John, I am a safety professional who has been bicycling for many years also. I've also been hit several times, and had two trips to the hospital. I have worked for 35 years in the safety profession, and have been in industry protecting employees from industrial processes. So my perspective is different from yours. In the safety profession, we use the
Hierarchy of Controls to protect employees. Elimination and substitution are the best workplace controls, followed by engineering controls, then administrative and behavioral controls, and finally personal protective equipment.
The problems I see in your position concerning vehicular bicycling is that it depends on the good intentions and competence of both the drivers and the bicyclists. Neither can be relied upon. Vehicular cycling as you have described it (and yes, I've read your book), puts the cyclist into the traffic, to be dealt with as a "vehicle" in the traffic pattern. However, what happens is that the cyclist, even the elite cyclists, creates a deflection of traffic flow patterns. American drivers are notoriously impatient, and I've honked at at 25 mph+ going downhill here in the Portland area. Now, there is a national epidemic of distracted driving which is throwing a real monkey wrench into your vehicular cycling assumptions. And, we still have the epidemic of DUII, which
took the life of one of your main proponents, Ken Kifer.
All of this tells me that we need to look elsewhere for answers to getting more people bicycling, which from your lecture and writings here apparently is not a priority of yours. The
Dutch have very good ideas that are being listened to and brought back here too. When I was a kid, I rode my bike everywhere (1952-1967, after which I entered the U.S. Air Force during the Vietnam War). I rode to school daily, and downtown to the YMCA for swim team practice.
But the traffic then was much different, as Salem, Oregon had a population of 49,313 (I know, as I passed that sign daily riding to grade school). The population today (2011) of Salem, Oregon is not 156,244, mostly on the same roads that I rode my bike on in the 1950s and 1960s. My family had one car, and now most family have one car per adult driver in the household. So things have changed dramatically since you first started the Vehicular Cycling concept in your book (my
Sixth Edition Effective Cycling, by John Forester has a copyright of 1993). So we are facing the same problems that the Dutch were facing in the 1970s with the increasing density of auto traffic, yet we depend on the sale of cars for much of our economy.
The deflection of traffic by the bicyclist I mentioned above is caused by the slower cyclist being in the traffic, and results in what I call a "bicycle-car (or truck) interaction." This happens whenever either the bicyclist or the driver must alter their behavior in response to the other. Whenever this happens with a discontinuity of travel patterns, there is the potential for an error, and a resulting traffic accident. This can happen even to the most competent bicyclist; witness what happened recently to
Bradley Wiggins! "Wiggins was thrown off his bike when a white Vauxhall Astra Envoy is thought to have pulled out of a petrol station in Wrightington and collided with him." I would not call an Olympic Champion and Tour de France winner "incompetent". You'll need to find a better means of explaining accidents such as these, and the same goes for your description of traffic engineers and others trying to find new ways of keeping cyclists healthy and promote cycling in the USA.
John
John C. Ratliff, CSP, CIH, MSPH