Indeed, bicycles have generally been transport within cities and close-by. A world where most people lived in rural areas would not be that practical for bicycle travel even now.
Bicycles surely played a considerable role in inter-village traffic in the earlier parts of the 20th century. Maybe not in particularly poor or sparsely populated areas, but where villages are close enough to touch each others at the very edges of their walkable productivity zones? Maybe they got their bikes a few years later, maybe their cars a few years earlier than in the cities, but that still leaves quite a few years of cycling.
