Fw: Interesting analysis of John Forrester

[John Eldon]

I would appreciate a good , well-referenced rebuttal to Slaughter (great name, huh?) and defense of Bicycle Driving. It would be fun to throw that back at the EBW groupies.  

John Eldon

----- Forwarded Message -----

From: Chris Giles <ch...@chrisgiles.co>

To: TheEncinitasBikeWalk <theencinit...@googlegroups.com>

Sent: Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 12:50:03 PM PST

Subject: Interesting analysis of John Forrester

Here's some rainy day entertainment for you. 

Jason Slaughter of Not Just Bikes offers a detailed examination of John Forrester's books, Effective Cycling and Bicycle Transportation, highlighting Forrester's thorough lack of using data or research in much of his work.

It's a long one at 1 1/2 hours but super interesting to see how Forrester impacted American cycling. Sadly, we still see his rhetoric in effect in how we design our streets for cycling today.

This is Why Cycling is Dangerous in America

Chris

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[Frank J. Lehnerz]

Here’s an AI-generated transcript with time stamps for those who don’t want to sit and watch something that long. 

00:00:01

In the middle of the 20th century, car- ccentric 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 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

00:00:35

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 Denhawk so much that they were determined to make Davis, California the same, which kind of surprised me because Denhawk was not particularly bicycle friendly in the 1960s. Davis was already a college town with a

00:01:07

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

00:01:39

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

00:02:07

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 and 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 side path bikeway practice and obviously had no

00:02:38

knowledge of cycling in traffic. Forester was determined to fight these new standards on the belief that they would marginalize 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. Forester went on to devote his life to cycling education and fighting against any proposal for dedicated bicycle

00:03:06

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,

00:03:39

no, no, no, no, no. After diving down the John Forester rabbit hole, I found out it was way, way worse than I thought. In 1972, the city of Palo Alto, California, wanted to make streets safer for cyclists. But instead of building new protected bicycle lanes like Davis, 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

00:04:17

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

00:04:49

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 the 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 marginalize cyclists and keep the roads clear so that cars could drive faster. For example, Forester fought against a

00:05:18

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

00:05:54

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 someone 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

00:06:25

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 summarized his philosophy with this famous line. Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles. The

00:06:57

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- streetet pass, 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

00:07:25

like a car driver. On 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 unsafeely. 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

00:07:54

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 strode while two-ton SUVs with blind spots big enough to hide an elephant are whizzing past you at double the speed limit, then yeah, it's probably 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

00:08:25

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 bike lanes even if they are available. Of course, he also did everything he could to ensure that any safer designs, such as those Dutchinspired designs that were proposed in the 1972 UCLA report, would never be built either, even though they

00:08:56

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 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. >> What if you just had a book you could

00:09:29

look in to show you what the right answer was? >> 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 800 pages

00:10:00

long. I thought, how could you possibly need this 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

00:10:29

to actually get to any of 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 Jon mentions once or twice or only in some chapters. This

00:10:59

entire book is absolutely loaded with snide references to anyone 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

00:11:29

non-enthusiast users such as children going to school. It is heavy, durable, and well-made, although many are just cheaper 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've 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

00:11:55

because of excessive wind resistance. He concludes the chapter by stating that without question, the road bike design is superior for all road uses. Okay, 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 driver's license. Why would anybody want to ride a bicycle like a car when they could just drive an

00:12:25

actual car instead? Needless to say, when I later learned many decades later that cycling didn't have to involve dropped handlebars and Lycro while weaving in and out of car traffic, I was actually interested in doing it. And it's why one of my earliest videos on this channel was about how I'm not a cyclist, which I now realize was my rejection of everything Forester advocated for. In the Netherlands, there are two different words for cyclist. One is verunner, literally wheelrunner. The other is

00:12:56

feezer but in English both are called cyclists. If someone is trying to explicitly differentiate the two then feezers are sometimes referred to as utility cyclists. As for ve runners English speakers may say racing cyclist but there is also the usually derogatory term mammal which is an acronym for middle-aged men in Lycra. And I think that 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

00:13:31

bicycle should look like. Dropped 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

00:13:59

women, he has some um 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 chain guard to keep the chain clean and dry. John briefly

00:14:31

talks about chain guards in his book where he writes that you should remove them. A pie plate chain wheel protector is unnecessary and may be removed. Instead of holding the chain on the chain wheel, it sometimes jams the chain. Its only function is to protect your trousers and trouser bands do this better. He's also very explicit about the proper posture on a bicycle. You should be hunched over, putting weight on your dropped handlebars, and it should feel uncomfortable for the beginner. The inexperienced cyclist who selects a

00:15:00

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

00:15:30

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,

00:15:58

like the one entitled Cycling with Love, which begins with most cycling authors titled 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 realized

00:16:26

that's not a joke. This book is designed to recruit cyclists and even suggest 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 anti-cycling prejudice that is strong enough to strain a relationship seriously once events activate it.

00:16:55

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 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 a single cyclist who own tandemss partly

00:17:23

to attract cyclists of the opposite sex. And to be clear, when he says cycling, he absolutely means riding a racing bicycle 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

00:17:53

they were shown how and given more time. Take the same care to develop traffic technique. Don't frighten your guests 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 John Forester Gatekeeps cycling in this book. And I am insulted by the idea that these people are the only real cyclists

00:18:23

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 singlese 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 m, 6 hours, and 3/4 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.

