Fwd: [BicycleDriving] Digest for bicycledriving@googlegroups.com - 5 updates in 1 topic

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Jim Baross

unread,
Nov 18, 2025, 2:59:41 PM (11 days ago) Nov 18
to Cabo Forum
FYI, on the subject of Forester.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/2020/06/john-forester/

Jim Baross
CABO President



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: 'John Schubert' via BicycleDriving <bicycle...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 16, 2025 at 10:41 AM
Subject: Re: [BicycleDriving] Digest for bicycle...@googlegroups.com - 5 updates in 1 topic
To: Digest recipients <bicycle...@googlegroups.com>


I have said this many times:  The worst way to help someone understand safe cycling is to direct him to Forester.

Forester's writing is argumentative, unpleasant sounding and off-putting.  There is such a massive cult that demonizes the guy, that you'll never get past all the nastiness to find the good stuff he had to offer.

For many decades, the good stuff he has had to offer is available in far more pleasant packages:  Street Smarts by John S. Allen; the many published articles by Keri Caffrey; the work of Paul Schimek; the work of Wayne Pein, and many others.  Send people there first.

Forester's been dead for five years.  He was a friend of mine, but I was cognizant of his faults, and also cognizant that we gain nothing by asking people new to the topic to wade through all the sturm and drang that surrounds him.  He deserves to be honored, and the best way to do that is to showcase his ideas and not his grumpy personality.

Here's my farewell to Forester:


John Schubert

On Sunday, November 16, 2025 at 11:26:36 AM EST, bicycle...@googlegroups.com <bicycle...@googlegroups.com> wrote:


John Eldon <j.e...@sbcglobal.net>: Nov 16 12:53AM

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 PSTSubject: 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 <flehne...@gmail.com>: Nov 15 07:12PM -0600

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
John Eldon <j.e...@sbcglobal.net>: Nov 16 01:16AM

I am sure the opposition is looking for refereed journal articles, etc. 
John 
On Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 05:12:36 PM PST, Frank J. Lehnerz <flehne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Here’s an AI-generated transcript with time stamps for those who don’t want to sit and watch something that long. 
 
 
 
00:00:01In 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
00:00:35exclusively 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
00:01:07lot 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
00:01:39would 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
00:02:07at 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
00:02:38knowledge 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
00:03:06infrastructure 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,
00:03:39no, 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
00:04:17sidewalk 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
00:04:49sidewalks 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
00:05:18law 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
00:05:54empathy 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
00:06:25is 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
00:06:57effective 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
00:07:25like 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
00:07:54for 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
00:08:25ride 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
00:08:56would 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
00:09:29look 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
00:10:00long. 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
00:10:29to 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
00:10:59entire 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
00:11:29non-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
00:11:55because 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
00:12:25actual 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
00:12:56feezer 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
00:13:31bicycle 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
00:13:59women, 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
00:14:31talks 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
00:15:00bicycle 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.
Frank J. Lehnerz <flehne...@gmail.com>: Nov 15 07:36PM -0600

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 <https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2214140518301488?via=ihub> 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.
 
 

 
Here’s also something from M Kary <https://john-s-allen.com/pdfs/Kary2014UnsuitabilityOfEpid.pdf> 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
 
 
John Eldon <j.e...@sbcglobal.net>: Nov 16 02:01AM

Yup -- hard to fight against religion.
John 
On Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 05:36:51 PM PST, Frank J. Lehnerz <flehne...@gmail.com> wrote:

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. 
 
 
 
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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 
 
 
On Nov 15, 2025, at 19:16, John Eldon <j.e...@sbcglobal.net> wrote:
I am sure the opposition is looking for refereed journal articles, etc. 
John 
On Saturday, November 15, 2025 at 05:12:36 PM PST, Frank J. Lehnerz <flehne...@gmail.com> wrote:

Here’s an AI-generated transcript with time stamps for those who don’t want to sit and watch something that long. 
 
 
 
00:00:01In 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
00:00:35exclusively 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
00:01:07lot 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
00:01:39would 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
00:02:07at 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
00:02:38knowledge 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
00:03:06infrastructure 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,
00:03:39no, 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
00:04:17sidewalk 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
00:04:49sidewalks 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
00:05:18law 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
00:05:54empathy 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
00:06:25is 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
00:06:57effective 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
00:07:25like 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
00:07:54for 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
00:08:25ride 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
00:08:56would 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
00:09:29look 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
00:10:00long. 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
00:10:29to 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
00:10:59entire 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
00:11:29non-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
00:11:55because 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
00:12:25actual 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
00:12:56feezer 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
00:13:31bicycle 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
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