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NJB Live (my live-streaming channel): https://youtube.com/@njblive
—
Relevant Videos
I am not a “Cyclist” (and most Dutch people aren’t either)
https://nebula.tv/videos/not-just-bikes-i-am-not-a-cyclist-and-most-dutch-people-aren-t-either
These Stupid Trucks are Literally Killing Us
https://nebula.tv/videos/notjustbikes-these-stupid-trucks-are-literally-killing-us
Why Dutch Bikes are Better (and why you should want one)
https://nebula.tv/videos/not-just-bikes-why-dutch-bikes-are-better-and-why-you-should-want-one
Toronto’s Newest Painted Bicycle Gutters [NJB Live]
Intersection design, the Dutch – cycle friendly – way – Bicycle Dutch
Protected Intersections For Bicyclists
Well There’s Your Problem Podcast – Vehicular Cycling
CycleYYZ
@cycleyyz
—
References & Further Reading
Effective Cycling, John Forester, ISBN 978-0262516945
Bicycle Transportation, John Forester, ISBN 978-0262560795
Davis, Californië: “The Bicycle Capital of the World”
https://fietsberaad.nl/CROWFietsberaad/media/Kennis/Bestanden/Davis_Californie.pdf
‘Bike Boom’: Lessons from the ’70s cycling craze that swept the U.S
https://archive.curbed.com/2017/6/28/15886810/bike-transportation-cycling-urban-design-bike-boom
https://phred.org/~alex/kenkifer/www.kenkifer.com/bikepages/lifestyle/70s.htm
America Could Have Been Building Protected Bike Lanes for the Last 40 Years
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/06/30/america-could-have-been-building-protected-bike-lanes-for-the-last-40-years
Vehicular Cycling – How Cyclists—Not Just Cars—Blocked Safer Bike Infrastructure
https://thehappyurbanist.substack.com/p/vehicular-cycling
Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines
https://web.archive.org/web/20080216022317/http://drusilla.hsrc.unc.edu/cms/downloads/BikewayPlanningGuidelines1972.pdf
1976: BIG JIM’s Big BOOZY Bike Trip to Braemar – BBC Archive
Four Types of Cyclists
https://www.portland.gov/transportation/walking-biking-transit-safety/documents/four-types-cyclists/download
2007.05.17 John Forester – Google Tech Talks
USA 1977: Chevrolet Impala/Caprice takes the lead
USA 1977: Chevrolet Impala/Caprice takes the lead, Ford F-Series now best-selling truck
The Marginalization of Bicyclists
Ontario Highway Traffic Act
https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/90h08#BK245
Road safety and perceived risk of cycle facilities in Copenhagen
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235358599_Road_safety_and_perceived_risk_of_cycle_facilities_in_Copenhagen
Ask the Experts: Søren Underlien Jensen and Dr. Lon D. Roberts, PhD.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518301488?via%3Dihub
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/11/20/what-the-data-says-about-dangerous-driving-and-road-rage-in-the-us/
https://www.thetrace.org/2024/04/road-rage-shooting-gun-highway-deaths/
Bicycle Today – Automobile Tomorrow
https://archive.org/details/BicycleToday
The Racing Cyclist
https://archive.org/details/TheRacingCyclist
Oslo Street Design Manual – English translation
https://www.cyclescape.org/library/documents/124
Map of buildings in the Netherlands by year of construction
https://code.waag.org/buildings/
Velo-city 2025 in Gdańsk | Global Cycling Conference Highlights and Impressions – Bicycle Dutch
—
Chapters
0:00 Intro
3:54 California tried to marginalise cycling
6:25 The birth of Vehicular Cycling
9:38 The MAMIL’s Manifesto
20:15 Just ride like a car, bro!
28:05 Bicycle lanes are … unsafe?
46:09 The second book is even worse?!
58:16 The actual problems with bike lanes
1:06:14 But what about the Netherlands?
1:13:30 Forester at Google
1:21:18 The Cult of the Vehicular Cyclist
1:26:16 Bicycles are not cars!?
1:31:29 Concluding thoughts
1:32:28 Acknowledgements & Nebula
In the middle of the 20th century, car-centric
suburbanization had taken over America. Nearly everyone who could
drive a car did drive a car, and cycling had become almost non-existent.
But in the 60s and 70s, there was a huge and unexpected boom in cycling,
and this was not a trivial bump: within just a few years bicycle
manufacturers saw their sales skyrocket, and in 1972, 1973, and 1974, there were
more bicycles sold in the US than cars. American cities were totally unprepared for
this. They had been designing exclusively for motor vehicles for decades,
but now there was a growing demand from the general public to design
safe infrastructure for cycling as well. In 1963, Frank Child, a professor
of Economics in Davis, California, took his family for an extended
holiday in the Netherlands. They loved cycling in Den Haag so much that they
were determined to make Davis California the same. Which kinda surprised me, because Den Haag was
not particularly bicycle-friendly in the 1960s. Davis was already a college town with a lot
of cycling, and Frank and his wife Eve were successful in getting several bicycle-friendly
politicians elected to Davis city council. And in 1967, Davis California installed
the first protected bicycle lane in the United States. And this started getting
the attention of other cities in California. In 1972, traffic engineers at UCLA published
this document, Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines, a proposal for how to design
bicycle infrastructure in California. To say that this document was ahead of its
time would be a massive understatement. It was based on the latest research in bicycle
infrastructure design from Dutch cities, but a lot of this was still theoretical.
This document even included designs for protected intersections, which
are now common in the Netherlands, but are extremely rare in US cities even today.
There was one group who were very unhappy with this document however, and that was the cyclists
who were already cycling on California streets. These were people who were comfortable cycling
at high speeds and sharing the road with cars. They typically used their bicycles for
recreational racing, and they were part of a touring club of people who did the same.
One cyclist, an industrial engineer called John Forester, wrote about
his reaction to this document. When I read it, I was appalled; it embodied
everything that I already knew was dangerous in cycling and placed in grave jeopardy
our rights to use the roads safely. The UCLA traffic engineers had largely copied Dutch
sidepath bikeway practice and obviously had no knowledge of cycling in traffic.
Forester was determined to fight these new standards, on the belief
that they would marginalise cycling, and make it impossible for him and his cycling
club to use the roads for bicycle racing. I prepared a written review of the document
and I publicized its errors in a newsletter that I distributed to cyclists in California.
My comments killed that bikeway standard. John Forester went on to devote
his life to cycling education, and fighting against any proposal for
dedicated bicycle infrastructure in the US. He became highly influential and his
philosophy, known as “vehicular cycling”, became the norm in cities, not just across the
US, but in many other English-speaking countries, including the UK and Canada.
Unfortunately while vehicular cycling as a policy was arguably wrong in
the 1970s, it is objectively wrong today. So I thought I’d be making a video about a
guy who was dealing with limited research on bicycle safety, but had his heart in the right
place, and ended up promoting the wrong approach. But oh no no no no … after diving down the
John Forester rabbit hole I found out it was way, way worse than I thought.
[NJB INTRO] In 1972 the city of Palo Alto
California wanted to make streets safer for cyclists. But instead of
building new protected bicycle lanes, they just put up signs telling
cyclists to ride on the sidewalk, and made it illegal to ride on the road.
John Forester was not impressed. He had been cycling on the streets of Palo Alto
for years, and he saw no reason to ride on a sidewalk that was never designed for
cycling, so he continued to ride on the road. He was stopped by the police and was issued
tickets for not riding on the sidewalk which he fought in court …
and lost. He fought the law, and the law won. But John Forester was correct.
The rules that Palo Alto put in place did not make cycling safer, and they
quietly reversed the ordinance, worried that other cyclists might sue the city if
they were injured while cycling on the sidewalk. Forester still wanted to prove that
the sidewalks were unsafe though, so he rode at his full racing speed down the
sidewalk of MIddlefield Road in Palo Alto, and was nearly hit by a car while trying
to turn left onto Oregon Expressway. This story will be important later, by the way.
At this time, many cities in California were proposing laws for bicycles that were
supposedly about safety, but were really designed to marginalise cyclists and keep the
roads clear so that cars could drive faster. For example, Forester fought against
a law that required bicycle riders to ride as far to the right as “practicable”.
Ontario Canada, where I’m from, still has this in their laws today, using nearly identical
wording to California. The problem is that “practicable” is too often interpreted by drivers
and the police as only riding in the gutter. And, outside of Davis, most of the supposed “bike
infrastructure” that US cities were building in the early 1970s were absolutely terrible.
Which is why I refer to bike lanes like these as “painted bicycle gutters.”
So I have some empathy for Forester, given this context, and I can understand why someone who
has been riding fast on wide roads for years would be upset about being forced to ride in the gutter,
that’s full of rocks and trash and other debris. Or worse, being required by law to ride right
next to parked cars, where there’s a very high chance of being doored,
that is, somebody opening their car door right in front of you.
This kind of infrastructure is garbage, and yet even today, many cities still
think that this is acceptable. It is not. Many cycling advocates argued at the time that
the solution to bad bicycle infrastructure was good bicycle infrastructure, but to
Forester, all bicycle infrastructure was bad. He was convinced that the only thing that mattered
was experience, and so he created a training course called Effective Cycling,
to teach people how to ride a bicycle just like they were driving a car.
He summarised his philosophy with the famous line: Cyclists fare best when they act and
are treated as drivers of vehicles. The Effective Cycling program
taught several skills for safely riding a bicycle around motor vehicles.
Cyclists should always ride on the roadway, never on the sidewalk or off-street paths,
and obey exactly the same laws as car drivers. If you need to pass another vehicle, you should
signal your movements, and make a lane change. You should always pass right-turning
cars on the left, and never on the right. When making left turns, you should merge
into traffic and turn from the left side of the road, just like a car driver.
In wide lanes, cyclists should ride on the right side of the road, leaving
enough room for cars to pass on the left. But if the lane is too narrow for a car to
pass, or if there are parked cars to your right, you should ride in the middle of the lane, to
prevent drivers from trying to pass you unsafely. This has become known as “taking the lane”,
and this will definitely come up later. Effective Cycling also taught people how
to maintain and repair their bicycles, as well as important skills for
sudden stops and emergency maneuvers. These are all extremely useful
skills that everyone should learn, and you should ride this way when you
are forced to share the road with cars. If your choice is between vehicular cycling or
riding in the gutter of a stroad while two-ton SUVs with blindspots big enough to hide an
elephant are wheezing past you at double the speed limit, then yeah, it’s probably is
safer to “take the lane”, just to stay visible. But nobody would actually advocate for
this to be the only way we should want to ride a bike … right? RIGHT?