00:19:02

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 author's descriptions of cycling to prove to the reader that those authors were not real cyclists. James E. Stars, the Noiseless Tener, 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

00:19:32

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 20 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

00:20:03

the Mammals Manifesto. And I feel really bad because I asked Nicole to help me with research and script writing for this video. So, I told her to read the book, too. >> Thanks a lot, >> 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

00:10:29

to actually get to any of 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 Jon mentions once or twice or only in some chapters. This

00:10:59

entire book is absolutely loaded with snide references to anyone 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

00:11:29

non-enthusiast users such as children going to school. It is heavy, durable, and well-made, although many are just cheaper 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've 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

00:11:55

because of excessive wind resistance. He concludes the chapter by stating that without question, the road bike design is superior for all road uses. Okay, 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 driver's license. Why would anybody want to ride a bicycle like a car when they could just drive an

00:12:25

actual car instead? Needless to say, when I later learned many decades later that cycling didn't have to involve dropped handlebars and Lycro while weaving in and out of car traffic, I was actually interested in doing it. And it's why one of my earliest videos on this channel was about how I'm not a cyclist, which I now realize was my rejection of everything Forester advocated for. In the Netherlands, there are two different words for cyclist. One is verunner, literally wheelrunner. The other is

00:12:56

feezer but in English both are called cyclists. If someone is trying to explicitly differentiate the two then feezers are sometimes referred to as utility cyclists. As for ve runners English speakers may say racing cyclist but there is also the usually derogatory term mammal which is an acronym for middle-aged men in Lycra. And I think that 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

00:13:31

bicycle should look like. Dropped 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

00:13:59

women, he has some um 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 chain guard to keep the chain clean and dry. John briefly

00:14:31

talks about chain guards in his book where he writes that you should remove them. A pie plate chain wheel protector is unnecessary and may be removed. Instead of holding the chain on the chain wheel, it sometimes jams the chain. Its only function is to protect your trousers and trouser bands do this better. He's also very explicit about the proper posture on a bicycle. You should be hunched over, putting weight on your dropped handlebars, and it should feel uncomfortable for the beginner. The inexperienced cyclist who selects a

00:15:00

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

00:15:30

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,

00:15:58

like the one entitled Cycling with Love, which begins with most cycling authors titled 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 realized

00:16:26

that's not a joke. This book is designed to recruit cyclists and even suggest 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 anti-cycling prejudice that is strong enough to strain a relationship seriously once events activate it.

00:16:55

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 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 a single cyclist who own tandemss partly

00:17:23

to attract cyclists of the opposite sex. And to be clear, when he says cycling, he absolutely means riding a racing bicycle 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

00:17:53

they were shown how and given more time. Take the same care to develop traffic technique. Don't frighten your guests 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 John Forester Gatekeeps cycling in this book. And I am insulted by the idea that these people are the only real cyclists

00:18:23

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 singlese 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 m, 6 hours, and 3/4 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.

00:19:02

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 author's descriptions of cycling to prove to the reader that those authors were not real cyclists. James E. Stars, the Noiseless Tener, 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

00:19:32

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 20 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

00:20:03

the Mammals Manifesto. And I feel really bad because I asked Nicole to help me with research and script writing for this video. So, I told her to read the book, too. >> Thanks a lot, >> 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

00:20:35

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 favor 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 favor 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

00:21:05

these concerns would be addressed. Instead, Forester is totally dismissive of anybody who doesn't ride a bicycle 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 DSM4 definition of a phobia. And yet somehow he isn't even using the word

00:21:36

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 arachna spider and phobos fear. So taking the ancient Greek harm meaning chariot and Than thantos meaning death, we get the much more accurate word harm thanobia which is the completely reasonable fear of being killed by cars. Now any reasonable person with even a shred of harmophobia might immediately realize that one of the problems of

00:22:10

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

00:22:38

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, never mind bicycles. And I talked about that in a previous video. This has been a wellrecoognized 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

00:23:08

edition of effective cycling was published. I was also disappointed that there was no mention of the increase in car traffic since 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, that'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

00:23:42

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 punishment. 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

00:24:11

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

00:24:46

pedestrians were charged at a rate of less than 1%. 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 with the world. There's also nothing mentioned in the book about the risk of injury or death

00:25:16

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 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

00:25:48

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

00:26:15

culture of the United States, there were still 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

00:26:43

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 a 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

00:27:12

of driving behind you, honking the horn when it is possible either to pass you or 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. right up beside the driver's window and say that you have

00:27:37

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 behavior is just an acceptable outcome rather than just building safe bicycle lanes. Oh, but sorry. Bicycle lanes are unsafe because um uh why are they unsafe again?

00:28:08

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 with that. In the Netherlands, the primary emphasis is on

00:28:39

building safe bicycle infrastructure, but education is an important component as well. Most Dutch school children are taught about cycling in elementary school, and they are tested in a feats exam 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

00:29:08

keep cyclist 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

00:29:41

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- streetet bicycle paths were significantly more dangerous than riding on the road with cars. He repeats this multiple times both in this book and his other writings and speeches. Here's one

00:30:13

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 Gerald A. Kaplan entitled Characteristics of the regular adult bicycle user. I love that title. I can

00:20:35

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 favor 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 favor 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

00:21:05

these concerns would be addressed. Instead, Forester is totally dismissive of anybody who doesn't ride a bicycle 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 DSM4 definition of a phobia. And yet somehow he isn't even using the word

00:21:36

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 arachna spider and phobos fear. So taking the ancient Greek harm meaning chariot and Than thantos meaning death, we get the much more accurate word harm thanobia which is the completely reasonable fear of being killed by cars. Now any reasonable person with even a shred of harmophobia might immediately realize that one of the problems of

00:22:10

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

00:22:38

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, never mind bicycles. And I talked about that in a previous video. This has been a wellrecoognized 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

00:23:08

edition of effective cycling was published. I was also disappointed that there was no mention of the increase in car traffic since 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, that'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

00:23:42

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 punishment. 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

00:24:11

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

00:24:46

pedestrians were charged at a rate of less than 1%. 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 with the world. There's also nothing mentioned in the book about the risk of injury or death

00:25:16

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 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

00:25:48

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

00:26:15

culture of the United States, there were still 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

00:26:43

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 a 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

00:27:12

of driving behind you, honking the horn when it is possible either to pass you or 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. right up beside the driver's window and say that you have

00:27:37

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 behavior is just an acceptable outcome rather than just building safe bicycle lanes. Oh, but sorry. Bicycle lanes are unsafe because um uh why are they unsafe again?

