Originally Posted by John Forester

Your first argument is that the Dutch system appears to be safer. Well, if that is the reason for that system, then there is no safety reason for requiring cyclists to operate in that manner instead of obeying the normal rules of the road, and therefore no legal justification for that requirement.

You refer to science as demonstrating that sharing the road is dangerous. In what way does science do this? When the head of the bicycling facilities engineering section of Dutch government appeared at a conference in Montreal, I asked him on what science did they base their designs upon. He replied that they had no science to determine the value of their designs. Only in recent years have car-bike collision studies been made of the similar Danish system, and those studies demonstrated empirically what we had predicted from engineering analysis decades before, that the separated system increased car-bike collisions at crossing points while reducing them between crossing points. Since the great majority of car-bike collisions occur at crossing points, this demonstrates that, when scientifically studied, that system increases car-bike collisions rather than reducing them.

You opine that vehicular cyclists are thwarting efforts to get the Dutch system installed in America. Well, we have good reason to do so. What has been produced so far in the USA is, nearly always, worse than using the roadways, and we have laws that force us to use such facilities. What other response should be expected? Indeed, even with bike lanes, the best advice to cyclists is to obey the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles while ignoring the bike-lane stripes, because it is difficult to figure out how to outsmart the defective parts of bike-lane systems.

It is clear from your final sentence that your motivation is the anti-motoring one of producing a large switch from motoring to bicycling. There are several problems with your efforts to produce that result. The first, as mentioned above, is that the Dutch system is not safer. The second is that you have no evidence that this system will be accepted in the typical modern city of the USA. The third is that there is no evidence that this system, if installed in the typical modern city of the USA, will actually produce the desired large switch from motoring to bicycling. The conditions are entirely different. In Amsterdam, bicycling is advantageous in its competition against walking. In Indianapolis, for example, bicycling has great disadvantages against its prime competitor, convenient motoring.