Unfortunately for all of us, John Forester was just built different.
He didn’t think vehicular cycling was an emergency-maneuver for
worst-case-scenarios, he argued that this was the only way to ride a bicycle
and that cyclists should never ride in bicycle lanes, even if they are available.
Of course he also did everything he could to ensure that any safer designs, such as those
Dutch-inspired designs that were proposed in the 1972 ULCA report, would never be built
either, even though they would have solved many of the problems that he identified.
His ideological refusal to accept any kind of bicycle infrastructure, especially as
these designs had been iterated on and improved upon, was ludicrous.
And the amount of damage he did cannot be understated: he set back cycling
adoption in North America by at least 30 years. Three years ago I went on the “Well
There’s Your Problem” podcast to talk about the problems of “vehicular cycling”.
And to this day, I still think about this joke: [Roz]
“what if you just had” “a book you could look in … ” “to show you what”
“the right answer was” [November]
“yeah it’s called the Quran” The whole podcast episode was great, and
I’ll leave a link in the description, but one of the criticisms I received
afterwards is that the only reason I hated John Forester is because I never read
what he actually wrote. Which is a fair point. So for this video, I decided to rectify that
deficiency by ordering a used copy of his book, And when it arrived I instantly regretted that
decision, because it’s EIGHT HUNDRED PAGES LONG. I thought, how could you possibly need his
many pages to say, “pretend to be a car!?” But I did read the whole thing, cover-to-cover, and I want to be very clear about something:
nobody should ever read this book. The only redeemable chapters are those about
bicycle maintenance, but you’d be better off learning that from YouTube videos anyway.
Plus there’s no mention of ebikes at all. And while there are some nuggets of
good advice sprinkled throughout – such as the chapter on “Emergency Maneuvers” –
in order to actually get to that good advice, you need to wade through dozens and dozens
of pages of unfounded opinion on what it means to be a “proper” cyclist.
So while this book is presented as a thorough reference manual on how to ride
a bicycle, the core thesis is very clear: there is exactly one way to properly ride a
bicycle, it’s like this, and anybody who doesn’t ride a bicycle this way is a worthless amateur.
This isn’t something John mentions once or twice, or only in some chapters.
This entire book is absolutely loaded with snide references to anybody who
doesn’t ride with lycra and dropped handlebars, and he describes everything else as
“childish cycling” or “incompetent cycling.” One of the few times he acknowledges that other
types of bicycles exist is in the first chapter, in the section about selecting a
bicycle, where he discusses road bikes, mountain bikes,
and utility bikes. The utility bike is the cheapest of the three. It
is intended for short trips, possibly with a load, by nonenthusiast users such as children going
to school. It is heavy, durable when well made (although many are just cheap copies of
better bikes), comfortable for short trips but uncomfortable and clumsy for longer trips. You can
learn the elements of cycling with a utility bike, but once you have learned a bit, you will
appreciate a better bicycle. Even for just cycling around town, its weight and inefficiency
make it more difficult to maneuver in traffic. Forester also dismisses mountain bikes
because of excessive wind resistance. He concludes the chapter by stating that …
Without question, the road bike design is superior for all road uses.
OK John, whatever you say. I grew up in Canada in the 1980s, in an
environment where vehicular cycling and racing bicycles were the norm.
I didn’t even know that any other kind of cycling existed.
Which is why I gave up cycling as soon as I got a drivers license.
Why would anybody want to ride a bicycle like a car, when they could
just drive an actual car instead? Needless to say, when I later
learned, many decades later, that cycling didn’t have to involve
dropped handlebars and lycra while weaving in and out of car traffic, I
was actually interested in doing it. And it’s why one of the earliest videos on
this channel was about how I’m not a “cyclist”, which I now realise was my rejection
of everything Forester advocated for. In the Netherlands there are two
different words for “cyclist”. One is wielrenner, literally “wheel runner”.
The other word is “fiester”. But in English, both are called “cyclists”.
If someone is trying to explicitly differentiate the two, then fietsers are
sometimes referred to as “utility cyclists”. As for wielrenners, English speakers may
say “racing cyclist” but there is also the, usually derogatory term MAMIL, which is
an acronym for “middle-aged men in lycra”. And I think it’s this one that best
describes John Forester and his idea of what it means to be a “cyclist.”
Forester spends multiple pages going into excruciating detail about
what your bicycle should look like: drop handlebars, toe clips, narrow tires,
a hard plastic saddle, and 10 to 24 gears. As well as what kind of clothing
that should be worn while cycling. Shorts and shirts should be tight-fitting and
made of, quote, “stretchable synthetic fabrics”, and should not have pockets, because
they create too much wind resistance. Gloves should be fingerless
with leather-padded palms. Shoes should have stiff soles and be specifically
designed for your bicycle’s foot-retention system. And for women, he has some, uh, interesting
anatomical analysis … and then provides details on how to modify a plastic bicycle seat with a saw.
He also includes detailed charts of weekly and monthly maintenance.
If the only things I knew about riding a bicycle came from this book, I would never want to do it,
because it sounds like a giant pain in the ass. Dutch bicycles have a lot of design elements
that make them require significantly less maintenance, such as internal gears, and a
chainguard to keep the chain clean and dry. John briefly talks about chainguards in his book
…. where he writes that you should remove them. A pie-plate chainwheel “protector” is unnecessary
and may be removed. Instead of holding the chain on the chainwheel, it sometimes jams the chain;
its only function is to protect your trousers, and trouser bands do this better.
He is also very explicit about the proper posture on a bicycle. You should be hunched
over, putting weight on your dropped handle bars, and it should feel uncomfortable to the beginner.
The inexperienced cyclist who selects a bicycle in the store because of its comfort will
be misled. Bikes are meant for riding, not for sitting on while watching TV. Until you
know how to ride and can feel it in your bones, you cannot correctly pick a bike by feel.
I swear, it’s like if you’re not properly suffering, and devoting your life to the bicycle,
then you’re not worthy of being a “cyclist.” But if you find it uncomfortable riding
this way, in a hunched over position, don’t worry, Forester has you covered:
Cycling produces some other aches and pains as a result of posture and contact with the
bike. Your neck aches from holding up your head, but generally you train your neck muscles
gradually because you slowly increase your ride duration. It is the same with the aches
in the outer upper arm muscles that hold your arms half-bent against the weight of your
upper torso. These aches are harmless. Funny, I never had any of those aches and
pains when riding an upright bicycle to work. There were so many ridiculous chapters
in this book that I wasn’t expecting, like the one entitled “Cycling
with Love” which begins with Most cycling authors title this chapter or
article “Family Cycling” and concentrate on methods for carrying young children. It
seems to me that these authors have ignored both the necessary preliminaries and the
enjoyable consequences. First, you have to attract a suitable partner; then you have to
keep your partner a lifelong happy cyclist. I’ve often joked that fans of John Forester
seemed like cult members, but after reading this book, I realised that’s not a joke.
This book is designed to recruit “cyclists” and even suggests you shouldn’t get too close
to people who aren’t willing to join the cult. I think it highly desirable that unattached,
enthusiastic cyclists look for partners among either those who already cycle or those who
respond to cycling invitations by becoming cyclists. Many people who don’t cycle have a
latent anticycling prejudice that is strong enough to strain a relationship
seriously once events activate it. He then shares an anecdote about his first wife
who regularly cycled when she lived in England, but stopped cycling when she moved to suburban
California, and that was, quote, “was one of the strains that caused our divorce.”
The chapter then goes on to explain the methods that a “cyclist” should use to attract a mate.
You need a spare bicycle to help attract a new cyclist. You should never discard
one bicycle just because you have bought another […] Some go further; I
know of single cyclists who own tandems, partly to attract cyclists of the opposite sex.
And to be clear, when he says “cycling”, he absolutely means, riding a racing bike quickly,
for sport, because as far as he is concerned, that is the only type of cycling worth talking
about, as everything else is “childish cycling”. You must show that cycling is very enjoyable when
done properly. Think of the number of new cyclists who start with a club and quit before they learn,
because they do not realize that they too would develop equal speed and endurance if they were
shown how and given more time. […] Take the same care to develop traffic technique; don’t frighten
your guest with heavy traffic merely because you do it every day. Remember that to develop a
cyclist, you must produce both a physiological transformation for speed and endurance, and a
mental transformation for traffic perception. It is legitimately insane just how much
Forester gatekeeps cycling in this book, and I am insulted by the idea that these
people are the only “real” cyclists. When we know for a fact the only “real”
cyclist that ever existed was Big Jim, who used to ride through the mountains of
Scotland on his 1940s single-speed bike. I’ve done this for years and I think it’s
the uh the water of the hill water seems to add to the quality of the whiskey as well.
Well, after 22 miles, 6 hours, and ¾ of a bottle of whiskey, not to mention those three pints of
beer, with bicycle somehow still in one piece, Jim finally arrives at Annie’s door.
Forester could never. There is a chapter entitled “How Society
Pictures Cycling” where Forester dissects early 20th-century literature and points out
totally irrelevant minute details of the authors’ descriptions of cycling, to “prove” to the reader
that those authors were not “real” cyclists. James E. Starrs, The Noiseless Tenor ([Cornwall
Books, 1982], page 58) writes in one paragraph that he rode his bicycles so hard that he
frequently broke chains, loosened spokes, and twisted handlebars and stem, then contradicts
himself in the next paragraph by describing his bicycles as “lean, hard, tough, swift, and
designed for usage.” In fact, he was the typical American boy, ignorant of bicycles and cycling,
riding the typical American heavy toy bicycles I’m not even joking: it goes on like this,
for twenty pages. So I just want to be really clear once again, this is an absolutely
terrible book and nobody should ever read it. I thought I was going to be reading a book
about the merits of vehicular cycling. I did not expect it to include almost
500 pages of the MAMIL’s manifesto. And I feel really bad because I asked Nicole to
help me with the research and scriptwriting for this video, so I told her to read this book, too.
“Thanks a lot, asshole!” But finally, after hundreds of
pages of pompous cyclist slop, Forester spends the rest of the book telling you
that the only safe way to cycle is to aggressively ride in traffic following the same rules as
cars, in the most obnoxious way possible. Can you imagine? An arrogant and
opinionated guy ranting about bicycles? “Well of course, I know him. He’s me.”
