Originally Posted by Bekologist

i think more fundamental of an issue is the disenfranchisement of the public along roads distinctly tenuous for bicycling by the vast majority of bicyclists or potential bicyclists.

i think the dogmatic VC are like the Robert Moses of the advocacy community. Segregation and disenfranchisement thru enforced motoring.

Originally Posted by Bekologist

would suspect so, but the league was in limbo thru much of the time of moses reign.

Originally Posted by SUX Vision R40

True, it seems they most of their early work was from about the 1890's to the 1930's.

Originally Posted by John Forester

This refers to the League of American Wheelmen. Its peak membership year was 1898. By 1912, half of the century run participants were motorists. By 1919 the Leage was no more than a filing cabinet in somebody's basement or attic. There was some resurgence in the Great Depression, when cheap recreation became respectable, and then death again about 1950. Then revival in 1963, as I remember.

Originally Posted by SUX Vision R40

By century run, do you mean those who were around at the turn of the last century, from 1899 to 1900? When was it you ran for election to Executive Director of the LAB? I was a member then and voted against you. For those that do not know the League of American Biccylists, or LAB used to be the LAW.

Originally Posted by John Forester

A century run, or century ride, is a ride of at least one hundred miles to be completed in one day.

I never attempted, by any means, to become Executive Director of the LAB. I was always against the League having such an official, because of the perverse incentives that are built into such an office. The accuracy of my opinion has been thoroughly demonstrated over the years.

Originally Posted by Bekologist

i believe the vc need to stop being follow sheep and start moving towards a 21st century understanding of road and highway designs that facilitate competent community bicycling.

as the vc can ride in bikelanes and on the shoulders of roads in a vehicular manner, there is no fundamental conflict between vc riding and design of roadway infrastructure that benefits bicycle traffic. even sidepaths can be used to great advantage by even the most virulent vehicular cyclist. i've seen it.

case in point: there was a local vc ideologue who used to stalewartly deny all bikeways planning in seattle. the mayor was designating our new bike master plan a few years ago along a major urban trail facility, guess who rides up on the trail despite there being a perfectly good road 50 feet adjacent? the vc ideologue. what a hypocrite. i got a huge laugh out of that, but of course already recognized the validity of trail networks as part of a unified bikeway network for all riders, even the dogmatic vc.

Originally Posted by SUX Vision R40

I think everyone can agree that vc and those that stritcly ride vc can agree the vc philospohy is against traffic calming like speed bumps/humps, and other similar traffic calming devices.

Originally Posted by peter norton, U of VA

"A hundred years ago of course roads were not for cars, because cars were rare, and to make roads places where cars could go, they had to be redefined.

It helps us understand what the street was like to city people then, if we think of what a city park is like to us today. It’s a place where we think of everybody as welcome, provided they don’t get in the way of others, don’t make a nuisance out of themselves, and don’t endanger other people. And it was in the nature of cars to be nuisances and dangerous, and so the early response was to blame the car and to restrict the car.

This started to change partly because people, who had an interest in selling cars and in a good future for cars, saw that this would really limit their future, this attitude would limit their future and that they would have to change it. And to do it, they had to do a number of things at the same time: one is to try to teach children to stay out of the streets. They could not rely on parents to do this because parents at that time thought of the street, at least residential streets, as proper playgrounds for children.


So auto dealers and auto clubs did things like promote the construction of playgrounds, they got involved in school safety education where they taught children to look both ways before they crossed; they started sponsoring school safety patrols where the children would guide each other as they crossed the street, and most importantly, would teach children that the street is a place for cars and not for children

They also had to get adults to concede the street to motorists as well, and reaching them was harder, and they did it in a number of ways, but I think the most effective and most interesting was a campaign to redefine walking in the street as an inappropriate thing to do, an inappropriate use of the street.

And one way they did this was to invent a new term of ridicule, and direct that against pedestrians walking in streets. They used a mid-Western American term ‘Jay’ which was an insult; it meant that you were uneducated and rural, and they connected it with ‘walker’ and invented the term ‘Jay walker’ and it was used as a term of ridicule against pedestrians."