John Forester

I consider the present condition, how it became what it is, and what can be expected from it. You advocate some utopian bikeway system that supersedes road use. Where is such? Not even the Dutch have managed that. And America is a particularly unlikely place for such to develop. We have to live with what we have and what improvements we can make to it. American policy for bicycle transportation has been against it for seventy years. One can quite handily name the political powers in highway matters as "motordom". As a result of motordom's activity we once had a law that gave cyclists the rights and duties of drivers of vehicles (RRDV). Then motordom got a law to prohibit such cycling, by limiting cycling to the edge of the roadway(FTR law, 1944). Then, in 1976, when the effects of the FTR law were examined for the first time, even the California Legislature discovered that FTR cycling was often more dangerous than RRDV cycling, so now the laws in most states combine the right to use the RRDV, the prohibition against doing so, and finally some examples of when, possibly, under some circumstances, cyclists may be allowed to obey the RRDV. Utterly confusing. The first adopted bikeway standards, the AASHTO designs, were forced onto cyclists by motordom, to make motoring more convenient, against cyclists' opposition, without regard for cyclists' safety or convenience. The current generation of bikeway designs, the NACTO designs, are specifically designed for use by a population of cyclists without any traffic skills whatever.

The result is that the American cycling population displays four different styles of cycling: obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles, hugging the curb, sidewalk and path riding, and an undescribable mix of unlawful movements.

Neither of the last two traffic laws nor any of the bikeway designs were designed to make cycling safer by using the scientific knowledge we have of car-bike collisions. The evidence is quite strong that cyclists who obey the RRDV do far better than the general cycling population, no matter to what extent they use bikeways. That is why I have spent forty years advocating that cyclists obey the RRDV, and training them to do so. That style of cycling is the best that is available in America. That does not mean that cyclists should never use bikeways; quite often bikeway cycling and RRDV cycling coincide, but that is by coincidence rather than by design. RRDV cycling will continue to be the best available until the utopian bikeway system appears. However, the probability that America will produce such a system is substantially zero, in my opinion, based on American history.

Despite the fact that RRDV cycling is the best available, it is politically impossible to impose it on American cyclists and American bicycle advocates. They won't allow it. So, there we are, having deliberately, by policy, produced a lawless cycling population, and that is a fact that we have to live with when considering what possible forms American bicycle transportation can take. I don't like this lawless population, so don't accuse me of advocating it. All that I advocate is what I think can be best produced from the situation in which we now exist.