Re: [BicycleDriving] Digest for bicycledriving@googlegroups.com - 1 update in 1 topic

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John Schubert

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Feb 5, 2026, 12:56:58 PMFeb 5
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Great piece of writing, Frank!
It's a shame that we have to play wack-a-mole with tiresome bogus arguments.
What's this guy's name?

On Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 11:26:36 AM EST, <bicycle...@googlegroups.com> wrote:


Frank J. Lehnerz <flehne...@gmail.com>: Feb 04 06:00PM -0700

Last year, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Denver Gazette in response
to their coverage on a controversial road diet project in Denver.
<https://www.denvergazette.com/2024/12/12/denvers-crestmoor-residents-hit-panic-button-as-a-bollard-bikeway-heads-for-their-streets-95af48dc-b823-11ef-8859-079c35c9a005/>
What
I found most interesting about their coverage was that it wasn't just
standard "bike lash" but also included comments from local non-cycling
residents claiming the protected bike lane projects imposed in their
neighborhoods were also unsafe for cyclists.
 
I used my letter as an opportunity to mention that this was a perspective
shared among a small yet often marginalized group of fellow cyclists who've
been trying to make this point for decades.
 
To my surprise, one of their journalists called me and we spoke on the
phone for a good hour or so. It helped that he had a cycling background as
well and noted that whenever he rides on this bicycle infrastructure, he
has close calls with turning and crossing motorists along with other
cyclists not paying attention to others in the bikeway.
 
He said they'd have no problem running the letter (capped at 250 words) but
wanted to know if I'd instead be willing to expand it into a longer form
op-ed intended for publication in their print versions of both the Denver
Gazette, the Colorado Springs Gazette, and in their parent publication The
Washington Examiner.
 
So we opted for that. The article spent a few months online before being
put behind their paywall but is still in the Internet Archive.
 
https://web.archive.org/web/20250123224852/https://gazette.com/opinion/denver-columns/perspective-a-cyclist-s-case-against-bike-lanes/article_a43a4006-c3d0-11ef-bc42-ab0617986877.html
 
Interestingly enough, coverage of the safety of the city's bike lanes has
become a bit of a regular occurrence over at the Gazette from both the news
and editorial sides.
 
https://www.denvergazette.com/2025/02/13/are-denvers-protected-bike-lanes-safe-5e54d69e-d831-11ef-a208-eb1f88fe401b/
https://www.denvergazette.com/2025/05/30/editorial-colorado-cyclists-ride-a-thin-line-06cc8eca-fd35-5671-b472-2045237539d2/
https://www.denvergazette.com/2025/10/22/as-bike-deaths-spike-shop-owners-opposed-to-infrastructure-changes-decry-bullying/
https://www.denvergazette.com/2026/01/09/former-chief-traffic-engineer-says-doti-was-right-to-scale-back-alameda-road-diet-plan/
https://www.denvergazette.com/2026/02/03/vision-zero-as-denver-doubles-down-fatalities-keep-climbing/
 
How this never came across my radar, I do not know, but the Education
Manager at Bicycle Colorado wrote a rebuttal to my op-ed over on their
website.
 
https://bicyclecolorado.org/what-are-bike-lanes-good-for/
 
What of course strikes here in this rebuttal follows a very familiar
pattern: the usual misrepresentations, shibboleths, and emotional
manipulation/framing devices that tend to appear whenever protected bike
lane ideology is questioned.
 
He treats “bike lanes” as a single, self-evident concept, ignoring the fact
that this term covers a wide range of designs, contexts, and operating
conditions. This flattening is a prerequisite for defending poor designs
such as the "flex post" and wheel stop "protected" bike lane shown in the
blog photo as though they were interchangeable with good ones or as I noted
in the op-ed, the Colorado Department of Transportation's use of a woman
and child cycling in a door zone bike lane for their bicycling safety
manual.
 
He then brings up Forester, and mangles his infamous, "Cyclists fare best
when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles." I didn't bring up
Forester intentionally in my op-ed since he already lives rent-free in the
minds of these people and there are far more approachable alternatives than
suggesting Forester's books. Predictably, he mischaracterized Forester's
legal and operational argument as a behavioral attitude, which sidesteps
the actual point about predictability, rights, and duties under traffic
law.
 
He insists the treatment of bicycles as vehicles as a 1970s ideological
development from Forester, ignoring the long statutory history of bicycles
being regulated as vehicles (ironic Bicycle Colorado is behind revisions
and re-writes of several traffic statutes) well before modern bike advocacy
or traffic engineering practices.
 
I get accused of relying on anecdotes while he implicitly defines
“evidence” as only that which passes through activist-aligned academic
channels. (As mentioned earlier, my article was intended for print
publication anyway) Independent safety analysis and practitioner-based
research such as those from people here or from the Cycling Savvy folks are
effectively excluded from the record, while subjective comfort and
perceived safety are treated as valid proxies for actual risk. Bringing up
Marshall and his book too was interesting as Marshall is a degreed engineer
but doesn't practice and spends his days in academia as a glorified
activist.
 
He further claims that I failed to address health, sustainability, and
broader urban mobility issues, despite the fact that I devoted multiple
sections to those topics. These sections are simply not engaged or
rebutted. He also accuses "vehicular cyclists" of ignoring land use and
auto-centric design, despite my explicit discussion of practicality,
climate claims, cultural preferences, and trade-offs.
 
