I-Like-To-Bike

WHO (or what organization), specifically, do you consider YOUR peers on evaluating bicycling issues? Does anybody who disagrees with your outlook make the cut?

By what method did you send notice to YOUR peers that you were seeking advice on this issue?

John Forester

You use the phrase "putting bikes on bikeways", which means kicking them off the roadways. The argument justifying this treatment has always been that this makes cycling so much safer that prohibiting the use of the roadway would be justified. However, bikeways cannot make cycling safer to any significant extent, and probably make it a bit more dangerous, besides encouraging negligent, and therefore dangerous, behavior by cyclists.

If bikeways are provided only for those who choose to use them, believing (I think incorrectly) that their advantages outweigh their disadvantages, that can be considered reasonable. But the right of those who recognize, correctly, that vehicular cycling is better than cyclist-inferiority cycling must not be infringed merely to satisfy either erroneous public opinion or the desire of motorists for bicycle-free roadways.

John Forester

Well, such people as Steven Goodridge, John Allen, Dan Gutierrez, of course.

I sent them, and others, email letters.

While we have certain disagreements, we all agree that vehicular cycling on good roads is better in typical American cities than is cyclist-inferiority cycling, whether on roadways or bikeways, and that this is supported by the weight of the scientific evidence available. While many people and organizations have spent much effort trying to demonstrate that cyclist-inferiority cycling is safer or more convenient than vehicular cycling, they have failed to do so. The only advantage of cyclist-inferiority cycling is that it appeals to motorists and to people who have not learned to obey, while cycling, the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. Were scientific information supporting the safety and convenience of cyclist-inferiority cycling in a nation in which cyclists are free to choose happen to be discovered, we would have to consider the basis for our opinions, but that has not yet occurred, and, I doubt, from the Bayseian perspective, that there is any likely probability of such discovery.

Mos6502

Well you have me there. Since by simple laws of physics no object can occupy two spaces at once, I suppose if a bike is on a bikeway at a given point of time, it cannot possibly also be on the road. But that doesn't necessarily mean it has to be off the road permanently.

Always?

Well everything being equal (which admittedly it is not), using a bikeway shouldn't be any safer or more dangerous than using the road. The second part is dubious at best - lack of education encourages dangerous behavior. You can go to a city with no lanes paths trails, etc. - and you will still see uneducated riders operating their machines in unsafe ways. This is not a problem inherent in the concept of bikeways, paths, trails, lanes, etc - it is a problem inherent in people in general.

In any event, using the term "cyclist-inferiority cycling" simply isn't appropriate unless the cycling really is inferior.

And back on topic even, I still don't see the generalities of the article being flawed even if we take into account your nitpicking of semantics. We're still going to see that major roads are more dangerous than minor roads, etc. It might shift some of the statistics a bit, but overall it'll still be much the same.

John Forester

To go to your last question, the intent of the reviewers, and my intent also, was to identify bicycle infrastructure changes in features that reduced the crash rate. The reviewers, taking into account the corrections in their data that I suggested, found no such reductions. Of course, it is likely that minor roads have a lower crash rate than major roads, but that difference is not produced by changes in infrastructure. We cannot expect that major roads will be reduced to minor roads so that the cyclist crash rate will be reduced.

You question my statement that prohibiting cyclists' use of normal roadways (we are not discussing freeways here) has always been justified by claims of reduced crash rate. If you actually question my statement, then please provide a example of several occasions on which the safety argument was explicitly refused when justifying prohibiting cyclists the use of a particular road.

You state that the term cyclist-inferiority cycling should not be used unless the cycling is really inferior. That's not the use of the term that has been established for years. Cyclist-inferiority cycling is that done by cyclists who consider their status to be inferior to motorists, as exemplified by the urgent desire to clear the way for motor traffic instead of standing up for their rights as drivers of vehicles. Of course, such cycling is actually inferior in the opinion of vehicular cyclists, but that is caused by the feelings of having inferior status to motorists.

Bekologist

that is a ludicrous flight of fancy. what an imagination you posess, john forester!

No, john, they reviewed most all of the extant studies and literature and critically examined them for trends. These researchers have published a peer reviewed paper on the efficacy of purpose built, bike specific transportation infrastructure in mitigating cyclist injuries.

Bekologist

JOHN! GET THE RUDIMENTS STRAIGHT! you have the gall to consider yourself a 'bicycle transportation engineer?' with such a gross misunderstanding of basic transportation definitions and useages, your screed is worthless in its inaccuracies.