What surprised me the most about this book though is just how weak the “argument”
is, in favour of vehicular cycling. I was expecting this book to be out-of-date,
sure, given that it was first published in 1976, but that it would at least present valid reasoning
to favour vehicular cycling over bicycle lanes. Like, I’m pretty sure anybody could immediately
think of some obvious downsides to riding a bicycle like it’s a car, so I thought
that these concerns would be addressed. Instead Forester is totally dismissive
of anybody who doesn’t ride a bike because they’re scared of cars. He calls
this the “cyclist inferiority phobia”. Though in multiple different places in
the book he refers to it as the “cyclist inferiority superstition” instead, which makes
me wonder if this book even had an editor. He has a whole chapter about the “cyclist
inferiority phobia”, and he begins it with the DSM IV definition of a phobia. And yet somehow,
he isn’t even using the word “phobia” correctly. These people aren’t scared of inferior cyclists,
they’re scared of being murdered by cars. Arachnophobia means you’re scared of spiders.
It’s the ancient Greek ἀράχνη (arákhnē), “spider”, and φόβος (phóbos), “fear”. So, taking
the ancient Greek harma (ἅρμα), meaning “chariot” And thanatos (θάνατος), meaning “death” We get
the much more accurate word ἅρμαθανατοφοβία (harmathanatophobia), which is the, completely
reasonable, fear of being killed by cars. Now, any reasonable person with even a shred
of harmathanatophobia might immediately realise that one of the problems of riding
a bicycle around cars is that cars are way bigger and heavier, making them very dangerous.
Here’s how Forester addresses this in his book: Nearly all motorists cooperate with
other traffic within the rules of the road. If might really made right, the
only vehicles left would be the toughest, gravel trucks, and the fleetest, Porsches.
But this is exactly what happened, right? Vehicles in the US are larger and heavier than
ever, and research is showing that this is the main reason why America has seen a sharp increase
in fatalities of people walking and cycling, that aren’t being seen in other developed countries.
This has turned road safety into an ‘arms race’ where most people in America
aren’t even comfortable driving small cars anymore, nevermind bicycles.
And I talked about that in a previous video. This has been a well-recognised problem in road
safety circles for decades, and the best-selling book “High and Mighty” was published in 2002.
This was all very well known in 2012, when the seventh edition of
Effective Cycling was published. I was also disappointed that there was
no mention of the increase in car traffic since the the first edition of the book.
In 1970 there were about 110 million motor vehicles in the United States, but by 2012, when
this latest edition was published, there were over 250 million. Even per-capita, it’s a jump
from about 550 per thousand people to over 800. This alone would mean that some streets
that were safe to cycle on in the 1970s, because they had very little car
traffic, would no longer be safe in 2012. But sorry, I guess it’s “childish”
of me to point that out. In arguing that bicycle infrastructure is not
required for safety, Forester claimed that drivers are already discouraged from hitting
cyclists for fear of severe legal punishments. The motorist who smashes a cyclist by an illegal
action is liable to go to jail and pay heavy damages. The prospect of punishment and financial
liability is expected to help prevent that motorist from being so careless that the lives
of others are endangered, and to make him repay, so far as practicable, for the trouble caused.
But later in the book he has an entire chapter about how drivers are never
punished for killing cyclists. This is still true today. In North
America, drivers who kill cyclists are almost never held to account and most
of them walk free without any penalty. In Washington DC, 132 cyclists were killed
by drivers between 1971 and 2019. 87% of those drivers were not even charged.
New York City data from 2012 shows that drivers who hit cyclists or pedestrians were
charged at a rate of less than one percent. If you want to get away with murder in
America, you just need to do it with a car. Of course, Forester blames this lack of
justice on the cyclist inferiority phobia, which had apparently infected the
minds of the police and the judiciary. If Forester were around today I’m pretty sure he
would just call it the “woke cycling virus” and blame it for everything wrong in the world.
There’s also nothing mentioned in the book about the risk of injury or death because
of road rage, even though this was already a serious problem on American roads in 2012.
And over the past decade several US states have started tracking a special category
of homicide called, and I shit you not, “road-rage shootings”. The most “only-in-America”
phrase since “medical bankruptcy”. This was something that may not have been talked
about in 2012, but it’s further proof that no, American drivers are not thinking
about the law, when they literally shoot people for cutting them off.
So even if, as Forester would like, a driver treats a person on a bicycle the
same way they would treat another driver, the way they treat those other drivers
is by running them off the road and shooting them if they get in their way.
And you will inevitably get in a driver’s way if you ride as a vehicular cyclist.
When cycling to work in Canada there were several times where I was forced to
“take the lane” to avoid unsafe passes by drivers on a road with no bicycle lanes.
And while Canada isn’t plagued with the insane gun culture as the United States, there were
a few times where angry drivers tried to run me off the road. Which was really scary.
And in the book, John Forester actually acknowledges that this can happen!
And this is his advice: If you meet someone who insists on running you
off the road, don’t let it happen. The driver won’t succeed, of course, because you know how to
handle that by now. But don’t let the driver get away with the attempt. First time, let it go, but
note the car type, color, and even license number if you can. Second time, as long as the driver
is disobeying the law and you are obeying it, stick up for your rights. It is a bluff. The
person who will kill you in front of witnesses is rare—they try this one on lonely roads, if at
all. Call the bluff; keep some escape route open, even if it is over the curb, but don’t let the
driver get away with it. Give that person the choice of obeying the rules of the road or of
going to court for it. If the driver tries the merely annoying scheme of driving behind you,
honking the horn when it is possible either to pass you and go away, or if it is hard to pass
because there is too much traffic ahead and all the person wants is your place in line, stall the
whole works. Wait till traffic stops, dismount, place your bike crosswise in front of the car,
and ask if you can help. If your annoyer tries to scrape you or shouts at you as he or she goes
by, give chase to the next traffic stop. Ride up beside the driver’s window and say that you have
exactly as much right to use the road as he or she has; no more, but certainly no less. Two or three
of these in two months, and you will probably never be mistreated again on your commute route.
Are you kidding me? We just have to accept this as a normal part
of life when you’re trying to get to work? And that … aggressive, confrontational behaviour
… that’s just an acceptable outcome, rather than just BUILDING SAFE FUCKING BICYCLE LANES!?
Ohh … but sorry, bicycle lanes are unsafe because … uh … why are they unsafe
again? Well, let’s look at that. The core thesis of the last half of the book
is that bicycle lanes are fundamentally unsafe, and the only proven method of avoiding a crash
while cycling is practice and experience. The most common claim that Forester makes is not
particularly controversial: cyclists crash less often when they have more experience cycling.
Which, I mean, yeah. When you do something more often you get better at it, and I
don’t think anybody would argue that. In the Netherlands, the primary emphasis
is on building safe bicycle infrastructure, but education is an important component as well.
Most Dutch children are taught about cycling in elementary school, and they are
tested in a fietsexam on the street. And driving around cyclists is a critically
important part of Dutch drivers education. It’s also way, way harder to
get a Dutch driver’s license than to get an American one,
but that’s a whole other topic. The issue here is that, according to Forester,
experience is the only thing required to keep cyclists safe, which is why his only solution to
every problem is better education and practice. He very proudly proclaims that,
most car-bike collisions are caused by cyclists disobeying the rules of the road.
I was shocked at how much victim-blaming was done in this book.
Whenever Forester writes about a cyclist being injured or killed
by a car, he always assumes it was because they were doing something wrong to cause the
crash. The infrastructure is never to blame. Forester makes some pretty wild claims
about bicycle safety in this book, usually in long-winded ranting
paragraphs without any references, but the vast majority of his “statistics”
seem to come from a handful of sources. So I decided to do something that most vehicular
cycling advocates clearly have never done: I actually read those papers.
Forester very often claimed that off-street bicycle paths were significantly more
dangerous than riding on the road with cars. He repeats this multiple times, both in this
book and in other writings and speeches. Here is one of those quotes from the book:
Those cyclists who habitually cycled in the most dangerous conditions of road and traffic
had adjusted to those conditions so well that they had the lowest accident rates of all.
However, even the comparatively skilled cyclists Kaplan studied hadn’t mastered
bike paths, where their accident rate was nearly three times their rate on the road.
“Kaplan” refers to a 1975 master’s thesis by Jerrold A. Kaplan entitled “Characteristics of the
Regular Adult Bicycle User”. I love that title. I can just imagine it as a nature documentary about
the behaviours of adult cyclists in the wild. The males travel in herds for
safety and reduced wind resistance. Meanwhile this adult female is
meticulously adjusting her gear ratios before embarking on
a solo foraging expedition. In the 1970s, adults riding bicycles
in the US was considered kinda weird, but there had been that recent Bicycle
Boom, and Kaplan wanted to know why. So he sent a mail-in survey to members of the
League of American Wheelmen, which is the coolest name for a cycling club ever,
and Kaplan’s primary goal was to understand when and why regular bicycle riders
decided to use a bicycle instead of a car. Incidentally, Forester himself worked very
closely with the League of American Wheelmen, and they ran the official Effective
Cycling training program for many years. Kaplan’s thesis includes dozens of different
charts analysing the responses from the survey in different ways, but the data
about off-street paths is from page 76. As you can see, the accident rate for
“Off-Street Bicycle Facility” is about 2.7 times that of “Minor Street”, and 2 and
a half times that of “Major Street”. Wow. Bicycle paths are really dangerous!
The first thing I noticed though, was that bike paths made up only 3.5% of
the total miles reported in the survey, Worse though, what Forester never mentions
anywhere, ever, is that this “off-street paths” was a catch-all category that included a
mix of gravel paths and informal forest paths, and Kaplan even mentions this explicitly, as
a reason not to read too much into this result No explanation is known for this finding. A
guess might be that cyclists use less caution on this type of facility, feeling it is free
of the menacing motor vehicle only to collide with a tree or fall on some slippery gravel.
This isn’t hidden information. It only took me a few minutes to find this.
It is really dishonest of John Forester to pretend that this data is relevant
to discussion about dedicated paved off-street bicycle paths within cities. But it gets worse.
Keen viewers might have noticed that this same table shows that streets with bike lanes
were significantly safer than any other kind. Coincidentally, the lowest accident
rate existed for both the categories of all accidents and serious accidents
when those incidents that occurred on bike lanes and bike routes were examined.
