Originally Posted by Brian Ratliff

RE: John Forester and his side path test:

I thought it was common knowledge that one doesn't ride sidepaths at the same speed as on the road. It sounds like he rode a sidepath at over 20 mph and never yielded at an intersection to get the results he did.

His test only proves that one cannot ride at 20 mph on a sidepath. He leaves out the obvious conclusion that there are probably speed bands on various cycing environments. On the road, he might well be unsafe at speeds from 0-10 mph while safe at speeds from 10-25 mph. On the sidepath, it is likely that 1-15mph is likely safe, but 15mph and up is unsafe. Another conclusion he conveniently leaves out is that sidepaths require different yielding patterns than the road.

So, you can argue that a facility wrongly imposes a speed limit on a cyclist and forces them to yield where the path crosses a street, but I don't see how you can argue from this that sidepaths are more or less dangerous than the road. His formation of the 1:1000 ratio is laughable, since he is not comparing apples to apples.

Originally Posted by John Forester

I compared cycling on a roadway with cycling on the adjacent sidepath, because the law required that the sidepath be used instead of the roadway, ostensibly (But not actually; the truth is more complicated.) for the reason that the sidepath was safer.