It's especially interesting given his job title at Bicycle Colorado in that
he frames education as a secondary or insufficient tool, while feelings of
safety are elevated as the primary concern. This is no surprise as it
reflects a core assumption of protected bike lane ideology: that safety is
chiefly about emotional comfort rather than lawful behavior, situational
awareness, cooperation with others, and conflict management.
 
As usual, emotional examples involving children or elderly riders are used
to short-circuit critique. This framing substitutes sentiment for analysis
and misrepresents what I actually argued. He further asserts that
disagreement with protected bike lane advocacy is repeatedly reframed as
indifference toward certain riders or a desire to force people to ride “a
certain way.” This is an emotional maneuver, not a response to the safety
arguments presented and had he made any genuine attempt to look at Cycling
Savvy, he'd see they don't present a "this is good, this is bad," take but
instead try to encourage people to understand the limitations and tradeoffs
with each cycling behavior mode.
 
Finally, he presents his. flavor of advocacy as inherently virtuous, rather
than as something that should be accountable to outcomes, unintended
consequences, and opportunity costs.
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Frank Krygowski

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Feb 6, 2026, 11:53:13 AMFeb 6
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There was quite a lot of interesting reading there!


In that article, they say former chief traffic engineer "Royer cited one study done in 2022 surveying cities that had adopted VZ.

“Every major city that had adopted it saw an increase in fatalities,” Royer said. “They’re doing the wrong things.”

I wonder what study that was. 

khal spencer

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Feb 6, 2026, 12:24:51 PMFeb 6
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Way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I wrote up a little piece on Bremen, Germany, where separated facilities were in the German model, with emphasis on intersection traffic control for motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians and people rigidly playing by the rules were part of the deal. Engineering controls can work (I worked 15 years in a high hazard nuclear facility and was in charge of one of the laboratories), but only if done right: they must be complete and solve the problem for each of the various hazards in the situation. That thinking is sadly lacking in the U.S., where we just put up bollards and paint stripes and declare victory.  We recently had a cyclist killed in Santa Fe at the Cerrillos Road/St. Francis Drive intersection when the cyclist rode into an intersection in the Cerrillos bike lane with the green and a motorist made an illegal left turn across three "car lanes" and the "bike lane". The cyclist hit him hard enough to be killed at the scene.

I doubt the cyclist and the left turning motorist ever saw each other until, as someone here quips, "the moment of impact", as they were screened from each other by multiple lanes of large vehicles. The motorist was able to stop the oncoming vehicles by blocking the travel lane, but he did not block the bike lane. Bam. The motorist was cited for careless driving and was clearly at fault. I hope he is sued out of his firstborn. The cyclist, a very experienced racer, was dead.

I rode on similar urban arterials (Chuck Marohn calls them "Stroads") in Honolulu almost daily as it was on my bike ride to and from work (Kalanianaole Highway and Waialaie Ave in East Oahu, in case anyone here is from Paradise). I never entered an intersection without slowing a little, observing, and thinking "what the hell can go wrong here"? With or without bicycle infrastructure, defensive riding, situational awareness, and bike handling skills are needed.

I really liked Frank's piece and think Benedict's was myopic. Sure, there are serious tradeoffs. I hound our local designers about the multiple turning and crossing conflicts that are intensified if motorists and cyclists are lulled into thinking they are in different worlds. I was almost smeared all over the pavement on one visit to Boulder when riding in a "buffered bike lane" when a motorist made a high speed turn across it. Fortunately, as usual, I anticipated the worst and just watched him fly by.

Sadly, as Preston Tyree once muttered to us in an LCI training class, too many people think they learned everything they need to know about bicycling by the 4th Grade. And the "pure facilities" people agree.

Khal Spencer
LCI 1173
Santa Fe, NM

On Fri, Feb 6, 2026 at 9:26 AM <bicycle...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
John Schubert <schu...@aol.com>: Feb 05 05:56PM

Great piece of writing, Frank!It's a shame that we have to play wack-a-mole with tiresome bogus arguments.What's this guy's name?

On Thursday, February 5, 2026 at 11:26:36 AM EST, <bicycle...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
 

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- Bicycle Colorado's Education Manager Responds to my Op-Ed - 1 Update

khal spencer

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Feb 6, 2026, 12:36:50 PMFeb 6
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Way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth, I wrote up a little piece on Bremen, Germany, where separated facilities were in the German model, with emphasis on intersection traffic control for motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians and people rigidly playing by the rules were part of the deal. Engineering controls can work (I worked 15 years in a high hazard nuclear facility and was in charge of one of the laboratories), but only if done right: they must be complete and solve the problem for each of the various hazards in the situation. That thinking is sadly lacking in the U.S., where we just put up bollards and paint stripes and declare victory.  We recently had a cyclist killed in Santa Fe at the Cerrillos Road/St. Michaels Drive intersection (oops, I had to correct that) when the cyclist rode into an intersection in the Cerrillos bike lane with the green and a motorist made an illegal left turn across three "car lanes" and the "bike lane". The cyclist hit him hard enough to be killed at the scene.
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