00:28:08

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 with that. In the Netherlands, the primary emphasis is on

00:28:39

building safe bicycle infrastructure, but education is an important component as well. Most Dutch school children are taught about cycling in elementary school, and they are tested in a feats exam 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

00:29:08

keep cyclist 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

00:29:41

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- streetet bicycle paths were significantly more dangerous than riding on the road with cars. He repeats this multiple times both in this book and his other writings and speeches. Here's one

00:30:13

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 Gerald A. Kaplan entitled Characteristics of the regular adult bicycle user. I love that title. I can

00:30:44

just imagine it as a nature documentary about behaviors 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 kind of 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

00:31:18

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 included dozens of different charts analyzing the responses from the survey in different ways, but the data about off- streetet paths is from page 76.

00:31:48

As you can see, the accident rate for off- streetet 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 bicycle paths made up only 3.5% of the total miles reported in the survey. Worse though, what Forester never mentions anywhere is that this off- streetet pass was a catch-all category that included a mix of gravel pass and informal forest pass. And Kaplan even mentions this explicitly as a reason not

00:32:24

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 took me only a few minutes to find this. It is really dishonest of John Forester to pretend that this data is relevant to discussions about dedicated paved off-street bicycle paths within cities. But it gets worse. Keen viewers might

00:32:55

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 study of the experience of club cyclists to say that bike laned roads are safer. However,

00:33:27

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, okay. I get it. So, since this category includes 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 master's thesis is not sufficient to make any general claims about cycling safety and Kaplan explicitly mentions this. It is also important that one does

00:34:02

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

00:34:32

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 cyclist's view, the report was hidden and no further copies were distributed. Fortunately for us, in 1977, the California Highway Patrol Commission crossed to create a much larger report

00:35:01

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

00:35:32

reports about car bicycle collisions in four US states. It's a really tough read and it is wildly biased in favor 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

00:36:05

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 depiction of cycling in early 20th century

00:36:37

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 cyclist's 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

00:37:08

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% of carbike collisions, while reducing the difficulty of only 2% of collision situations. analysis of all

00:37:39

accidents to cyclists shows that bikeways are aimed at only 0.3% of accidents to cyclists. Earlier in the book, he explains what that.3% of accidents was referring to. The motoristcaused car overtaking bike collision constitutes about 0.3% 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

00:38:14

report actually says the exact opposite about the dangers of motorists overtaking cyclists. The fear of overtaking accidents is wellfounded 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 1/4 of all fatal accidents in the sample. Three times as many as any other problem type. So, how did 1/4 of all fatal accidents

00:38:46

get turned into only.3% 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 that number. Bikeway programs are even more useless. They are aimed at only 0.3% of accidents to cyclists caused by urban motorists hitting lawful cyclists from the rear during daylight. Notice the caveats in that statement. Urban motorists lawful cyclists during daylight. The cross report makes it very clear that

00:39:19

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

00:39:47

insignificant number of crashes that Forester estimates at.3%. 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- streetet bicycle lanes would reduce the incidence of overtaking accidents if such facilities were available and used by

00:40:18

bicyclists who otherwise would be riding on roadways. The obvious problem with off- streetet bicycle lanes is their high cost and the lack of space in most communities for constructing a comprehensive network of off-street bicycle lanes. 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

00:40:46

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 tenant 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 300page document written by bicycle-hating cops. And in one case, he

00:30:44

just imagine it as a nature documentary about behaviors 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 kind of 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

00:31:18

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 included dozens of different charts analyzing the responses from the survey in different ways, but the data about off- streetet paths is from page 76.

00:31:48

As you can see, the accident rate for off- streetet 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 bicycle paths made up only 3.5% of the total miles reported in the survey. Worse though, what Forester never mentions anywhere is that this off- streetet pass was a catch-all category that included a mix of gravel pass and informal forest pass. And Kaplan even mentions this explicitly as a reason not

00:32:24

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 took me only a few minutes to find this. It is really dishonest of John Forester to pretend that this data is relevant to discussions about dedicated paved off-street bicycle paths within cities. But it gets worse. Keen viewers might

00:32:55

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 study of the experience of club cyclists to say that bike laned roads are safer. However,

00:33:27

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, okay. I get it. So, since this category includes 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 master's thesis is not sufficient to make any general claims about cycling safety and Kaplan explicitly mentions this. It is also important that one does

00:34:02

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

00:34:32

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 cyclist's view, the report was hidden and no further copies were distributed. Fortunately for us, in 1977, the California Highway Patrol Commission crossed to create a much larger report

00:35:01

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

00:35:32

reports about car bicycle collisions in four US states. It's a really tough read and it is wildly biased in favor 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

00:36:05

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 depiction of cycling in early 20th century

00:36:37

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 cyclist's 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

00:37:08

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% of carbike collisions, while reducing the difficulty of only 2% of collision situations. analysis of all

00:37:39

accidents to cyclists shows that bikeways are aimed at only 0.3% of accidents to cyclists. Earlier in the book, he explains what that.3% of accidents was referring to. The motoristcaused car overtaking bike collision constitutes about 0.3% 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

00:38:14

report actually says the exact opposite about the dangers of motorists overtaking cyclists. The fear of overtaking accidents is wellfounded 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 1/4 of all fatal accidents in the sample. Three times as many as any other problem type. So, how did 1/4 of all fatal accidents

00:38:46

get turned into only.3% 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 that number. Bikeway programs are even more useless. They are aimed at only 0.3% of accidents to cyclists caused by urban motorists hitting lawful cyclists from the rear during daylight. Notice the caveats in that statement. Urban motorists lawful cyclists during daylight. The cross report makes it very clear that

