Originally Posted by John Forester

I work to allow cyclists to operate according to the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles, against the American discriminatory traffic laws and bikeways that try to prohibit them from doing so. The American discrimination against cyclists has several evil effects. Rather than allowing cyclists to operate in a safer manner, it allows the police to harass cyclists who are operating within the normal laws. Rather than giving cyclists the option of deciding whether or not to use a bikeway, it requires them to do so even when not using the bikeway would be the safer option. This discrimination against cyclists legally justifies bad treatment by government and socially justifies bad treatment by motorists.

In America, cyclists operating according to the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles get a better deal than do cyclists who obey the discriminatory laws. This is a fact of American life that you, Hagen, find difficult to understand.

There are no signs that the American program for bicycle transportation is going beyond this discrimination, no matter what some bicycle advocates hope for. And I see no signs that the admired European examples are without this discrimination. Given this American discrimination, I see no likely path to some cycling heaven. Of course, we vehicular cyclists are completely unable to stop the progress of American bikeways based on this discrimination. We have been beaten for thirty-five years, and we still get defective bikeways that are based on discrimination.

Therefore, the most that vehicular cyclists might be able to obtain is relief from the requirement to operate according to the discriminatory laws and return to the old, old, system of operating with the full rights of drivers of vehicles. With the road system that we have, such relief would provide the option of doing whichever is best from the cyclist's point of view, obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles or doing whatever the other system might appear to require. In short, operating as a competent adult or as a person assumed to be incapable of obeying those rules.