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Notes -
Some notes on John Forester and Vehicular Cycling
After the discussion on last week's cycling CW post had waned a bit, it occurred to me that the name of John Forester had never come up. Indeed, in the context of the two broadly defined "sides" in the discussion we had then, Forester stands out in a manner analogous to the early 20th century eugenicists and imperialists who essentially founded the US National Park system and comservation movement. Some of their ideas pop up uncredited in our discourse to this day, but they dramatically fail to be on either side of the current CW and probably as a result are not widely remembered by name. I am a lifelong cyclist and reasonably knowledgeable about bicycle history and had never heard of Forester until a recent troll thread on 4chan, though some of the advice my dad (also a lifelong cyclist) gave me when I first started riding for transport is pretty clearly Forester in the intellectual water supply--don't be scared of the streets, claiming the lane, staying out of thendoor zone, setting up for left turns, and so on.
John Forester was an engineer by trade and lifelong avid cyclist. The main thrust of his cycling-related advocacy was that "bicycles should be operated like any other vehicle — ridden in the same lanes and manner as cars and trucks rather than in bike lanes or separated infrastructure", a philosophical position which he called Vehicular Cycling. So far, so recognizable, you may well think. However, Forester made himself notorious for actively arguing against the construction of separated bike lanes and bike paths, often in fairly acrimonious terms. His general argument was that the very existence of a designated bikeway, even a hilariously inadequate one (in the door zone, frequently blocked, full of debris, disappearing, located in the right-turn lane but intended for through traffic, etc), would be used to force cyclists into more dangerous and less effective riding strategies, and even a bikeway that avoids these obvious pitfalls exposes cyclists to significant collision risk when it inevitably intersects with a road. Indeed, it sounds like there were a few legal battles along these lines in Forester's area of operations in the 70s. If this all sounds rather baffling to you, it may help to consider the question of whether it's safer to drive on interstates or surface streets. Kinetic energies are much higher on the interstate and it's much harder to just pull over and stop than it is on most surface streets, but interstates are well known to be safer than surface streets (see e.g. https://www.thewisedrive.com/side-streets-vs-interstate-which-is-safer/). Now imagine that, in order to make life easier for commercial trucks and keep passenger cars safe from vehicles much larger than them, it was proposed to legally limit passenger traffic to surface streets. You might, of course, dispute the analogy to cycling on roads vs bikeways, but perhaps it helps clarify the point.
As far as I can tell, nobody in the conversation uses scientific research in what those of us who are familiar with old SSC review articles would consider a convincing and intellectually honest manner, so I'm not going to bother engaging either Forester's studies (he likes to cite Kenneth Cross) or the Marshall paper from the Chi Streets link below. This being the Motte, I'll note that nobody in the conversation seems to have considered the likely impacts of 13/50 on either motorist or cyclist behavior.
Forester claims pretty plainly in his book Effective Cycling that an actually existing credible threat of severe punishment effectively deters truly negligent and malicious driving, which I dunno about. Every so often a motorist kills a cyclist and gets off remarkably easy. (I have been in online conversations about this where someone pipes up to say, well, what about cyclists who kill pedestrians? Sure, them too.). Forester actually cites a number of these cases in his book, but seems to regard them as an advocacy issue more than anything. "Other people should behave differently" would be nice in a lot of cases but is generally not a viable solution to your problem.
On the other hand, in Forester's favor, a lot of actually-existing bikeways in the US do in fact suck in one or another of the ways I've described and my experiences riding in them versus acting like a car generally agree with his. Forester himself was by all accounts an outstandingly disagreeable nerd and a pretty strong recreational cyclist; a good deal of his book is concerned with going faster, though I don't believe that part has been updated since the widespread adoption of the power meter so it's a bit of a 70s endurance broscience time capsule. His interlocutors (e.g. in my links below) seemingly all say things like "don't you know the population that's scared to ride in traffic is more Diverse?", a point which he essentially ignores when the interviewer brings it up. I suppose I take these as indicators of which side I should be on. From a more substantive standpoint, the problem of people who are too slow to ride effectively in traffic is at least somewhat mitigated by e-bikes, though I guess that's a whole different Culture War battle of its own.
