I'm an intern in the Seattle area for the summer and was faced with a choice upon arriving - buy a bike and get $350 of it covered or pay ~$1000 to get a rental car for all three months. Due to the obvious financial benefit of the former I wanted a bike, but after it raining for a week straight upon my arrival I chose to get a car. This, along with the tremendous social benefits of being able to come and go as you please, convinced me that owning and riding a bike is a healthy alternate transportation method for the nice days, but not really a feasible replacement.
Modern tech products are used by so many people that you really can't give all users the same label. There are some brilliant people using Macs to get their jobs done and same goes with Dells, Lenovos, Windows, IE, Ubuntu, etc..