Yes, of course, but anyway Copenhagen is not really quite as dense as the small area of the city proper would lead you to believe.
(Looking at Wikipedia, the San Jose metro area actually seems to be very concentrated in the city proper, with almost 1.9 million in the city proper and only 56 000 outside it. )
Wikipedia is wrong if it means the effective metropolitan area surrounding San Jose is just San Jose. People live and work spread across the entire Silicon Valley area, that is indeed why that term is used most often for the region. Since housing is expensive and difficult to find and expensive, workers wind-up spread out at close to the maximum drivable to distance, putting them at far from an easily bikable distance.
"Geographically, Silicon Valley is generally thought to encompass all of the Santa Clara Valley, the southern half of the Peninsula and southern portions of the East Bay."
Is it? I thought all of Silicon Valley was pretty densely populated, and that's more than just San Jose.
In any case, biking works best when distances aren't too big. Amsterdam is probably the bike capital of the world (more bikes than people), but biking from a suburb on one side of the city to one on the opposite side is pretty rare (except for the more dedicated biker, obviously). You're a fool if you take a car into the city center (many people don't even own one), but around the edges, cars work fine.
Although my wife, who is not a dedicated cyclist at all and usually commutes by car, has had a time where she regularly cycled 17 km to Schiphol.
(Looking at Wikipedia, the San Jose metro area actually seems to be very concentrated in the city proper, with almost 1.9 million in the city proper and only 56 000 outside it. )