And Forester acknowledges this in his book, in the context of someone who pointed that out to him:
The authors misstate Kaplan’s 1976 [sic] study of the experience of club cyclists to say
that bike-laned roads are safer. However, Kaplan grouped roads with bike lanes
with other roads, and so few bike lanes existed at that date that nearly all the
data came from roads without bike lanes. Ah, OK. I get it.
So since this category included signed routes, and there weren’t that many bike lanes in 1974,
then those 3.2% of miles don’t count. Got it. It’s very obvious that the data from this
masters thesis is not sufficient to make any general claims about cycling safety,
and Kaplan explicitly mentions this: It is also important that one does not
attempt to apply these accident rate values to the general bicycling public. As shown
later, cycling experience tends to play an important role in accident involvement
(along with age and other factors). The other major source mentioned by Forester
is a study by Kenneth D. Cross in 1974. Unfortunately, nobody can find
this study anymore because Forester destroyed it with facts and logic:
The study had been commissioned by the California Office of Traffic Safety (controlled by the
California Highway Patrol) with the expectation that its data would prove (proof is not
scientifically possible) the “bike-safety” case and provide a scientific basis for the bikeway
program that the CHP and others were promoting. When I showed that Cross’s study in fact disproved
the “bike-safety” and bikeway views and strongly supported the cyclists’ view, the report was
hidden and no further copies were distributed. Fortunately for us, in 1977 the California Highway
Patrol commissioned Cross to create a much larger report that Forester said also proved him right,
but this one wasn’t hidden, for some reason. This is the document that Forester
references more often than any other, so let’s look at what it actually says.
First off, the writers of this report wanted you to know that this is a very modern
analysis, as the introduction confidently states: The data were then encoded, punched onto IBM
cards, and entered into a computerized data file. This report is over 300 pages long and
it’s a detailed summary of police reports about car-bicycle collisions in four
US states. It’s a really tough read, and it is wildly biased in favour of motorists.
Which I guess shouldn’t be surprising in a report created by American cops in the 1970s.
And even though it mentions that bicyclist fatalities were often caused
by motorists speeding or driving drunk, the main takeaway of the report is that the cops
should crack down on those lawbreaking cyclists: It is recommended that communities throughout the country be urged to develop and implement
a selective enforcement program which focuses on critical violations by
specific bicyclist target groups. But more importantly, it’s not immediately clear
why Forester is referencing this report at all. He doesn’t provide any quotes or page
numbers when he references this document. He just vaguely gestures towards
it and says it proves him right. It is absolutely ridiculous how Forester
provides exact page numbers and quotes when criticizing the depictions of cycling
in early 20th-century literature, But provides nothing at all when referencing
the study that supposedly proves the fundamental underpinnings of his entire philosophy.
When referring to this paper, Forester claims: “This study conclusively supported
the cyclists’ view and disproved the ‘bike-safety’ and bikeway views”.
Incidentally, Forester insisted on using the word “bikeway”, even though everything written
after about 1972 uses the word “bicycle lanes”, including the Cross report. Just add
it to the long list of things that are incredibly annoying about this book.
In multiple places, Forester confidently claims that bike lanes are useless to
prevent most types of bicycle accidents. Analysis of car-bike collision statistics (Ken
Cross’s second, national study done for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
shows that all practical bikeway designs increase the number and difficulty of collision
situations that produce some 30 percent of car-bike collisions while reducing the difficulty
of only 2 percent of collision situations. Analysis of all accidents to cyclists
shows that bikeways are aimed at only 0.3 percent of accidents to cyclists.
Earlier in the book, he explained what that 0.3 percent of accidents was referring to:
The motorist-caused car-overtaking-bike collision constitutes about 0.3
percent of cycling accidents. First of all, it really annoys me how Forester
would constantly lump all “accidents” together: as if a minor crash resulting in a few scratches
was the same as being hit by a car at high speed. But as you’ve probably guessed by now, the Cross
report actually says the exact opposite about the dangers of motorists overtaking cyclists.
The fear of overtaking accidents is well founded since the likelihood of fatal injuries is indeed
higher for overtaking accidents than for any other class of accidents revealed by this study.
this problem type must be considered one of the most important, because it
accounted for nearly one-fourth of all fatal accidents in the sample–three
times as many as any other problem type So how did “one-forth of all
fatal accidents” get turned into only 0.3 percent of all accidents by Forester?
It’s not mentioned anywhere in the report of course, but another quote from Effective
Cycling provides some insight into how Forester might have landed on this number:
Bikeway programs are even more useless. They are aimed at only the 0.3 percent of accidents to
cyclists caused by urban motorists hitting lawful cyclists from the rear during daylight.
Note the caveats in that statement: urban motorists, lawful cyclists, during daylight.
The Cross report makes it very clear that overtaking crashes are the most dangerous
for cyclists, but many of these crashes happened on rural roads at night.
And it was also based on police reports where the driver claimed that
the cyclist was riding illegally, even though in many cases, the cyclist was
dead and couldn’t give their side of the story. So, if you cut down all of the police
reports in this paper to only those crashes that occurred in urban areas, during
daylight, where the police report claimed that the cyclist was riding legally, then
you’re left with an insignificant number of crashes that Forester estimates at 0.3 percent.
What’s worse is that nowhere in this report is it stated or even implied that overtaking crashes
would be the only type that bicycle lanes would prevent. Forester just decided that himself.
In fact, this report barely mentions bicycle lanes at all, and when it does
it says the exact opposite: There is virtually no doubt that off-street
bicycle lanes would reduce the incidence of overtaking accidents, if such facilities were
available and used by bicyclists who otherwise would be riding on roadways. The obvious problem
with off-street bicycle lanes is their high cost and the lack of space in most communities
for constructing a comprehensive network of off-street bicycle lanes. There are many good
reasons for constructing off-street bicycle lanes, but it is unlikely that the funding and space
available in most communities would be sufficient to construct a network of bicycle lanes that would
be comprehensive enough to have a significant impact on the incidence of overtaking accidents.
That doesn’t say bicycle lanes are not safe, it just says that California can’t be bothered to pay
for them, and that there’s no space to build them. Because you have to understand, unlike European
cities, the roads in California are really narrow. You could never fit bicycle lanes here.
This report is full of conclusions that directly contradict what Forester claims to be true.
They even suggest that there is not enough evidence to recommend teaching bicyclists to “take
the lane”, a core tenet of vehicular cycling. That’s not really surprising though, because
Forester’s books are full of gaslighting. He is clearly banking on the fact
that nobody will be able to find, let alone be willing to read, a three hundred
page document written by bicycle-hating cops. And in one case he actually admits that
he is drawing his own conclusions when referencing another study by Cross:
In 1980, Cross published a study of “non-motor-vehicle” accidents to cyclists in Santa
Barbara County. The most important conclusion that I draw from his data (he did not make this
calculation from his data) is the relationship between the accident rate and experience.
It is kinda wild how often Forester does this: he references a scientific
paper to justify his beliefs, but he’s actually drawing his own conclusions
that are different from the conclusions made by the authors of the paper he’s referencing.
The value of these studies is in the data they contain, because many of the authors were
not cyclists and most did not know that the important question was to decide between the
similar “bike-safety” and bikeway pictures and the very different cyclists’ picture.
In other words, since I’m a real “cyclist” I know how to interpret the
researcher’s data better than they do. There’s a really long-winded boring
chapter about exercise efficiency that I really don’t want to talk about,
but there is one quote that truly captures John Forester’s approach
to peer-reviewed scientific papers: I pointed out this discrepancy between facts
and conclusions to the editor of the Journal of Applied Physiology, suggesting that my hypothesis
better explained the facts that had been measured than did the theory of efficiency. The editor
refused to publish the letter, with the excuse that it had no experimental support. Of course
it had; its experimental support was the data measured by Hagberg and associates—data that
had already been accepted by the journal. There are two real reasons for the refusal: I am not a
member of the exercise physiology profession, and my hypothesis runs counter to the current theory.
He very clearly believed that he was smarter than any of the actual researchers
who studied this stuff. Of course, Forester was never able to publish
any peer-reviewed scientific papers himself, but he confidently claims in his books
that his interpretations of other people’s data are actually more correct than
that of the researchers themselves. The only study that compares these studies and
uses them to decide between the two pictures is in my book Bicycle Transportation (MIT Press,
1983, 1994), which supersedes my Cycling Transportation Engineering (Custom Cycle
Fitments, 1977). Most of the accident data presented in Effective Cycling come from those
books, but are derived from data given by Cross, Kaplan, and the National Safety Council.
Incidentally there was only one part of the book with a statistic from this National Safety Council
paper, claiming that it showed that car-bike collisions were only responsible for 10 percent
of bicycle casualties for elementary children. But despite my best attempts, I cannot
figure out where he got this number, because the paper itself never mentions it.
Now, you might have also noticed that all of the studies Forester references are from the 1970s,
yet this is the seventh edition of this book, published in 2012.
Well, don’t worry, Forester has a very good explanation for that.
You may wonder, reading this in 2012 or later, why this book does not contain statistics
from later years. The answer is simple. Today, no organization, governmental or private, cares
enough about learning new facts about car-bike collisions to fund such studies as I have quoted.
Are you fucking kidding me? How did anybody take this guy seriously?
Believe it or not, Forester was full of shit, once again. By 2012 there were dozens of
published peer-reviewed studies that showed that protected bicycle infrastructure
was far safer than riding on the road. This 2009 meta-analysis, of 23 high-quality
papers, showed that bicycle lanes and off-road paths were the safest type of bicycle facilities,
and that on-road marked bike lanes reduced injury rate, collision frequency, or crash rates by
about 50 percent compared to unmodified roads. These 23 studies and the meta-analysis
itself were all published well ahead of 2012, and there is no way that John Forester was not
aware of them. He just chose to ignore them, because he couldn’t cherry-pick the data to
pretend they said what he wanted them to, like he could with the Cross Report.
And of course now, over a decade later, there have been dozens of other
peer-reviewed scientific papers published that only strengthen that conclusion.
This 2023 study, using 13 years of data from US cities, even showed that protected bicycle
infrastructure was not just safer for cyclists, it actually make the roads safer for
all road users, including drivers. We can argue about what designs are best,
and how best to implement them, but anybody who is still arguing in favour of vehicular
cycling over bicycle lanes is just wrong. By the early 2000s, even the League of American
Wheelmen, now known as the much less cool name League of American Bicyclists, went on to advocate
in favour of dedicated cycling infrastructure and against the idea of vehicular cycling.