00:39:19

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

00:39:47

insignificant number of crashes that Forester estimates at.3%. 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- streetet bicycle lanes would reduce the incidence of overtaking accidents if such facilities were available and used by

00:40:18

bicyclists who otherwise would be riding on roadways. The obvious problem with off- streetet bicycle lanes is their high cost and the lack of space in most communities for constructing a comprehensive network of off-street bicycle lanes. 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

00:40:46

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 tenant 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 300page document written by bicycle-hating cops. And in one case, he

00:41:19

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's kind of wild how often Forester does this. He references a scientific paper to justify his beliefs, but he's actually drawing his own conclusions

00:41:48

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

00:42:18

chapter about exercise efficiency that I really don't want to talk about. But there is one quote that truly captures John Forers's approach to peer-reviewed scientific papers. I pointed out this discrepancy between facts and conclusions to the editor of the Journal for Applied Physiology, suggesting that my hypothesis better explain the facts that have 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

00:42:45

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

00:43:16

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 fitment 1977. Most of the accident data presented in effective cycling comes from those books but are derived from data given by cross Kaplan and the national safety council.

00:43:47

Incidentally, there was only one part of the book with a statistic from this National Safety Council paper he mentions claiming that it showed that car bike collisions were only responsible for 10% 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

00:44:15

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 collisions to fund such studies as I have quoted. Are you kidding me? How did anybody take this guy seriously? Believe it or not, Forester was full of once again. By 2012, there were dozens of published peer-reviewed

00:44:47

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- streetet paths were the safest type of bicycle facilities and that on-road marked bicycle lanes reduced injury rate, collision frequency, or crash rates by about 50% compared to unmodified roads. These 23 studies and the metaanalysis itself were all published well ahead of 2012. And there is no way that John Forester was not

00:45:17

aware of them. He just chose to ignore them because he couldn't cherrypick 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 the protected bicycle infrastructure was not just safer for cyclists. It actually made the roads safer for all road users,

00:45:44

including drivers. We can argue about what designs are best and how best to implement them. But anybody who is still arguing in favor of vehicular cycling over bicycle lanes is just wrong. By the early 2000s, even the League of American Wheelman, now known as the much less cool name, League of American Bicyclists, went on to advocate in favor 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

00:46:16

rambling book to recruit mammals, 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 guide book for designing bicycle infrastructure. It was first published in 1977, but I bought the most recent edition published in 1994.

00:46:44

Today, there are lots 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 in Norway 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

00:47:14

infrastructure, please do not reinvent the wheel. Start by reading one of these existing guide books. Unfortunately, American traffic engineers of the 1980s didn't have that luxury. The Crow Manual was available in the 1980s, 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

00:47:44

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 realized that since this book was supposed to be an engineering book, he might actually need to 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

00:48:16

engineers that they should never be building any off- streetet 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 techchnical scientific sounding language. So, it's even more painful to read. And there are so many irrelevant, rambling chapters, like this part about the 11 types of people who advocate for bicycle lanes, but they only do it because they're ignorant, they're overly emotional, or

00:48:46

they're just paid the big bucks for 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 have been the people upset about things like a leaded gasoline, smog, and acid rain. In this book, Forester is dismissive of basically everyone, and he routinely states that his detractors are

00:49:19

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

00:49:47

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. And that's pretty much it for the good stuff. Now, on to 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

00:50:16

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 mph. That's almost 50 kmh. Every facility for promoting cycling should be designed for 30 mph. If it is not, it will not attract the serious

00:50:50

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 always 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 coming because it will also slow down cyclists and be unsafe. He specifically

00:41:19

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's kind of wild how often Forester does this. He references a scientific paper to justify his beliefs, but he's actually drawing his own conclusions

00:41:48

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

00:42:18

chapter about exercise efficiency that I really don't want to talk about. But there is one quote that truly captures John Forers's approach to peer-reviewed scientific papers. I pointed out this discrepancy between facts and conclusions to the editor of the Journal for Applied Physiology, suggesting that my hypothesis better explain the facts that have 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

00:42:45

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

00:43:16

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 fitment 1977. Most of the accident data presented in effective cycling comes from those books but are derived from data given by cross Kaplan and the national safety council.

00:43:47

Incidentally, there was only one part of the book with a statistic from this National Safety Council paper he mentions claiming that it showed that car bike collisions were only responsible for 10% 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

00:44:15

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 collisions to fund such studies as I have quoted. Are you kidding me? How did anybody take this guy seriously? Believe it or not, Forester was full of once again. By 2012, there were dozens of published peer-reviewed

00:44:47

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- streetet paths were the safest type of bicycle facilities and that on-road marked bicycle lanes reduced injury rate, collision frequency, or crash rates by about 50% compared to unmodified roads. These 23 studies and the metaanalysis itself were all published well ahead of 2012. And there is no way that John Forester was not

00:45:17

aware of them. He just chose to ignore them because he couldn't cherrypick 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 the protected bicycle infrastructure was not just safer for cyclists. It actually made the roads safer for all road users,

00:45:44

including drivers. We can argue about what designs are best and how best to implement them. But anybody who is still arguing in favor of vehicular cycling over bicycle lanes is just wrong. By the early 2000s, even the League of American Wheelman, now known as the much less cool name, League of American Bicyclists, went on to advocate in favor 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

00:46:16

rambling book to recruit mammals, 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 guide book for designing bicycle infrastructure. It was first published in 1977, but I bought the most recent edition published in 1994.