Some further reading
Long interview with Forester: https://archive.is/5GwSs
FAQ from the training and advocacy organization that succeeded Forester's Effective Cycling courses: https://cyclingsavvy.org/road-cycling/
Unsympathetic from Strong Towns: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/28/why-john-forester-was-wrong-design-streets-for-the-humans-you-have-not-the-humans-you-wish-you-had
And from Chi Streets: https://chi.streetsblog.org/2020/04/24/r-i-p-john-forester-a-worthy-adversary-in-the-battle-for-safe-biking
I think he's right that, at least some of the time, bike lanes are not really for the benefit of bikers- they're used to force bikers out of the way so that cars can go faster. It seems like we've basically accepted, as a society, that you have a right to drive at whatever is the speed limit on your current street. And anyone who interferes with that is blocking traffic and needs to get out of the way. Which is a little odd, when you think about it- in normal life there's no "right to run" where you can sprint at top speed and just expect people to get out of your way. It might make sense on a freeway dedicated to motor vehicles, but even then, you'll encounter stuff like trucks going at a slower speed and you just have to wait until you can pass them safely.
I've been wondering if this will come up more in the future, as EVs have given a lot more people access to speeds that in the past you'd only see from ultra-expensive supercars. If I pay for 200MPH "plaid speed" from Tesla, why should I be stuck behind some granny going 60 in her 1980s honda civic? Make a "slow car lane" and force her to drive exclusively in that lane so that the rest of us can drive as fast as we want! Oh, and if she accidentally drifts into the "regular" lane, make her pay for the damage to my car. Or at least, that's how it feels like from the perspective of someone who got used to cycling on rural roads and is suddenly told he's not supposed to do that anymore.
We sort of already have this. Many states reserve the far left lane for passing only, and cops will absolutely pull you over and ticket you for driving too slowly in it. Speeders get a pass; those following the speed limit get a fine.
This is true, but enforcement in the US is quite a bit more notional than real, ime. I wonder what the equilibrium effects of a stricter norm around this would be--maybe slower traffic would be less disruptive if the left lane was consistently open for passing.
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Sure, but that's different because it's temporary. You wait for a safe chance to pass, gun it, then move back to the normal lane and speed once you're clear. You're not supposed to just continuously barrel along the left lane at twice the speed of the right lane, which is the equivalent of cars vs a bike lane. Of course, people do that anyway...
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Yes, because speed limits are one of the most abused tools of legislation in the modern world (over the cross-section of people affected by them).
Legislators/certain factions of society impose them for reasons that have nothing to do with safety, but forget that respect for their laws is a two-way street; drivers then treat the laws (and by extension those who insist they be followed religiously, or those who aren't capable of breaking the lowest-common-denominator speed limits due to some infirmity) with the zero respect the law affords them.
They're also a way to put the bikers in a place where drivers are expecting, or can learn to expect, them to be. Though really, it's just a hack around not having the space to put in a grade-separated lane because drivers stupid enough to be on their phones (or the aformentioned granny who can barely even see) can't lanekeep (as in, not intrude on the bike lane) to save their lives.
It still gets people killed when the bike lane empties onto the road for that reason, too; the "everything needs to be high up because people who are bad enough drivers to get into rollovers deserve to die less than the pedestrians" safety standards don't help (you can't see out of modern cars unless you make the effort; that and modern hyper-bright eye-level [if you're in a normal car] headlights are why everyone loves tall SUVs simply because tallness gives you [the illusion of] better visibility, and I'd argue that if you screw up so bad you end up on the roof you deserve to die more than the people someone else is going to run over because they can't even see them when pulling out of the drive-thru or making a right turn across the bike lane).
This is why the meta is "put things in between the cars and the bikes at the expense of road usability", because it takes away the road's ability to support reasonable speeds by putting things in the way while at the same time functionally getting a grade separation between cars and bikes. Even those fucking texters still have self-preservation instincts and you can trigger them by making the lanes so narrow that they're more scared of the F-350s and the collapsible-yet-still-capable-of-damaging-the-front-end separation pipes/rails boxing them in than they are missing the latest Facebook post for 5 more minutes.
Wouldn't you normally expect them to be in the road, like right in front of you in the easiest possible place to see? Not shunted off to the side, into their perepheral vision, in a place where you can 99% ignore them until it's time to make a turn and then "oops, I never saw him." But ok, maybe you're right that drivers are just so phone-addled these days that the periphery is the only place they can actually see. Too bad modern car designs (like you mentioned) make it exceedingly difficult to see the blind spots.
Yeah, this is a fairly significant component of practical vehicular cycling advice.
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