Now, if all Forester had ever done was to advocate for better cycling education, write
a terrible rambling book to recruit MAMILs, and wear too much lycra, then that
wouldn’t have been such a problem. But we know that Forester actively fought against
the installation of safe bicycle infrastructure, and nothing did more damage to cycling
safety than his second terrible book. This is Bicycle Transportation, a book
written for transportation engineers, as a guidebook for designing bicycle infrastructure.
It was first published in 1977, but I bought the most recent edition, published in 1994.
Today, there are a lot of reference manuals that transportation engineers can use
when designing cycling infrastructure. The gold standard is the CROW manual.
This book provides detailed information about how to design safe bicycle infrastructure,
based on research from the Netherlands. The city of Oslo used this, as well
as similar guidelines from Copenhagen to design their own bicycle design manual,
which is also freely available in English. If you are a transportation engineer responsible
in any way for cycling infrastructure, please do not re-invent the wheel. Start by
reading one of these existing guidebooks. Unfortunately American traffic engineers
of the 1980s didn’t have that luxury. The CROW manual was available
in the 80s, but only in Dutch, and since none of these engineers were cyclists
themselves they were looking for guidance. John Forester filled that need by writing
this book. Engineering teams across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK used “Bicycle
Transportation” as a reference, and the damage that was done cannot be understated.
This book got a lot of people killed. Forester makes the same ridiculous claims
here that he did in Effective Cycling, but I think he realised that since this was
supposed to be an engineering book, he might need to actually provide a few references,
so every once in a while he actually includes a footnote. But when you follow
them it just says “Kaplan.” So yeah, Forester is using that 1975 master’s thesis
about racing cyclists on gravel paths to tell transportation engineers that
they should never be building any off-street bicycle paths, separated from cars.
This book is shorter than Effective Cycling but because it’s supposed to be an
engineering manual everything is dressed up in this pseudo-technical scientific-sounding
language so it’s even more painful to read. And there are so many irrelevant rambling
chapters, like this part about the eleven types of people who advocate for bicycle lanes,
but they only do it because they’re ignorant, they’re overly emotional, or they’re just paid
the big bucks from those sweet bikeway funds. The seventh type is “greenway
visionaries”. Those monsters! It’s also absolutely crazy how often Forester
rants about environmentalists in this book. That’s the third type, if you’re curious.
And given that this was 1992, those environmentalists would’ve been
the people upset about things like leaded gasoline, smog, and acid rain.
In this book, Forester is dismissive of basically everyone and he routinely states that
his detractors are intellectually inferior. Most of the time when people talk about
vehicular cycling, they reference the book Effective Cycling, but the few times
I’ve seen someone talk about this book, they praise it for getting traffic engineers to
install the grates on storm drains like this, instead of like this, so that cyclists
don’t get their wheels stuck in them. I always thought it was odd that this particular
example was almost always the only one referenced by anyone, but after reading this book I
finally understand why. Because it’s some of the only good advice in the entire book.
The other useful things that Forester suggests are that engineers should
calibrate the vehicle detection loops at traffic lights to detect bicycles,
and that retail shops should have more bicycle parking. That’s the
good stuff. Now, onto the rest. Forester is very clear to state in this book
that the number of people who are willing to cycle cannot be meaningfully changed, so it
is totally worthless to design infrastructure for people who do not cycle today.
So he tells engineers that by far the most important factor when designing
cycling infrastructure is speed, and anything that slows down a cyclist in
any way will discourage people from cycling. He therefore advises that all bicycle
facilities of any kind should be designed for a target speed of 30 miles per hour.
That’s almost 50 kilometres per hour. Every facility for promoting cycling should
be designed for 30 mph. If it is not, it will not attract the serious cyclist over
the long term, and hence it will not be an effective part of the transportation system.
Forester suggests that suburban arterial roads are the best type of road for
cyclists because they are wide, straight, and do not have any stop signs.
Therefore these should be the main bicycle routes in any city.
He also advises against any kind of design that might slow down cars, including
speed bumps or other traffic calming, because it will also slow
down cyclists and be unsafe. He specifically calls out Dutch woonerven
like this as being extremely dangerous for cycling. WATCH OUT!! CAN’T YOU
TELL THIS STREET IS DANGEROUS!? And Forester advises that if an engineer is being
pressured to redesign any given road to make it safer for cycling, they should never build bicycle
lanes or install any traffic calming, but instead, all they need to do is to
make the rightmost lane wider. He goes on to state that all government funds for
cycling should be used exclusively for education campaigns, and never for bicycle infrastructure.
He also provides helpful design advice, like telling engineers that they should
install barriers like these in parks and on paths to prevent cyclists from using
them, because off-street paths are dangerous. And I loved how the most technical chapter in the
whole book, which included lots of graphics and mathematics, was the one that argued that road
cyclists don’t actually slow down car traffic, so people should stop talking about that.
Forester regularly claims in this book that his opponents are being funded by the automobile
industry in order to marginalise cycling, but the way Forester intensely advocates in favour
of car-centric designs just made me think of the phrase, “every accusation is a confession”.
In the 1980s, the idea of building bicycle infrastructure had very little public
support, and proposing to install bike lanes was politically risky.
Forester plays into that fear to convince engineers not to build any.
This lack of significant positive safety effect means, at least, that promotion of urban
bikeway systems is a lie. Bikeway systems do not have overwhelming public support, and
most of their support springs from the superstition that bikeways make cycling
safe. The same is true for bikeway use; those who use them do so because of the belief
that they are thereby preserved from great dangers. Sooner or later the public will learn
the truth, and bikeways will lose public support. Most people in America were not convinced
that they should be spending any money on “cyclists” at all, so Forester uses this as
another argument against building bike lanes: It is extremely expensive to attempt to
produce any bikeway system that separates bikes from cars. Even bikeways that do
not effectively separate bikes from cars cost 3-10 times more per bicycle-mile,
at expected levels of use, than roads. The source of those cost
estimates is not cited, of course. Forester goes on to argue that
These difficulties point out that conventional urban bikeways will be useless for
their intended purpose of accommodating cycling transportation safely, and that they will become
unacceptable once the public discovers that they are a sham. Quite obviously, endangering all
cyclists and discouraging the best are not the ways to develop cycling transportation.
And of course there are dozens and dozens of references to the cyclist-inferiority
superstition. It’s still “superstition” because he hasn’t had a chance to come
up with that clever “phobia” thing yet. the cyclist-inferiority superstition now
controls public policy about cycling. Our public policy about cycling is driven
by 0.2% of the accidents to cyclists, regardless of the increase in accidents of other
types that that policy produces, and regardless of the inconvenience to and discrimination
against cyclists that it also produces. Both the cycling transportation engineer and the
cyclist advocate must operate in a society in which belief in false superstition controls most
of the debate. If they are to accomplish anything worthwhile they must understand why and how
this superstition took hold and operates today. Forester does not provide any evidence of
his statements, and he also never mentions that his safety statistics are from his
own calculations of other people’s data, even though the researchers themselves
did not come to those same conclusions. But in a book targeted at engineers, Forester
knows he can’t just say that there were no other worthwhile studies done since the 1970s,
so there’s a chapter where he briefly goes over 24 other reports and studies by the Federal
Highway Administration, and dismisses each one. His primary argument is usually that
because the authors weren’t “cyclists”, they didn’t understand what they were studying,
and so their conclusions should be dismissed. Or he just says they’re too intellectually
inferior to understand what they were doing. At other times his “debunking” is just
Forester saying the researchers are wrong, without any follow-up or counterevidence:
The authors grossly misrepresent the accident facts. They write that “over one-third of
bicycle-motor-vehicle accidents occur when the motor vehicle overtakes the bicyclist with
nearly 80% of these accidents occurring at night.” Of course, these researchers actually
provided references for their statistics, which was more than Forester ever did.
But what I found even funnier is that the other crash data referenced in this
paper … is from the Cross report. The only difference is that they’re directly
quoting the conclusions of the Cross report, rather than using the cherry-picked subset
of the data that Forester liked to use. Forester also included a story of when he
tried to publish his own scientific paper, but it never made it through peer-review because
of basic errors in data collections and analysis. So he spends multiple pages ranting
about how the scientific community is trying to silence him. Sure, John.
This book was published in 1992, so Forester obviously doesn’t provide any
new sources that weren’t already mentioned in the 2012 edition of Effective Cycling.
But he does actually provide a source for one of the wild claims that I was
having trouble finding a citation for. Multiple times in Effective Cycling he claims
that bicycle paths are a thousand times more dangerous than riding on the road.
These dangers are so great that bicycle sidepaths in urban areas with short blocks
and heavy traffic have been measured as more than 1,000 times more dangerous than the adjacent
roadway, in terms of motor-traffic hazards alone. Wow! That sounds really bad! I
wonder how that was measured? Well, I finally found out, as the only time
he ever mentions where he got this number, is on page 101 of Bicycle Transportation.
I rode at the same speeds I used on the road at the same time of day, and I counted the
incipient car-bike collisions that required all my bike-handling and traffic skill to avoid. They
averaged two per mile, on a road on which I had previously cycled at least 500 miles without any
problems. The eighth near collision nearly killed me; it was just chance that I was not hit headon.
Therefore, I terminated the test at 4 miles. Yeah.
It comes from that one time when John Forester rode really
fast down the sidewalk in Palo Alto in 1972. This is the high level of scientific
rigor that I’ve come to expect from advocates of vehicular cycling.
It is so infuriating to read the garbage that John Forester wrote.
He routinely makes absolutely ridiculous claims about bicycle safety, states them
like they’re fact without any references, and then it’s like the world’s worst scavenger
hunt trying to track down where it came from. And when I finally find the source of
it, it’s from some stupid typewritten report written before I was born that
doesn’t even say what he says it does, or worse, he just pulled numbers out
of his ass and called it “science.” I’d like to remind you again that people
told me to read what he actually wrote. And yet what he actually wrote was
a bunch of rambling bullshit. How did anybody ever take this guy seriously?