00:46:44

Today, there are lots 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 in Norway 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

00:47:14

infrastructure, please do not reinvent the wheel. Start by reading one of these existing guide books. Unfortunately, American traffic engineers of the 1980s didn't have that luxury. The Crow Manual was available in the 1980s, 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

00:47:44

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 realized that since this book was supposed to be an engineering book, he might actually need to 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

00:48:16

engineers that they should never be building any off- streetet 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 techchnical scientific sounding language. So, it's even more painful to read. And there are so many irrelevant, rambling chapters, like this part about the 11 types of people who advocate for bicycle lanes, but they only do it because they're ignorant, they're overly emotional, or

00:48:46

they're just paid the big bucks for 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 have been the people upset about things like a leaded gasoline, smog, and acid rain. In this book, Forester is dismissive of basically everyone, and he routinely states that his detractors are

00:49:19

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

00:49:47

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. And that's pretty much it for the good stuff. Now, on to 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

00:50:16

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 mph. That's almost 50 kmh. Every facility for promoting cycling should be designed for 30 mph. If it is not, it will not attract the serious

00:50:50

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 always 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 coming because it will also slow down cyclists and be unsafe. He specifically

00:51:19

calls out Dutch Wanuran like this as being extremely dangerous for cycling. Watch out. Can't you tell that 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 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

00:51:54

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- streetet paths are dangerous. And I loved how the most technical chapter in the whole book, which includes lots of graphs 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

00:52:24

the automobile industry in order to marginalize cycling. But the way Forester intensely advocates in favor 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 bicycle 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

00:52:54

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. 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

00:53:25

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 to 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

00:53:58

they will become unacceptable once the public discovers that they are a sham. Quite obviously, endangering all cyclists and discouraging 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

00:54:28

driven by 0.2% of the accidents to cyclists regardless of the increase in accidents of other types the policy produces and regardless of the inconvenience and discrimination against cyclists that it also produces. Both the cycling transportation engineer and the cyclist advocate must operate in a society in which the 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

00:54:59

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 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

00:55:27

each one. His primary argument is usually that because the authors weren't cyclists themselves, they didn't understand what they were studying and so their conclusion should be dismissed. Or he just says that 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 counter evidence. The authors grossly misrepresent the accident facts. They write that over onethird of bicycle

00:55:58

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 is 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 cherrypicked subset of the data that Forester liked to use.

00:56:29

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 collection 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

00:57:00

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 side paths 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

00:57:31

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 m without any problems. The eighth collision nearly killed me. It was just chance that I was not hit head-on. Therefore, I terminated the test at 4

00:58:00

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

00:58:34

from. And when I finally find the source of it, it's from some stupid typewritten report written from 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 How did anybody ever take this guy seriously? I was so disappointed in these books. There are many legitimate criticisms

00:59:03

that could be made of 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 bike 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 have opened up

00:59:33

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 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

01:00:06

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 live streamed a ride down the newest bicycle lanes in Toronto in 2021. Going downhill in these super narrow bicycle lanes with these stupid plastic sticks that were higher than my handlebars was actually really nerve-wracking. This whole ride was a show of bad bicycle infrastructure. And if you want

01:00:37

to see me suffer through it, you can watch the full video on my live streaming 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. Oh, I'd like to thank a Cycle YZ who provided me with some of these bicycle riding clips. His channel has lots of videos about how to ride a bicycle safely on less than ideal infrastructure. So definitely check it

01:01:08

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 bicycle 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 3% of

00:51:19

calls out Dutch Wanuran like this as being extremely dangerous for cycling. Watch out. Can't you tell that 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 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

00:51:54

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- streetet paths are dangerous. And I loved how the most technical chapter in the whole book, which includes lots of graphs 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

00:52:24

the automobile industry in order to marginalize cycling. But the way Forester intensely advocates in favor 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 bicycle 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

00:52:54

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. 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

00:53:25

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 to 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

00:53:58

they will become unacceptable once the public discovers that they are a sham. Quite obviously, endangering all cyclists and discouraging 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

00:54:28

driven by 0.2% of the accidents to cyclists regardless of the increase in accidents of other types the policy produces and regardless of the inconvenience and discrimination against cyclists that it also produces. Both the cycling transportation engineer and the cyclist advocate must operate in a society in which the 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

00:54:59

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 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

00:55:27

each one. His primary argument is usually that because the authors weren't cyclists themselves, they didn't understand what they were studying and so their conclusion should be dismissed. Or he just says that 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 counter evidence. The authors grossly misrepresent the accident facts. They write that over onethird of bicycle

00:55:58

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 is 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 cherrypicked subset of the data that Forester liked to use.

00:56:29

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 collection 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

00:57:00

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 side paths 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

00:57:31

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 m without any problems. The eighth collision nearly killed me. It was just chance that I was not hit head-on. Therefore, I terminated the test at 4

00:58:00

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

00:58:34

from. And when I finally find the source of it, it's from some stupid typewritten report written from 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 How did anybody ever take this guy seriously? I was so disappointed in these books. There are many legitimate criticisms

00:59:03

that could be made of 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 bike 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 have opened up

00:59:33

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 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

01:00:06

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 live streamed a ride down the newest bicycle lanes in Toronto in 2021. Going downhill in these super narrow bicycle lanes with these stupid plastic sticks that were higher than my handlebars was actually really nerve-wracking. This whole ride was a show of bad bicycle infrastructure. And if you want

01:00:37

to see me suffer through it, you can watch the full video on my live streaming 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. Oh, I'd like to thank a Cycle YZ who provided me with some of these bicycle riding clips. His channel has lots of videos about how to ride a bicycle safely on less than ideal infrastructure. So definitely check it

01:01:08

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 bicycle 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 3% of

01:01:40

crashes or 2% 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

01:02:11

significantly safer. Some of this supposed bike infrastructure that I see in Ontario, Canada is so bad. I have way too much harm thanophobia 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

01:02:45

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

01:03:17

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

01:03:46

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 above or in the case of Einhovven, a giant bicycle ring over the entire junction. The other major source of bicycle

