Originally Posted by sggoodri

Besides the government policies and social attitudes that treat cyclists as having inferior rights to roadways, John Forester talks a bit about the attitudes that cyclists have about their own cycling on roadways. Here he uses the terms "superstition" or "phobia" to describe some cyclists' concerns about road sharing. Here I prefer to make finer distinctions than he does. While I think there is a lot of overestimation of danger, and a socially-reinforced taboo effect at work, I do not think that is adequate to describe the situation.

I think many experienced cyclists who are not afraid of being hurt by cycling on roadways, including narrow roadways where drivers must change lanes to pass, often have other concerns about riding on certain roadways, and that it is counterproductive to dismiss these concerns too easily, e.g. with oversimplistic language. These concerns include:

1. The desire to reduce inconvenience to other drivers when exceptionally bad roadway engineering creates hassles for auto drivers sharing the road with cyclists. The cyclist feels that his inconvenience of avoiding the roadway is less than motorists' inconvenience at his use of the roadway.

2. The desire to avoid harassment. The cyclist knows that he deserves to use the roadway, but finds horn honks and deliberate close passes unpleasant.

3. Aesthetics. The cyclist prefers routes with less traffic for aesthetic reasons.

These concerns drive a significant amount of bikeway planning, such as increasing the connectivity of neighborhood streets via both roadway and short-cut paths, mapping and signing bike routes through complicated back roads for wayfinding, and building extra width into busy roads in the form of wider outside lanes, wide paved shoulders, and bike lanes. Interest in these efforts is reasonable, in my opinion, for cyclists who do not have a fearful, inferior view of their status as roadway users.

I think that John Forester supports a number of these planning efforts, e.g. he has described support for wide outside lanes, however, that sometimes gets lost in the debate about what "cyclist inferiority" means.