I was so disappointed in these books. There are legitimate criticisms that could
be made of many bicycle lane designs, but Forester doesn’t talk about any of that. He just pretends that all bicycle
infrastructure is the same, that a dedicated car-free bicycle path
is identical to a trail through the forest or a Palo Alto sidewalk, and he makes
implausible safety claims as a result. These books show a willful ignorance on the
part of Forester, but I know why he did it. Because if he had pointed out the actual
problems with most bicycle lane designs, then that would’ve opened up the possibility
of fixing those issues, rather than throwing away the idea of bicycle infrastructure
completely, which is what he ultimately wanted. Like, this kind of bicycle lane that puts
cyclists in the “door zone” is dangerous. But the solution to that is not
to throw away bicycle lanes, it’s to put them on the other side of
the cars, with enough of a gap to allow a car passenger to open their door.
This was the design used in Davis, California in 1972.
But today it’s a worse and more dangerous design, partially due to the objections
of Forester, and other vehicular cyclists. It’s also a problem when bicycle
lanes are too narrow and you can’t even pass anyone who’s cycling slower.
One of the worst examples that I’ve experienced was when I livestreamed a ride down the newest
bicycle lanes in Toronto in 2021. Going downhill in these super-narrow narrow bicycle lanes with
these stupid plastic sticks that were higher than my handlebars was actually really nerve-wracking.
This whole ride was a shitshow of bad bicycle infrastructure, and if you want to see
me suffer through it, you can watch the full video on my livestreaming channel NJB
Live, I’ll put a link in the description. The most glaring problem with most bike lanes
though, is the intersections. Especially right hooks. This is where a cyclist, riding in a
bicycle lane, is hit by a right-turning car. I’d like to thank CycleYYZ who provided me
with some of these bicycle riding clips. His channel has a lot of videos about how
to ride a bicycle safely on less-than-ideal infrastructure, so definitely check
it out if your city looks like this. The vehicular cycling method advises cyclists to
pass right-turning cars on the left-hand side, and this is generally good advice.
This can be done in a bike lane as well, but it is more difficult, especially if
your view of the intersection is blocked. Forester used this fact to argue that
the only type of crash that bicycle lanes could ever prevent is being hit from
behind by same-direction motor traffic. And this is why he would regularly state
that bicycle lanes could only prevent 0.3 percent of crashes, or 2 percent of crashes,
or whatever data he decided to make up that day. Some traffic engineers have tried to encourage
cyclists to follow the vehicular cycling method by explicitly designing the bicycle
lane so that right-turning drivers cross over it before turning right.
But this just creates a new point of conflict earlier in the turn as
drivers have to cross the bike lane. The Netherlands also experimented
with this kind of design in the 1990s, but very little of it exists today, because newer
designs were found to be significantly safer. Some of this supposed “bike infrastructure”
that I see in Ontario, Canada is …. so … bad. I have way too much harmathanatophobia
to ever consider cycling here. The safest type of bicycle lanes
are curb-protected, that is, up a curb and at or near the level of the
sidewalk instead of the level of the road, This is what it looks like when a
typical curb-protected bicycle lane crosses a side street in most of the Netherlands.
Notice that the bicycle lane doesn’t drop down to the level of the road, like what you would see
in most other countries. Instead, it stays at sidewalk level through the entire intersection.
This means that any car wanting to turn in or out of this street needs to effectively go up a “speed
bump” in order to turn. This has several benefits. The raised crossing makes it clear to
everyone that the people cycling have priority over turning traffic.
It also ensures that any driver who is making a turn needs to slow down
significantly, in order to go up the ramp. The bicycle lane is set back from the street
as well, so before the driver crosses the bicycle lane, they have already started their
turn, and so they have much better visibility of people cycling in the bicycle lane.
This can be installed on roads of any size, but on wider roads where there is more room, the
bicycle lane curves even farther from the road at the junction. This means that a driver can totally
exit and wait for people cycling without blocking traffic on the road, and it gives the drivers an
even better view of people in the bicycle lane. It also means that a left-turning driver can wait
for a gap in car traffic, make the turn, and then wait for a gap in bicycle traffic, without having
to worry about both at the same time, making everything safer and less stressful for everyone.
A similar design is used at roundabouts whenever there’s space.
And some large roundabouts will have a lower bicycle path, totally
separated from the traffic on the roundabout. Or in the case of Eindhoven, a giant
bicycle ring over the entire road junction. The other major source of bicycle
crashes is at four-way intersections. While Forester used this fact to pretend
that bicycle lanes could never prevent crashes at junctions, Dutch engineers
created the protected intersection. And as I mentioned before, an early
design of this kind of intersection was published in that 1972 UCLA proposal,
the one Forester was so proud of killing. Today these kinds of intersections
are found all over the Netherlands. There are many elements that make them
safe, but the core of this design are these concrete islands on every corner.
These ensure that right-turning drivers need to make a relatively sharp turn, which means that
they cannot take the corner too quickly, and the bicycle lane is set back so that any turning
driving has a clear view of anybody cycling. This kind of intersection design is
significantly safer for people cycling, as it provides curb protection from cars
for as much of the intersection as possible. Bicycle Dutch has an exceptionally
good video about the design of these intersections that is definitely worth watching.
He illustrates the problems with the typical North American intersection design,
And shows how a Dutch junction can be designed in exactly the same amount of space.
There is also a video and website created by a transportation planner in Portland
that breaks down the most important aspects of a protected intersection.
I’ll leave a link in the description. Unfortunately this kind of intersection design
is very rare outside of the Netherlands. I have seen a few examples
of this in other cities, but the design is rarely up to Dutch standards
But it’s even more typical for a city to do nothing, or maybe just a bit of paint, leaving
cyclists to YOLO their way through intersections. Most notably, Copenhagen still just
uses blue paint through intersections, and only in two of the four directions.
Copenhagen is known as a cycling city, and they have built some very good
bicycle infrastructure over the years, but their intersection design is
totally inadequate, and I wish they would start following the Dutch example.
So that might make you wonder, what did John Forester think about the rise of cycling
in places like the Netherlands and Denmark? Well, despite being published in 2012, the
seventh edition of Effective Cycling barely even mentions the Netherlands or Denmark.
American cycling transportation knowledge now far exceeds European knowledge. European
knowledge declined as motorization took over from 1960 on. Particularly in northern Europe
(Germany, Holland, Denmark, Scandinavia), bicycle traffic became relegated to second-class
status and cyclists acquiesced (even cheered) as they were diverted to bike paths and prohibited
from using the better roads. In many of these places, they accept slow and dangerous bike-path
congestion that would cause American cyclists to rebel, but they do so because the motor traffic
congestion makes motoring even less convenient for the short distances involved. America now
has the best cycling transportation knowledge in the world, one part of which is in this book.
I honestly don’t know how delusional and/or willfully ignorant you would need to be
to believe that America had the best cycling transportation knowledge in the world
at any point in time, nevermind in 2012. But he does mention that Danish and Dutch
bicycle lanes actually increased collisions: The Dutch and the Danes have done more of
this than elsewhere, and their research results are illuminating. Recent extensive and
well-designed Danish studies have concluded that their sidepaths, even with their extensive
signalization, have increased the car-bike collision rate. Within blocks, the rate
decreased, but the sidepaths produced even greater increases wherever traffic crossed.
As usual, Forester doesn’t provide any reference to these supposed well-designed Danish studies,
but I strongly suspect he was talking about this one, because I found it linked as
proof that bicycles lanes are unsafe on several vehicular cycling websites, as well as
a document written by Forester himself in 2009. This study concluded that the construction
of protected bicycle lanes, what Copenhagen calls “cycle tracks”, resulted
in a 9 to 10 percent increase in accidents and injury. CHECKMATE URBANISTS!!
But they also saw a much higher increase in bicycle traffic of 18 to 20 percent.
In other words, the main reason there was an increase in crashes is because a lot more
people were cycling, especially novice cyclists, now that the infrastructure was safer.
the study did find that painted bicycle lanes were much less safe than cycle tracks,
but that’s just more reason to build protected bicycle lanes instead of painted bicycle gutters.
And of course this study was also done in Copenhagen with intersection designs
that are objectively less safe than what is common in the Netherlands.
When Forester claimed that biking in the Netherlands was unsafe, he was just
wrong, and there was plenty of evidence available to him that he just … ignored.
This year 2000 paper found that that “bicyclist fatalities per billion kilometres cycled are
only a fourth as high” as in the United States, And this 2008 study found that
cycling was over five times as safe in the Netherlands as in the USA.
Of course the book Bicycle Transportation, was targeted at engineers, so Forester couldn’t
just pretend that the Netherlands didn’t exist, like he did in Effective Cycling.
So he provided an entire chapter on European bikeway design. And in
it, he shares his story of meeting a Dutch traffic engineer for the first time.
Velo-City is a cycling planning conference, started in Bremen, Germany in 1980, and it
has become a major industry conference for bicycle policy and infrastructure design.
The first time this conference was held outside of Europe was in Montréal in
1992, and John Forester was there. The dean of traffic engineering at one of the
three schools in Holland that teach traffic engineering, and researchers in charge
of the largest current bicycle planning research project in Denmark [sic], did not
even understand (although they are fluent in English – language was not the problem) the
cycling-traffic-engineering questions that Americans asked of them. The questions that had
been debated and investigated in the U.S.A. for two decades (the questions discussed in this
book) were so far removed from their frames of reference that they didn’t understand them. The
Dutch dean of traffic engineering was asked to describe the principles and data upon which
Dutch traffic engineers based their bikeway designs. Once he grasped the significance
of the question (which took several minutes of discussion in itself), he said that they
had none, that they just used “common sense.” I would love to hear a recording of that
conversation, because I strongly suspect that the reason it took so long for the Dutch to understand
what Forester was talking about was because he was saying so many incredibly stupid things that
they couldn’t believe he could actually be that ignorant, and still be at this conference.
It’s also pretty ironic that Forester is attacking the Europeans for having a lack
of hard data in 1992 when the sum-total of Forester’s data was whatever he cherry-picked
from two papers from the 1970s, while somehow also coming to the exact opposite conclusions of the
researchers who actually published those papers. He then goes on to claim, without evidence,
that the solutions the Europeans have come up with for things like right-turning motor traffic
are, quote, “much worse solutions than ours”, and says that the only reason the
Dutch have dedicated traffic lights for bicycles is because they need to, quote,
“correct the dangers that bikeways produce.” He also mentions that many Dutch cyclists
have realised that their approach is flawed, but they’re being silenced. His source for
this? A friend of his who lives in California, but who was born in the Netherlands.
