Cycling Safety Conference

[John Forester]

To other persons and groups also.

This is a report on some aspects of the Sixth International Cycling
Safety Conference held in Davis, CA, last week.

The conference format: The conference lasted two days. Each major
presenter was given fifteen minutes of time. Each minor presenter, of
which I was one, was given one minute of time in which three slides
could be shown, plus a space in which to hang a poster, 3-foot wide and
four-foot high, that could be read and questioned by passers-by for an
hour. There were three super-major presenters, selected by the
management, who were given one hour each.

My three slides, courtesy of John Allen, showed a green bike lane
leading to a bike box; a left cross car-bike collision situation; a
wrong-way sidewalk cyclist perplexed by car traffic at an intersection.
My description of the first slide was: "American society wants cyclists
to be so dumb as to overtake on the right-hand side of traffic that may
turn right, so they get smashed in a right-hook collision." The
statements for the other two slides had the same structure: "American
society wants cyclist to be so dumb as to ...." followed by the crash
description.

My poster listed the most frequent car-bike collision situations, from
the most frequent to as long as the poster could hold. The situation was
described in black print. Below it, in red print, was the vehicular
cycling instruction of how to avoid this situation. Then, in blue print,
was American society's instruction, if any, to the cyclist to avoid this
situation. For some situations, American society's instructions directed
the cyclist right into the collision (as in overtaking on the right-hand
side of motor traffic that may turn right).

One of these super-major presenters was Prof. Peter Furth (a prominent
sidepath advocate), who announced that his intention was to refute
vehicular cycling. He did not; in fact he didn't even try to refute
vehicular cycling. He provided only one item of traffic engineering,
Caltrans treatment of Camino Rio del Norte, in San Diego. This is a
divided highway that works up to five lanes eastbound, three for
straight-through traffic and two for right-turning traffic (Furth called
this seven lanes, counting the two lanes on the north side of the
dividing structure.) Caltrans installed the standard design, giving a
long distance for the drivers (cyclist and motorist) to sort themselves
out into 3 lanes on the left for straight-through motorists, 2 lanes on
the right for right-turning motorists, and a lane between them for
straight-through cyclists. At this intersection there are no
right-turning cyclists, as I recall. So cyclists were placed where all
the motor traffic on their left had to continue straight, and all the
motor traffic on their right had to turn away from them, to the right.
Furth objected to this design because having motor traffic on both sides
of the cyclists frightened them, even though there could be no
conflicting motor traffic. In addition, Furth repeatedly posted my
statement, in a jeering manner, that sidepaths were 1000 times more
dangerous than obeying the rules of the road. The rest of Furth's
presentation merely claimed that sidepaths were popular.

You may have heard of this as The Great Furth/Forester,
Sidepath/Vehicular Cycling Debate. Think again. There was no prearranged
debate. Of the hour time allowed, Furth managed to grab about forty-five
minutes (and the management did not stop him), leaving me with about ten
minutes to make my argument for vehicular cycling and to correct the
worst of Furth's errors. My argument was quite simple. The rules of the
road system is accepted by its users because, over a century of use, its
difficulties have been ironed out. It provides reasonably safe,
reasonably efficient and reasonably equable highway transportation. The
Anti-Motoring Cyclist-Inferiority advocates (AMCIs), such as Furth,
discard this system and replace it with the sidepath system, which has
many more crossing collision points, some of which are very dangerous,
which is more complicated, more expensive in both capital and operating
cost, and which destroys the rights of cyclists as drivers of vehicles,
leaving them as trespassers. Furthermore, to achieve their objective,
AMCIs have adopted Motordom's program for making motoring more
convenient by kicking cyclists off the roadway. Thus Furth, with other
AMCIs, has made a series of choices, each being harmful to cyclists, and
have therefore violated engineering ethics. Thus Furth, with the others,
ought to be utterly and thoroughly ashamed of themselves.

AMCIs have made themselves quite obvious. In the interest of reducing
motoring they want a cycling traffic system for everybody, which can be
operated by persons without any traffic training, wearing business
clothes, and by cyclists whose only qualification is that they don't
fall down. In my opinion, this is impossible. Nobody has achieved it.
But in trying to implement such a system in the American physical,
climatological, urban patterns, and social settings, I say that the
AMCIs have forced themselves into a system which is limited to slow, and
therefore short range, flatland transportation. But AMCIs refuse to
admit that their system is so limited. Not only that, but they denigrate
those who would make better use of bicycle transportation by obeying the
rules of the road to achieve higher speeds and greater distances, over a
wider choice of roads, to a greater number of destinations.


--
John Forester, MS, PE
Bicycle Transportation Engineer
7585 Church St, Lemon Grove, CA 91945
619-644-5481, fore...@johnforester.com