BZZZT! INCORRECT. please explain to the crowd how 'bikeways', which can include normal travel lanes, shared lanes, wide outside lanes, and sharrowed roads could be somehow misconstrued thru your filters as being 'kicked off the roadways'.

worthless interpretations, john forester. 'bicycle engineer' indeed! it's laughable.

Additionally, both bike lanes, and shoulders are considered part of the roadway by the federal highway administration.

all these most emphatically DO NOT 'kick bicyclists off roadways'. Your intrepretation is lousy, it is transparently, grossly incorrect, and it stinks.

I-Like-To-Bike

Of course! Your "peers" are selected by you and are the handful of people who consider you as the final word on Bicycle Transportation issues and know your typical vituperative reaction to VC acolytes who do not toe the line in deference to your "authority". No wonder your "peer reviewed" screeds get your peers' endorsement. Of course!

cyclezealot

Yes. Round about makes me nervous. It's the closest thing to bumper cars for adults.. Lane changing is out of control and where a cyclist places themselves is a mystery...
I sure recognize when the solid white line more resembles a solid wall between me and the street, I ride much more comfortably.
Oh if the rest of the world could just resemble the bike infrastructure of Germany. I think their highway engineers excel at the contents of this report.

meanwhile

Couldn't this mean creating bikeways and giving cyclists the choice of whether to use them?

I use bikeways in my town in the UK - but I'm not prohibeted from riding on the road.

If a "bikeway" means a seperate facility then the above is very hard to believe. 90% of cyclist deaths come from collisions with cars; if a cyclist is on a car-less track then his odds of death surely go down by a factor of 10.

Unless you anticipate some truly amazing risk compensation behaviour - at least on the scale of tieing rocket boosters to rear racks and bicycle jousting with posion tipped lances.

meanwhile

Why not post your letter here?

Bekologist

a 'critique' by a self professed bicycling transportation ingenue like john forester, someone willing to incorrectly define commonly accepted roadway engineering terms, is NEXT TO WORTHLESS.

invisiblehand

That, of course, I can't prove.

EDIT: Just read further in the thread. You're right.

invisiblehand

John,

When you submit an article to upper eschelon journal -- Is there a top journal that handles a broad range of topics in transportation? I'm thinking of American Economic Review among a handful of others in economics -- who do the editors pick as referees?

If the network of bicycle transportation researchers really is that small, how do you avoid group think and the like?

John Forester

Bek, you have so little understanding of rational discussion that you attempt to play semantic games to suit your ideology. Bikeways are defined by law as: bicycle lanes, bicycle paths, and bicycle routes. That's the legal definition, and I adhere to it. You insist on adding in other names, not specified in the law, and then condemning me for making statements that agree with the law but not with your personal additions to the law.

Bicycle lanes are, by law, part of the roadway. However, they are no longer part of the normal roadway, and they are intended to produce operation that is in conflict with the normal rules of roadway operation. Shoulders are not legally part of the roadway.

Get your facts together before you split your brain with unlawful additions.

John Forester

You say that you ride in the UK. The attitude there is far different from the attitude in the USA. The USA bikeway standards, and the accompanying laws, were designed by motorists, over the opposition of organized cyclists, with the purpose of clearing the way for motorists. That's the difference.

CycleBiker

There is a huge difference between small roundabouts and mini -roundabouts versus large multi-lane roundabouts and traffic circles. With the small roundabouts you simply occupy your lane. All 4-way stops need to be replaced with mini-roundabouts to encourage cycling. Stop signs erected to slow traffic should be replaced with uphill priority cycle pass through chicanes. Unecessary stop signs should be replaced with yield signs.

I can't understand why people want to waste their time arguing away bikeways versus roadways when there is a freaking four way stop sign every few hunderd yards around here.

John Forester

I am fully familiar with the standard procedure for refereeing papers, for I participated in that for several years, and in many discussions about how it should be done. I have known, and obeyed, Bernard K. Forscher's paper Rules for Referees, published in Science, for some twenty years.

If you noted my account, the paper submission process used by the journal Environmental Health and its associated journals had six entries for suggested referees and three entries for referees to be excluded. So they considered the submitter's choice of referees, although, I presume, they were not obligated to follow the request. Normally, referees are anonymous, although I know of cases, at the top of the ladder, in which the names of the referees were admitted.

If you have been reading this material, you will have read that the situation of bicycle transportation engineering is not the standard for professional science. It is done by amateurs, simply because those with money for studies and projects fund according to the cyclist-inferiority bikeway cycling program.