He also has one of the dumbest footnotes I’ve ever read, where he claims that the
Dutch needed to create slow cars because people who grew up riding bicycles there,
couldn’t learn how to drive normal cars. What he’s referring to are vehicles like the Canta
that were built for disabled people, so that they could use the safe cycling infrastructure,
even if they could not physically ride a bicycle because of their disability.
Of course, Forester never mentions disabilities or anything about people who can’t
ride a racing bicycle for whatever reason, because he is working on the assumption that
cycling is reserved only for physically fit people who can cycle at 30 miles per hour.
Forester concludes the chapter with, It is quite clear that the European experience
with bikeways gives us more knowledge, but that knowledge is rather different from
what bikeway advocates expected. That is, it amplifies and confirms the knowledge
that we American cyclists have worked out, that bikeways are bad for cyclists. There is
no known way of combining cyclists on bikeways and motorists on roadways (to say nothing of
pedestrians on sidewalks and bike paths as well) that makes cycling safer or more convenient
Of course, at no point in the chapter does he provide any evidence or
references to support that position. At other points in the book Forester
acknowledges that Europe exists, but since they design for “inferior
cycling”, it is not applicable to America. In one chapter he actually shows what
might be a Dutch-style intersection, but he either doesn’t realise, or wants to
purposefully hide, that it is supposed to have a curb that would make it impossible to
make the dangerous turn that he marks as M4. But if you think it’s hard to
read what John Forester wrote, you should try listening to him speak.
In 2007, Google invited John Forester to give a talk at their silicon valley
campus, and it turns out that he rambles just as much when talking as he does when writing.
Some roads have nice, smooth gutter pans, although most aren’t. I can remember the years when paving
was restricted because of World War II. We rode on the gutter pans because the concrete was smoother
than the tar, which hadn’t been maintained for years. Of course, that got fixed later on,
and now we generally stay off gutter pans. Bizarrely, he spends almost half of his
presentation time arguing that cars are the best form of transportation ever invented.
Some of you may not like it. Some of you may think, well, we should stick
with the bicycle age. Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it, but we can’t,
something like 80% of the growth since then has been in suburbs, which cannot efficiently
be served by mass transit, and therefore your two choices are car or bicycle. That’s what
it amounts to. Well, there’s lots of value in riding a bicycle, but you cannot expect that
bicycle travel is going to take the place of very much of the automotive travel that’s being made.
But there it was. The motorists invented the bike lane system, and they invented it for their
own convenience, on the excuse that cyclists were too dumb. Did you know? Did you know that
here you are, Stanford graduates and all that, did you know that straddling a bicycle destroys
your brains? It turns you into children who don’t know how to drive. Yeah, yep.
Forester also really wanted his audience to know that most people
don’t actually want to ride bicycles, so it’s useless to try to encourage cycling.
Even here, I’m going to say that I doubt whether you have reduced the motoring intake into
Google by 1%. I doubt it.I may be wrong, OK, but all I’m going to say is that it’s unfortunate
that motoring is not going to be significantly reduced– such that you’re going to save
significant amounts of oil or do away with significant amounts of highway or whatever– as
a result of the amount of bicycle transportation being done. It just doesn’t have that capability.
and then they quote enormous numbers of people who say, oh yes, haven’t you seen this
review? Why, 72.34% of the people who answered this question said, yes, they would
ride to work if they had a bikeway. I mean, you see these all the time and not one of
them makes any statistical sense at all. Unsurprisingly the only reference he provides
for any of the nonsense he says is from the Cross report, which was 33 years old by this point.
You can hear him fumble through his justification for using only part of Kennth Cross’s
data, because at this point he had surely been called out on it by others and felt
the need to justify his interpretation. and at this time we first started
getting decent statistics from a man named Cross in Southern California.
[…] he got a contract for a national sample–four different states representing
different parts of the nation, and more representative of the country. And there, you
might look at the figure and it might be 2% or something like that, depends whether you want to
count daytime ones only or nighttime ones as well, were there other complications, or
whether you want to count rural ones, which are different from urban ones. Small number.
But the absolute best part is when he starts talking about the Netherlands.
Also we’re talking about America. You find that many people say, oh yes, Dutch
bikeways are wonderful. Dutch bikeways, they’ve got a 40%, 50%, 60% bicycle modeshare
in Amsterdam. Well, sure they do. It’s a medieval city. It’s a pre-automotive
obsolete city–Isn’t that a nice word? OK, ignoring the fact that even the centre
of Amsterdam that most people think about was mostly built in the 17th century,
more than half of the area of Amsterdam was built out after 1945, and much
of it was built to be car-friendly. This is what huge parts of Amsterdam looks
like. Does this look “medieval” to you? And yet it’s perfectly safe
to cycle everywhere here, even the places that were
originally designed for cars. But the absolute best part of this presentation
is when he opened it up to questions, because the audience was not having any of it.
They immediately started asking about Europe. The question is the classic comment that they
have much more like cycling in places like the Netherlands particularly, and some other northern
European countries, than they have here. Now, the Netherlands–all the cities there
were started medieval times or before. Now, it may surprise you to learn that John
Forester, bicycle expert extraordinaire, never visited the Netherlands. I’m sure that
was really difficult to guess by the way he’s wrong about everything he says about it.
There are lots of cities in the Netherlands that were founded well after “medieval times”,
most notably the entire province of Flevoland that was constructed on reclaimed
land, with cities such as Almere and Lelystad that were built in the 70s and 80s.
I made a previous video about another town, Houten, which was built in the 1980s.
And yet it’s a better place to cycle than anywhere in the United States.
Let it be known … this is the kind of horror your city will become if those
type-7 “greenway visionaries” get their way. I wouldn’t expect the average American
to know about all this in 2007, but as a self-proclaimed expert in cycling,
it is embarrassing how willfully ignorant John Forester was about Dutch cycling.
There was an audience member from Sweden who had lived in Amsterdam for years, and said
he cycled in Europe but that he didn’t feel safe cycling in San Francisco and
asked why bicycle lanes can’t work there. Well, yeah, I mean, stay out of the door zone
and don’t run into double parked cars. Just go around them. But I agree with you. San Francisco
is an extremely congested city for motor traffic. However, here is the point. There’s nothing
practical that we could do about it that would improve the situation for cyclists. There’s no
extra room for bike paths on the Amsterdam model This is just so stupid I don’t
even know where to start with it. San Francisco was founded in 1776. How is
Amsterdam great for bikes because it’s old but San Francisco isn’t? And no room for
bike paths? That’s absolutely ridiculous. I used to live near San Francisco and I’ve been
there dozens of times. There’s tonnes of room for bike lanes on almost every major street!
Certainly more room than most streets in Amsterdam. It’s just such an absolutely
absurd excuse from a supposed cycling expert. The rest of the video continues like this as
the audience asks him more and more questions, especially why bicycle paths can work
so well in Europe but not in America, And it’s painful listening to John’s rambling
ignorant responses. I’ll leave a link to the full video in the description if
you’re that kind of masochist. OK, so you might be thinking, why should
we care about what some racing cyclist said almost twenty years ago?
Well, the problem is that, even though John Forester is no
longer with us, he left behind a cult of vehicular cycling advocates who
continue to promote his outdated ideas. I’ve been making videos on Not
Just BIkes for over six years now. “… and it certainly explains why
I liked living in London, England” “… but hated London, Ontario”
When I started out I had no interest in becoming a channel that’s watched
by millions of people every month. I just wanted to share the reasons why my wife
and I moved our family to the Netherlands, and what I loved about Dutch city design.
But after one of my early videos went viral, I started getting a lot of hatred online.
There was even one person who harassed me for months, tried to doxx me,
and sent me lots of hate mail. So what was it that made these people so angry?
Was it because I wanted more car-free streets? Was it because I showed that car-dependent
suburbia was financially insolvent? Was it because I called American
cities car-infested shitholes? No, it was because I said I preferred riding
this type of Dutch-style bicycle. Seriously. No video I’ve ever made has attracted as much
vitriol and hatred as this one, and it all came from Forester’s cult of the vehicular cyclist.
They were absolutely infuriated that I promoted the idea of riding an upright bicycle
that required almost no maintenance. That comfort might be more
important than efficiency. And that bicycles could be used for reliable
urban transportation instead of for sport. Or maybe they were just upset that I
kicked a stuffed animal in the head. It’s now one of my most-watched videos
of all time with over six-million views, and that makes them even more upset.
Before I moved to the Netherlands, I was involved in safe streets
advocacy for several years, and one of the common tropes that advocates
used to joke about was the “avid cyclist.” At any community meeting, the
moment anyone started a question with “I’m an avid cyclist myself but …”
we knew they were part of the Cult of the Vehicular Cyclist, and everything else
out of their mouth would be total nonsense. But as funny as that was, those people
caused real damage to the cause of making streets safer for people on bikes.
Because to the planners, engineers, and politicians, here was a “cyclist”, supposedly
the exact type of person they were designing for, up there telling them that bicycle infrastructure
was a waste of time and money, that all the people injured or killed while cycling were just filthy
amateurs who didn’t git gut, that all that was really needed was more education campaigns.
And these cult members used John Forester’s books and “research” to prove their point.
Encouraging vehicular cycling was much cheaper, both financially and politically, than building a
bunch of safe bicycle infrastructure, so in many cases, that’s what those engineers and politicians
did instead. And this is still happening today. As I was writing the script for this video, a
fan told me about a large group of vehicular cyclists who showed up to a community
meeting about bike lanes in the UK. They were, of course, opposed to building
bike paths, and were arguing that nobody who rides a bicycle wanted any of this.
This really gets to the core of the problem, because despite what Forester or his cult members
would tell you, you aren’t building bicycle paths for the people who ride bicycles today.
You’re building them for all of the people who would ride a bicycle, but they
don’t, because it’s too dangerous. As the former chief planner
of Vancouver often says, “Never forget, it’s hard to justify a bridge by
the number of people swimming across a river.” Especially when that river
is infested with sharks. Or worse, hippopotamuses, because
they’re more dangerous than sharks. Cities that build high-quality bicycle
infrastructure see a large increase in the number of people cycling.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in Paris where they have built out
substantial bicycle infrastructure recently. They still have a ways to go before they’re as
bicycle-friendly as the Netherlands, but they’ve already made incredible progress that would
have been unimaginable ten to fifteen years ago. I visited Paris a few years ago and documented the
incredible surge in new people cycling, and I’ll put a link to that video in the description.