01:04:16

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 kind of intersections are found all over the Netherlands. There are many elements that make them safe, but the core of this design are these

01:04:46

concrete islands on every corner. These ensure that right turning drivers need to make a relatively sharp turn, which means they cannot take the corner too quickly. and the bicycle lane is set back so that any turning driver 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

01:05:15

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 to both in the description. Unfortunately, this kind of intersection design is very rare outside of the Netherlands. I have seen a few examples

01:05:43

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

01:06:12

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 motoriization took over from 1960 on. Particularly in Northern Europe, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Scandinavia,

01:06:44

bicycle traffic became relegated to secondass 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

01:07:12

book. I honestly don't know how delusional andor 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, never mind 2012. But he does mention that Danish and Dutch bicycle lanes actually increase 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 side paths, even with their extensive

01:07:44

signalization, have increased the carbike collision rate within blocks. The rate decreased, but the side paths produced even greater increases wherever traffic crossed. As usual, Forester doesn't provide any references to the supposed well-designed Danish studies, but I strongly suspect he was talking about this one because I found it linked as proof that bicycle lanes are unsafe on several vehicular cycling websites, as well as a document written by Forester himself in 2009. This study concluded that the

01:08:14

construction of protected bicycle lanes, what Copenhagen calls cycle tracks, resulted in a 9 to 10% increase in accidents and injury. Checkmate, urbanists. But they also saw a much higher increase in bicycle traffic of 18 to 20%. 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 one more reason to build

01:08:49

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 bicycle fatalities per billion km cycled are only a fourth as high as in the United States. And this 2008 study found that

01:09:21

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 the story of meeting a Dutch traffic engineer for the first time. Vetho City is a cycling planning conference started in Braymond, Germany in 1980 and it has become a major industry conference for bicycle

01:09:52

policy and infrastructure design. The first time this conference was held outside of Europe was in Montreal 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 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.

01:10:21

The questions that have been debated and investigated in the USA 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 the discussion itself, he said that they had none, that they just used common sense. I would

01:10:47

love to hear 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 Forers data was whatever he cherrypicked from two papers from the

01:11:16

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 needed to quote correct the dangers that bikeways produce. He also mentions that many Dutch cyclists have

01:01:40

crashes or 2% 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

01:02:11

significantly safer. Some of this supposed bike infrastructure that I see in Ontario, Canada is so bad. I have way too much harm thanophobia 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

01:02:45

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

01:03:17

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

01:03:46

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 above or in the case of Einhovven, a giant bicycle ring over the entire junction. The other major source of bicycle

01:04:16

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 kind of intersections are found all over the Netherlands. There are many elements that make them safe, but the core of this design are these

01:04:46

concrete islands on every corner. These ensure that right turning drivers need to make a relatively sharp turn, which means they cannot take the corner too quickly. and the bicycle lane is set back so that any turning driver 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

01:05:15

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 to both in the description. Unfortunately, this kind of intersection design is very rare outside of the Netherlands. I have seen a few examples

01:05:43

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

01:06:12

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 motoriization took over from 1960 on. Particularly in Northern Europe, Germany, Holland, Denmark, Scandinavia,

01:06:44

bicycle traffic became relegated to secondass 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

01:07:12

book. I honestly don't know how delusional andor 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, never mind 2012. But he does mention that Danish and Dutch bicycle lanes actually increase 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 side paths, even with their extensive

01:07:44

signalization, have increased the carbike collision rate within blocks. The rate decreased, but the side paths produced even greater increases wherever traffic crossed. As usual, Forester doesn't provide any references to the supposed well-designed Danish studies, but I strongly suspect he was talking about this one because I found it linked as proof that bicycle lanes are unsafe on several vehicular cycling websites, as well as a document written by Forester himself in 2009. This study concluded that the

01:08:14

construction of protected bicycle lanes, what Copenhagen calls cycle tracks, resulted in a 9 to 10% increase in accidents and injury. Checkmate, urbanists. But they also saw a much higher increase in bicycle traffic of 18 to 20%. 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 one more reason to build

01:08:49

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 bicycle fatalities per billion km cycled are only a fourth as high as in the United States. And this 2008 study found that

01:09:21

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 the story of meeting a Dutch traffic engineer for the first time. Vetho City is a cycling planning conference started in Braymond, Germany in 1980 and it has become a major industry conference for bicycle

01:09:52

policy and infrastructure design. The first time this conference was held outside of Europe was in Montreal 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 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.

01:10:21

The questions that have been debated and investigated in the USA 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 the discussion itself, he said that they had none, that they just used common sense. I would

01:10:47

love to hear 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 Forers data was whatever he cherrypicked from two papers from the

01:11:16

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 needed to quote correct the dangers that bikeways produce. He also mentions that many Dutch cyclists have

01:11:45

realized 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 Can that were built for disabled people so that they could use the safe cycling

01:12:12

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 30 mph. 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

01:12:41

expected. That is it amplifies and confirms the knowledge that we American cyclists had 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

01:13:12

since they designed 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 realize or wants to purposely hide that 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

01:13:43

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 the World War II. We rode on the gutter pans because the concrete was smoother than the tire, which hadn't been maintained for years. Of course, that got fixed later on, you know, and now we generally stay off gutter pans. >> Bizarrely, he spends almost half of his presentation time arguing that cars are

01:14:11

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'd be nice, wouldn't it? But we can't, unfortunately. 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

01:14:43

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 to 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. No. No. Forester also really wanted his audience to know that most

01:15:25

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. Maybe wrong. Okay. 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

01:15:59

transportation being done. It just doesn't have that capability. And then they quote all the 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 bike way. I mean you know it's our you see these all the time and not one of them makes any any statistical sense at all. Unsurprisingly the only reference he provides for any of the nonsense he says is from the cross

