Hello @Heba, nice to meet you.
I had the good fortune of living in a city, Milan, just as it managed to get a bicycle culture going. When I moved there in 2001, for various reasons, almost nobody rode bikes. It was quite scary. By the time I moved out, ten years later, things had gotten much better.
This was not led by the city government. It was pushed by civil society, and specifically from small groups of “extreme cyclists”. I told the story before here:
[…] young, fit men who wore tactical backpacks, army boots and yelled at drivers, and even kicked at their cars. I could just about cope: my (Swedish) wife refused to cycle, saying it was too dangerous. Extreme bikers did things like this:
https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/1/11a17d67f639a63ee13b23948ecf39e174f423ba.jpg
But over the years those extreme people have become sort of cool. A company called Urban Bike Messengers established a bicycle-based delivery service. They cultivated an image of green, cool and a bit scary. Rumour was that, to become a messenger, you had to pass a near-impossible test of crossing the city only in minutes. This encouraged more people to go out and bike. This, in turn, made biking a little safer for everyone, because drivers learned to be a little more attentive. So even more people got out. By the time I left the city, the Decathlon shop in Cairoli was selling 50 to 100 bicycles a day. Eventually, the city council started to take cyclists a bit more seriously; traffic was restricted in the center, some slightly better bike lanes appeared.
In later years (by this time I had left the city), Milan’s civically minded cyclists decided to tackle the problem of bicycle lanes. They just go out at night with white paint and draw them! I remember a candidate mayor’s own team doing this as part of the mayoral election campaign in 2011. But now there must be a group of “guerrilla bike lane makers” in town.
This is a street called via Cartesio, about a month ago (article, in Italian)
https://edgeryders.eu/uploads/default/original/2X/e/ea65af8bb4d2cbecdfe99b6aa48bfa3d76a2a010.jpg
A month before, on a railway bridge (Cavalcavia Bussa):
Media report that drivers normally respect these DIY bike lanes. This is telling the city leaders that the time for cycling has come.