I should really get around to making a similar video about London.
In his books Forester laments that in America, cycling is not taken
seriously by the rest of society, but what did he think was going to happen?
Any place designed for only one form of transportation will always result in all
other forms of transportation being inferior. It’s like designing a city only for cars, and then
expecting to be able to add public transit later. It will never work as well or be
respected as much as a place that was properly designed for public transit.
Bicycles may be “vehicles” in the broadest sense of the word, but they are not the same as
cars, and I can’t believe I even need to say that. Bicycles are slower, lighter, and
smaller than cars so there will always be a power imbalance on roads designed for cars.
But blindly treating bicycles as cars eliminates many of the benefits of bicycles as well.
Bicycles don’t get stuck in traffic like cars do, as large groups of cyclists
easily move around one another. And a cyclist can instantly become
a pedestrian, something that’s also not possible to do with a car.
Bicycles are very quiet and so large amounts of bicycle traffic can be routed
through dense cities without a lot of negative effects on the surrounding neighbourhood.
In the Netherlands there are veritable bicycle highways that go through parks and move
just as many people as a suburban arterial road. You could never do this with cars, at
least, not without destroying the park. and a parking lot for bicycles takes
less than 5 percent of the space required to park the same number of cars.
But fundamentally, I just don’t understand how Forester could have spent so much time
advocating for cities to be designed for cars, and yet somehow expected that cyclists
wouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens. He wrote so often about wanting the police
to treat him and his cycle buddies fairly, for his neighbours and other drivers to respect
him, and for people to enjoy the sport of cycling. And yet here in the Netherlands,
all of that is true. And they accomplished this by doing the
opposite of everything Forester advocated for. Here cycling is completely normalised. Nobody
judges anyone else for riding a bicycle. Friends ride their bicycles
together, side-by-side. People go on dates on bicycles. No
extra tandem bike trickery required. There’s ample bicycle parking
in front of every shop. Including the grocery store.
Even when I go to a music festival the very best parking, right
by the front gate, is the bike parking. And some of the indoor bicycle parking
garages are seriously impressive. With controlled entry and 24 hour security.
There are bicycle shops everywhere who can fix any issue that I can’t fix myself.
It’s easy to get anywhere I want to go by bicycle, and most cities are set up so that
people cycling can take the shortest and most direct route to get somewhere, while
drivers have to take the long way around. And while every major street will
have safe, protected bicycle lanes Many other streets will have none.
Not because bicycle lanes are unsafe, but because access to cars has been restricted,
and when you don’t have a lot of cars, you don’t need bicycle lanes.
Since there are almost no stop signs, and many intersections have cycling
underpasses, it means that you can cycle for a long time without ever having to stop.
But if you do have to cross an intersection, the traffic detection loops work just fine
with bicycles, and the bicycle paths even have their own detection loops just for bikes.
And some traffic lights have an extra detection loop ahead of the intersection so that the
traffic light goes green for people cycling, before they even get there.
There are even cities that have traffic lights that go green more
often for cyclists when it’s raining. The drainage grates are also always
turned the right way. Imagine that. I used to have negative encounters
with angry drivers several times a year in Toronto, but after seven years in the
Netherlands, I was only ever honked at once … and that was by a friend who was
driving by and wanted to say “hi.” No one has ever tried to run me off of the road,
indeed the vast majority of drivers are very accommodating, and there’s a good reason for that:
because almost every driver in the Netherlands also rides a bicycle, so they know what it’s
like to be on a bike around a bunch of cars. And yet, the way that happened, and I would argue,
the only way that can happen, is to have a society where cycling is made available to everyone, so
that it is a normal part of life for most people. Not just the young and fit who can cycle
between motor vehicles at 30 mile-per-hour, but genuinely accessible infrastructure.
And even if you’re completely Forester-brained and only care about
race cycling, that’s better here too. It’s very common to see wielrenners
out on the weekend, enjoying the sport of cycling, just like Forester wanted.
And yeah, sometimes you get stuck behind people riding too slowly in the bike path.
But you also get to ride on wide, smooth, straight cycling paths outside of the city
on infrastructure that is objectively better to cycle on than a typical
pothole-filled American road. There are an estimated 700 thousand people in
the Netherlands who ride bicycles for sport, which comes out to a little
under 4% of the Dutch population. That is an order of magnitude higher
than the percentage of people who cycle for sport in the United States.
So if you really and truly want people to “enjoy the sport of cycling”, then this
“inferior cycling” is still the right approach. John Forester and the vehicular cycling movement
did immeasurable damage to cycling in every English-speaking country, and they’re about
30 years behind the Netherlands as a result. But the good news is that it’s also easier than
ever to build proper cycling infrastructure. There’s no more guesswork needed, and
proven designs are available for the taking, just copy and paste from resources
like the Oslo guide or the CROW manual. Cycling projects can be built
quickly and at relatively low cost, and the cities that are designing for
“childish cycling” are reaping the benefits. But a necessary first step is to throw away
Forester’s dogma and admit that vehicular cycling is not a viable alternative, except
as an emergency maneuver for dangerous roads. Because after what I’ve learned about vehicular cycling I would argue that if
you don’t hate John Forester, it’s because you haven’t
read what he actually wrote. Thanks so much for watching,
I really appreciate it. Special thanks to Thomas Frank for reading
all of the John Forester quotes. It’s not easy to read such bad writing out loud.
I’d also like to thank Brent Toderian who read the quote by Brent Toderian,
as well as Ray Delahanty, George Weidman, and TierZoo for lending their voice
to various quotes in this video. And of course, Nicole Conlan who not
only helped with research and writing, she also managed to get through all of
Effective Cycling without killing me. Making quality videos takes time,
money, and involves a lot of people. This video took hundreds of hours to make and I’m
very happy with the result, but I must admit that it’s difficult to compete on social media
when an AI slop creator can churn out multiple low-quality videos in a day.
It would have been much easier if, instead of hiring Nicole and spending dozens
of my own hours writing, I had just asked an LLM to generate a script for me. The problem is
that not only would that AI script be terrible, it would also be wrong. Which is one of the
many reasons why I don’t use generative AI. Well that plus I can’t imagine unironically saying,
“and remember: Don’t be a Forester, be a Fietser.” My videos are researched by humans, written by
humans, edited by humans, with humans doing the voices, and with real footage, recorded by humans.
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23 Comments
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Forester writing a book about how to design better bike infrastructure is like a Nazi writing about how to make their country more multicultural.
Forester is the RFK Jr of bikes
I bet this guy also had opinions on roundabouts
1:22:57 Did you see that? The poor creatures had been Gegronkht !!
How could you??!
The average dutch fietser hates these hobbyist cyclists with a passion. It's one of the few things I believe actual cyclists and car centric nutjobs can agree upon, fuck those MAMILs.
Me at 00.03:30: "This is gonna make me very angry, isn't it?….
Me at 01:35:30: "Yes".
Amazing video!! You're my hero. Perfect reference to link this to anyone bringing up these absurd arguments from Forester or his ilk ever again. 🚲
As a cyclist, I could not disagree with you more.
I was in Amsterdam not too long ago and a lot of people ride unsafely there.. alot of bikes don't have brakes… Alot of people ride motorized scooters in bike lanes. Local cyclists seem to relish the idea they could hit a tourist.
In the mid-2000s when Streetsblog & Streetfilms were just getting active we immediately saw that "physically protected bike lanes" (that's what we used as a term back then) were the ONLY way to go to increase bicycling in the United States' big cities. We started making videos about it and writing about it as much as we could. Aaron Naparstek (the editor of Streetsblog) and I would get incredible amounts of hate comments (and some private harsh e-mail messages!!) from Forester devotees. Never directly himself, but somehow his minions saw we were the ones that were starting to turn public debate against vehicular cycling.
Anytime, anyway in the time period from 2006 thru, I would say early 2010s, we would have to deal with this hate. Sometimes we would get the occasional aggressive cyclist get in our face at public events. I will never forget once presenting an hour of Streetfilms at Livable Streets Boston in 2007 (Boston had likely one of the most ardent Forester devotee packs in the nation) and during the Q&A session with me following after I showed the film "The Case for Protected Bike Lanes" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONS2ptAR4mo) the nice gathering of a crowd of 50 turned awful when I was peppered with insane questions/ramblings by three men in attendance that I was told were sent there just to attempt to destroy my advocacy and film work.
They wouldn't stop saying that separated lanes or barriers would KILL more bike riders and not encourage more people to ride. I had my rebuttals down and expected at least some push back since that is what Streetfilms got for years. But it still totally killed the mood until we moved to the reception and they were escorted out. At least the other wonderful advocates in Boston were very happy I was there and reassured me that it was a cranky segment of riders there that actually believed it, but I will say I hated Forester for life, not because the angst and anger he directed at me, but because his beliefs stopped many people from ever trying bike riding and actually killed people since so much of the bike infra we have in the USA (which is still admittedly well behind Europe) was delayed. In some places for DECADES! He was a great enemy and Aaron and felt good the longer we did our advocacy journalism the less and less we heard from his people. The enemy was finally defeated.
Why do I think that this guy and Trump are buddies?
Great video. Thanks a lot.
Foresters biggest mistake was trusting that the other driver knows how to… drive…
Sounds like he's a complete cycle-path.
I'm shocked by how easily pceudocientists like Forester ocupy mids in America. Same thing is happening right now in Texas with their humongous project to expand highways in Houston area in the age when all developed counties are prioritizing mass transit projects over cars. No wonder we ended up with Trump as a president…
It hurts me everytime you say "Cyquelist / Cykelist "
The Dutch expecting cycling paths everywhere and riding on the sidewalks when none are available are one of the main reasons cycling in Belgium is becoming impossible, where I now have to force Dutch car driving idiots off the road cause they think the road is uniquely for cars.
In my mind there are two types of cyclists. The recreational cyclist and the mobility cyclist. They both have different goals and uses.
Why would there be any advice about E-bikes in a book about bicycles? E-bikes are motorcycles. They don't belong in bike lanes or in any discussion about bicycles.
These guy is so obtuse and inflexible that is makes me suspect he was a bit on the spectrum, no offense to people who are.
Surprise November appearance 9:41
Cycling around Ottawa in the late 70s/early 80s was pretty much the same as Fake London. The worst were the city buses. Especially one particular maniac driver on the No 2 route.