01:16:31

report which was 33 years old by this point. You can hear him fumble through his justification for using only part of Kenneth 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. But anyway, he got a contract for a national sample, you know, four different states representing different parts of the nation and more representative of the

01:17:01

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 uh only or nighttime ones as well where there other complications or whether you want to count rural ones which are different from urban ones. Okay, 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

01:17:32

bikeways, they got a a 40, 50, 60% bicycle mode share in Amsterdam." Well, sure they do. It's a medieval city. It's a pre-automotive obsolete city. Isn't that a nice word? >> Okay, ignoring the fact that even the center 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

01:18:03

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 is the classic comment that they have much more cycling in places like the Netherlands particularly and some other northern European countries than they have here. Now the Netherlands

01:18:37

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 Flavoland that was constructed on reclaimed land with cities such as Almera and Leistad that

01:19:11

were built in the 70s and 80s. I made a previous video about another town, Hton, 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

01:19:45

was an audience member from Sweden who had lived in Amsterdam for years and he 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. you 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. Uh, however, here is the point. There's nothing practical that we could do about it

01:20:18

that would improve the situation for cyclists. There's no extra room for bike paths on the Amsterdam model. This is just so stupid that 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? Like, that's absolutely ridiculous. I used to live near San Francisco, and I've been there dozens of times. There's tons of room for bike lanes on almost every major

01:20:51

street. Certainly more room than most streets in Amsterdam. it 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 pass can work so well in Europe but not in America. And it's painful listening to John's rambling incoherent responses. I'll leave a link to the full video in the description if you're that kind of massochist. Okay, so you might be thinking, why

01:21:20

should we care about what some racing cyclist said almost 20 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 bikes for over 6 years now. 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

01:21:52

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 dox 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 carinfested holes? No, it was because I said I preferred riding this type of Dutch style bicycle.

01:11:45

realized 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 Can that were built for disabled people so that they could use the safe cycling

01:12:12

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 30 mph. 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

01:12:41

expected. That is it amplifies and confirms the knowledge that we American cyclists had 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

01:13:12

since they designed 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 realize or wants to purposely hide that 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

01:13:43

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 the World War II. We rode on the gutter pans because the concrete was smoother than the tire, which hadn't been maintained for years. Of course, that got fixed later on, you know, and now we generally stay off gutter pans. >> Bizarrely, he spends almost half of his presentation time arguing that cars are

01:14:11

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'd be nice, wouldn't it? But we can't, unfortunately. 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

01:14:43

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 to 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. No. No. Forester also really wanted his audience to know that most

01:15:25

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. Maybe wrong. Okay. 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

01:15:59

transportation being done. It just doesn't have that capability. And then they quote all the 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 bike way. I mean you know it's our you see these all the time and not one of them makes any any statistical sense at all. Unsurprisingly the only reference he provides for any of the nonsense he says is from the cross

01:16:31

report which was 33 years old by this point. You can hear him fumble through his justification for using only part of Kenneth 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. But anyway, he got a contract for a national sample, you know, four different states representing different parts of the nation and more representative of the

01:17:01

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 uh only or nighttime ones as well where there other complications or whether you want to count rural ones which are different from urban ones. Okay, 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

01:17:32

bikeways, they got a a 40, 50, 60% bicycle mode share in Amsterdam." Well, sure they do. It's a medieval city. It's a pre-automotive obsolete city. Isn't that a nice word? >> Okay, ignoring the fact that even the center 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

01:18:03

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 is the classic comment that they have much more cycling in places like the Netherlands particularly and some other northern European countries than they have here. Now the Netherlands

01:18:37

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 Flavoland that was constructed on reclaimed land with cities such as Almera and Leistad that

01:19:11

were built in the 70s and 80s. I made a previous video about another town, Hton, 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

01:19:45

was an audience member from Sweden who had lived in Amsterdam for years and he 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. you 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. Uh, however, here is the point. There's nothing practical that we could do about it

01:20:18

that would improve the situation for cyclists. There's no extra room for bike paths on the Amsterdam model. This is just so stupid that 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? Like, that's absolutely ridiculous. I used to live near San Francisco, and I've been there dozens of times. There's tons of room for bike lanes on almost every major

01:20:51

street. Certainly more room than most streets in Amsterdam. it 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 pass can work so well in Europe but not in America. And it's painful listening to John's rambling incoherent responses. I'll leave a link to the full video in the description if you're that kind of massochist. Okay, so you might be thinking, why

01:21:20

should we care about what some racing cyclist said almost 20 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 bikes for over 6 years now. 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

01:21:52

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 dox 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 carinfested holes? No, it was because I said I preferred riding this type of Dutch style bicycle.

01:22:27

Seriously, no video I've ever made has attracted as much vitriol and hatred online 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

01:22:57

head. It's now one of my most watched videos of all time with over 6 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

01:23:31

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 get good, and that all that was really needed was more education campaigns. And

01:24:03

these cult members used John Forers'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

01:24:33

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 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

01:25:02

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 highquality 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

01:25:30

already made incredible progress that would have been unimaginable 10 to 15 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

01:26:03

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

01:26:37

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 rooted through dense cities without a lot of negative effects on the surrounding neighborhood. In the Netherlands, there are veritable

01:27:06

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% 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 secondclass citizens. He

01:27:39

wrote so often about wanting the police to treat him and his cycle buddies fairly, for his neighbors 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 it by doing the opposite of everything Forester advocated for. Here, cycling is completely normalized. 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

01:28:12

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

01:28:45

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

01:29:15

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. And 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

01:29:42

way. Imagine that. I used to have negative encounters with angry drivers several times a year in Toronto, but after 7 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 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

01:30:12

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 mph, but genuinely accessible infrastructure. And even if you're completely foresterrained and only care about race cycling, that's better here, too. It's very common to see ve runners out on the

