Originally Posted by joejack951
Forester took issue with the blanket statement that sidepaths are safer for cyclists because they seperate bicycle traffic from motor traffic. A blanket statement like that implies that under any conditions, the sidepath is safer. He set out, albeit possibly not in the best manner, to prove that blanket statement false. You freely admit yourself that sidepaths are not safe above certain speeds, speed that many cyclists meet or exceed safely on the street.
It's similar to the argument about sidewalk riding. I would admit, that if one took into account all of the limitations of riding the sidewalk and rode accordingly, that sidewalks are safer than the roadway. The problem is that by taking into account all of those limitations, your progress would be pitifully slow (imagine stopping/slowing to a crawl at each and every driveway, commercial and residential, to check for traffic) negating the benefit of riding a bike over walking.
I agree with the above - the blanket statement at sidepaths being less dangerous than the roads is misleading as well. He was applying a
reductio ad absurdum test to the side path. Which is fine, except that it ignores reality, which is that the people that the side paths service ride in the speed range where they'd be in danger on the road. He was also fighting a different battle at the time; he wasn't fighting over whether one facility was more dangerous than the other, he was fighting over legal use of the road, and using this test as a tool to show that it was more dangerous for
him (and people like him) to use the sidepath rather than the road. This test was simply demonstrative retoric which he was applying to the use of the road battle he was fighting.
Self described "serious, high mileage cyclists" many times draw the conclusion that you do with your last sentence, that "taking into account all of those limitions... [would] negat[e] the benefit of riding a bike over walking". This vastly underestimates the usefulness of even slow cycling over walking. Walkers are lucky to get even a couple mph at reasonable effort. Riding a bike even at 10 mph is 5 times faster than walking, and less effort besides. But, as many people have pointed out, Forester does not consider these cyclists worthy of his advocacy. His advocacy is aimed narrowly at trained, voluntary transportational cyclists, of the subgroup of which is high mileage and bicycle at high speed.
My point is that his test was not about absolute safety at all. It is about how valid it is to apply roadway operating procedures to a sidepath. Implicit in the assumption that this test related to absolute safety is the assumption that roadway operating procedures were the safest procedure to operate by in
any environment. This implicit assumption is clearly false, as you have agreed with above.