Originally Posted by John Forester

I have just read Pucher's latest paper as given on his part of the Rutgers website, months before publication.

For a professor of planning, Pucher is less than competent, because he has failed to take notice, or has deliberately ignored, some of the most important planning aspects of his subject. He keeps harping on the fact that, in his favored cities, bicycle transportation dropped markedly when motoring became widely available, and then recovered as anti-motoring and pro-bicycling policies were introduced. These cities grew up without motoring, meaning their urban pattern with all of its commercial, governmental, and social characteristics grew so that all these characteristics worked together in the absence of motoring. There had always been a little motoring since the dawn of the automotive era, but not enough to seriously upset matters. Then, after WW2, motoring became widely available. It is worth noting that in Germany, one of the richer of these nations, Hitler's People's Car was not sold to the public until about 1948. (I had a 1947 one, but that was probably one of those purchased by the British government.)

Once motoring became widely available, there was first a rapid increase in it. Only later did it become obvious that these Obsolete Pre-Automotive Cities were unsuited for motoring. Then it was decided to take measures, some of which involved clearing the way for cars, others of which involved making motoring more costly and difficult, and still others of which involved making special facilities for bicycles. As one would expect from the essentially short-term impulse caused by the addition of motoring to conditions that had existed for at least a century, many centuries for some conditions, the system returned to a system not so far different from what it had been before.

The profession of urban planning ought to be able to consider cities in a systematic way, such as I have just outlined, but Pucher fails to do so. I hear from others in the planning profession that Pucher is considered to be a distant outlier with an axe to grind. I don't know whether his failure is because of ignorance or deliberate choice, but I suspect that this is a matter of ideology.