I've noticed that my longer distance paths tend to have a lot more traffic than the shorter ones. Adding a walking path beside one of my shorter cycling paths led to a huge influx of pedestrians, so there may be something to the idea that cims would rather walk short distances than ride their bike. This doesn't really explain why they'd rather wait around at a bus stop all day than take a quick bike ride though.