Normally, referees are chosen from persons with a substantial publication record. However, there have been no professional publications in that field. Only Paul Schimek's Dilemmas of Bicycle Facilities and my Bicycle Transportation Controversy papers have been published by professional journals. Now consider those with substantial publishing history. Take John Pucher, so admired here. He has never published anything in the field of bicycle transportation engineering; all he has done is to collect population statistics. Take Hunter, with several papers to his name. They all have to do only with motorists overtaking cyclists, and fail to consider at all the major engineering problems of bicycle transportation. The list goes on and on. Consider the absurdity of the bike box program in Portland (and other places); any simple engineering analysis of the actual operation demonstrates its defects, although there has been much propaganda issued about them. Much publishing that has no engineering at all, and some that is intended to demonstrate the superiority of bikeways but fails to do so through bad management and other problems.

There are very few writers who have concerned themselves with the cyclists' safe operating method, its usefulness, and the design of the facilities that best provide for it. Therefore, the pool of reasonable referees is small.

You consider the problem of group think. Well, that's not a problem All chemists believe the periodic table; that's not a group think problem. The fact that those who have specialized in cyclists' safe operating methods have come to agree that vehicular cycling is appropriate is no more a problem than the chemists' belief in the periodic table. It is the most reasonable conclusion from the evidence.

Bekologist

good grief.

john, get the fundaments straight.

'bikeways' and 'bikeways planning' DO NOT 'kick bicyclists off roadways'.

Until you correct yourself, any input you have about the validity of studies on 'bicycling transportation infrastructure' is rendered worthless from your lying misdirect.

using your analogy, discussing bicycle transportation with a man like yourself -someone who holds such gross misunderstandings of the basics of bicycle transportation issues - is like describing valence shell theory to someone that thinks the periodic table is a list of magazines!

genec

John, the reality is that as long as cyclists are dependent on human drivers understanding and obeying the rules of the road, cyclists are not "safe" sharing the road with larger faster heavier vehicles.

The rules of the road are fine, it is the motorists that refuse to obey such rules that are the problem.

Even the most vehicular cyclist adhering exactly to the rules of the road is admonished to keep their "head on a swivel" due to the improper actions of motorists. That alone is cause for many potential cyclists to simply not ride a bike on shared roads.

Go ahead and throw all the probabilities you want at this issue, the fact is "the weak link" for any experienced, skilled, trained, cyclist remains, the motorist.

invisiblehand

Regarding referees, almost every journal I can think of is at least blind and sometimes double blind. But as a practical measure, it is fairly straightforward to figure out who is writing either the paper or the review. Besides circulating working papers one will see the same people at conferences presenting papers or giving talks on certain subjects.

Like a lot of activists -- i.e., the crazies here and at Chainguard -- I simply read what is freely available. Things like reputation and the rigor of the review process are very hard to assess from the outside since the set of acceptable assumptions appears to vary across disciplines.

It is clear that bicycle transportation research is a drop in the bucket and suffers from a general lack of resources and interest. To be honest, you stating that biases observed in small groups is not a problem in your small group fails to inspire me with confidence. My history of science is far from complete, but I seem to recall that the periodic table was painfully vetted out and went through several iterations. Chemists have moved on to other questions which are argued and examined in excruciating detail. Mind you, I happen to think that vehicular cycling is the optimal strategy for safe cycling in a wide variety of environments. But my casual reading of transportation science suggests that like many other discplines that deal with strategic agents, the interaction between engineering and people is not fully understood.

Anyway, you may not have many options regarding people who take cycling transportation science seriously. But that would be a reason to temper one's results, IMO.

John Forester

I agree completely with your statement: "But my casual reading of transportation science suggests that like many other disciplines that deal with strategic agents, the interaction between engineering and people is not fully understood." However, as always engineering cannot wait until perfect knowledge is achieved. Science has some greater latitude, but even scientists have to work on the basis of imperfect information, and they know it. If there is some reasonable probability that an hypothesis is valid, then one has to operate in accordance with it. You do the best you can with the best that's known. On that basis vehicular cycling has a very high probability of being better than cyclist-inferiority cycling, whether on normal roads or in practical bikeway systems.

Bekologist

that's a VERY interesting concession, john forester. "practical bikeway systems"

John Forester

Well, yes, I exclude bicycle freeway systems from the realm of practical construction and practical politics.

Bekologist

what is a 'practical bikeway system' john forester, in your definition?

more basic and germane to the discussion, what is a 'bikeway?' you're the self professed bicycle transportation ingenue, please provide an accurate definition of a 'bikeway.'

you seem confused, because a 'normal' road can be a 'bikeway' and several classes of 'bikeway' do not 'kick bicyclists off the roadways'

please clarify your misunderstanding of these terms before any more of your rancorous, misleading blather about 'transportation infrastructure.'