Hey Everybody! Speaking of debunking, perhaps the Subject's grasp of reality can best be understood by his own listing of his (and therefore cycling's) enemies. I came across this gem from my archives of Forester Funnies. It was posted on the now all but defunct Bicycle Transportation Institute (BTI) list: Note Initials have been substituted for actual names except for man with all the enemies. Be sure to reasd the last paragraph, its a doozy.
Re: Organization
From: John Forester
Feb 18, 2001 20:15 PST BTI
I have been considering both D.S's assertion that the enemies of vehicular cycling are well organized, and J. A's thought that this is not quite so. As I see it, the enemies of VC consist of a ill-assorted alliance of several groups, some better organized than others.
By far the best organized of our enemies is the highway establishment. However, they are not organized to oppose VC; they are organized to suit the multitude of their purposes, and have been so for almost a century. The highway establishment is controlled by an army of professionals with largely common training, interests, and perspective. At one time I thought that they would be allies, because it seemed to me that they would see that their customers, motorists, would be better off with lawful, competent cyclists than with unlawful, incompetent ones. However, it has not turned out that way. The highway establishment has decided that motor traffic goes better when cyclists are kept out of the way as much as is practical. In making this decision, it has been influenced by the thought that no significant proportion of cyclists will ever become competent. In that it is probably influenced by the failure of American motorists to become supremely competent, because of the perception that riding a bicycle in traffic requires far greater competence than driving a car in traffic.
The least organized of our enemies is the general public, who are powerful despite their lack of organization because they are numerous, because as motorists they both dislike and are afraid of VC, and because they are the customers of the highway establishment. The highway establishment fears going against the public's wishes, for obvious reasons. The general public fear that, as motorists, they will either be delayed by cyclists or will get into nasty accidents because cyclists are using the roads, and they fear, when considering cyclists, that VC is much more dangerous than cycling on bikeways of various kinds, or than cyclist-inferiority cycling on normal roads. Almost by definition, the members of the general public are not professionals in either the highway or the cycling fields.
The environmentalists are pretty well organized for their own interests. Except for the top level in their organizations, they are dedicated amateurs. However, their transportation interests are anti-car, which makes them anti-vehicle and pro bikeway. Their organization is fairly weak when it comes to questions that only concern cycling. They have little connection with the highway establishment, being largely against highway improvement, but they are effective in obtaining environmentalist patches over what they consider to be the worst applications of the motoring ethos. And, of course, those environmentalist patches on highway projects naturally include bikeways rather than roads properly designed for both motoring and cycling. The closest organizational connections that the environmentalists have, at least as is relevant to cycling, is with the urban planners and with the bike planners. Being convinced of the dangers of automobile travel, they do not favor vehicular cycling, but only bikeway cycling.
The urban planners have a well-organized professional organization, whose work is written into the legal requirements for designing and improving urban areas. In this they are powerful, although they cannot go against the wishes of the general public and, particularly, the powerful politicians. For many years, and for the likely future, the urban planning profession has been, and will be, largely anti-automobile. Being convinced of the dangers of automobiles, while they advocate more bicycle transportation, they advocate only bikeway cycling. They are largely ignorant about real cycling, and bicycle transportation is only a minor issue with them.
The bicycle planners are a different profession from the urban planners, being officially concerned only with bicycle planning. Insofar as cycling is concerned, the bike planners are the most intensely organized of our enemies. They are organized because their entire livelihood depends on making and implementing bike plans. Therefore, for them everything depends on the credibility of what they like to think of as a learned profession. However, they cannot operate alone. They need the cooperation of the highway establishment, to fit into the highway system, and they need the generosity of the national and state legislators for money and of the local city councils and county supervisors for space in which to spend the money. They also depend on the national highway establishment for their intellectual credibility, because organizations such as the National Highway Administration, the National Traffic Safety Administration, and the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials provide the research and the documents that provide, however weakly, the intellectual justification for the bike planning activity. Not that the highway establishment does this without self-interest; the highway establishment has provided the bike planners with the means of carrying out the highway establishment's desires regarding bicycle traffic. With their intensity in belief and their organizational connections with the highway establishment, the bike planners are our strongest opponents.
The bicycle advocates are the amateurs, at least they are largely amateur, who want to promote bicycle transportation because they think it good. One may consider them misguided, in that they predominantly advocate bikeway spending. They are organized around bicycle advocacy organizations, from the national to the local levels, but, at present, that organization is not very strong.
The bicycle industry wants to sell bikes, and it sees that the best way to sell more bikes in total (dividing up a larger pie, rather than each working to get the largest slice of the existing pie) is to get bike paths built. That is their realistic evaluation of public opinion, and that won't change unless public opinion favors more roadway cycling. The industry is organized, and exerts whatever political force it can, but it is a weak industry, both financially and intellectually. An enemy, yes, but only a minor one.
We must not forget that there is another strongly organized and coordinated enemy that pervades all of the above, although it has no members, as such; all that it has is believers. It is the cyclist-inferiority superstition and phobia, the belief that the cyclist who rides in traffic must either delay the cars, which is Sin, or will be crushed, which is Death, and the Wages of Sin is Death. Without that pervasive public belief, all of the above would have been discredited long ago. It is discredited in any respectable intellectual sense, for there is no science behind the cyclist-inferiority superstition. All that keeps all of this alive is the strength of the superstition's grip on its victims' minds. We must remember that, because without recognizing that situation, we can develop no rational strategy, for all normal strategies fail before such an emotional commitment by our enemies.
John Forester