01:30:45

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 the typical pothole fililled American road. There are an estimated 700,000 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

01:31:17

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

01:31:48

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 to 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

01:32:21

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 Toadarian who read the quote by Brent Toadarian, as well as Ray Delahanty, George Weedman, and Tearzu for lending their voices to various quotes in this video. And of course, Nicole Conlin, who not only helped with

01:22:27

Seriously, no video I've ever made has attracted as much vitriol and hatred online 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

01:22:57

head. It's now one of my most watched videos of all time with over 6 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

01:23:31

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 get good, and that all that was really needed was more education campaigns. And

01:24:03

these cult members used John Forers'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

01:24:33

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 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

01:25:02

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 highquality 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

01:25:30

already made incredible progress that would have been unimaginable 10 to 15 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

01:26:03

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

01:26:37

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 rooted through dense cities without a lot of negative effects on the surrounding neighborhood. In the Netherlands, there are veritable

01:27:06

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% 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 secondclass citizens. He

01:27:39

wrote so often about wanting the police to treat him and his cycle buddies fairly, for his neighbors 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 it by doing the opposite of everything Forester advocated for. Here, cycling is completely normalized. 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

01:28:12

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

01:28:45

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

01:29:15

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. And 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

01:29:42

way. Imagine that. I used to have negative encounters with angry drivers several times a year in Toronto, but after 7 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 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

01:30:12

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 mph, but genuinely accessible infrastructure. And even if you're completely foresterrained and only care about race cycling, that's better here, too. It's very common to see ve runners out on the

01:30:45

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 the typical pothole fililled American road. There are an estimated 700,000 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

01:31:17

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

01:31:48

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 to 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

01:32:21

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 Toadarian who read the quote by Brent Toadarian, as well as Ray Delahanty, George Weedman, and Tearzu for lending their voices to various quotes in this video. And of course, Nicole Conlin, who not only helped with

01:32:53

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 turn out multiple lowquality 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

01:33:22

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 featser. My videos are researched by humans, written by humans, edited by humans, with humans doing the voices, and with real footage recorded by humans. Because ultimately, I believe that you shouldn't

01:33:52

spend your time watching a video if someone else didn't spend their time creating it. So, if you'd like to support the creation of more highquality human-made videos, then please consider signing up to Nebula. Nebula is a creatorowned streaming service that isn't built to make giant profits for venture capitalists or big tech. and were funded by fans, not advertisers, which is why Nebula can afford to support creators and give them a platform to make the videos they want to make. When you sign up, you not only get

01:34:22

early access to all of my videos, ad free and sponsor free, but also the videos from over 200 other talented creators, as well as Nebula originals, special shows, and documentary films that are only available on Nebula. Nebula also has an AI policy and we're committed to creating real content by real people. We're not totally against ever using AI, but it needs to be useful and accurate. And most importantly, it can't be unethically trained off of copyrighted works without the original

01:34:52

creators permission. And today, that's just not the case with Grand Theft Auto here. If you share our vision for a better platform for content creators or you just want to support my channel so that I can make more videos like this one, then I'd encourage you to try Nebula. If you sign up at the link go.nebula.tv/notusbikes, you'll get 40% off an annual subscription. Nebula also has gift cards and my Dutch viewers will be glad to know that you can buy them with Ideal. Thanks to everyone who supports this

01:35:22

channel on Nebula, on Patreon, or even here on YouTube by watching this video all the way through to the end. I appreciate it.

01:32:53

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 turn out multiple lowquality 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

01:33:22

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 featser. My videos are researched by humans, written by humans, edited by humans, with humans doing the voices, and with real footage recorded by humans. Because ultimately, I believe that you shouldn't

01:33:52

spend your time watching a video if someone else didn't spend their time creating it. So, if you'd like to support the creation of more highquality human-made videos, then please consider signing up to Nebula. Nebula is a creatorowned streaming service that isn't built to make giant profits for venture capitalists or big tech. and were funded by fans, not advertisers, which is why Nebula can afford to support creators and give them a platform to make the videos they want to make. When you sign up, you not only get

01:34:22

early access to all of my videos, ad free and sponsor free, but also the videos from over 200 other talented creators, as well as Nebula originals, special shows, and documentary films that are only available on Nebula. Nebula also has an AI policy and we're committed to creating real content by real people. We're not totally against ever using AI, but it needs to be useful and accurate. And most importantly, it can't be unethically trained off of copyrighted works without the original

01:34:52

creators permission. And today, that's just not the case with Grand Theft Auto here. If you share our vision for a better platform for content creators or you just want to support my channel so that I can make more videos like this one, then I'd encourage you to try Nebula. If you sign up at the link go.nebula.tv/notusbikes, you'll get 40% off an annual subscription. Nebula also has gift cards and my Dutch viewers will be glad to know that you can buy them with Ideal. Thanks to everyone who supports this

01:35:22

channel on Nebula, on Patreon, or even here on YouTube by watching this video all the way through to the end. I appreciate it.

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[John Eldon]

I am sure the opposition is looking for refereed journal articles, etc. 

John 

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bicycledriving/485F2F87-E6E9-4948-8F86-068AFBFBE7F2%40gmail.com.

[Frank J. Lehnerz]

John,

Oh of course. 

One of the problems is academia isn’t too friendly to so-called vehicular cycling or bicycle driving. Many in the field are activists first and honest academics last. 

I do see they cited the Marshall and Ferenchak study claiming « protected » bike lanes increases safety for all road users. Paul Schimeck noted it had severe methodological errors and wrote a letter (attached) to the journal. 

[John Eldon]

Yup -- hard to fight against religion.

John 

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Here’s also something from M Kary on the use of epidemiological methods in bikeway studies. 

Of course neither are peer-reviewed and published work and we all know it’s difficult to reason someone out of a belief they were not reasoned into. 

Frank 

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