This is a bit long ... and I think it has to be. It's a defense, or perhaps, an apology for John Forester.
How can one not support the man who invented the very simple, very direct, and very necessary Vehicular Cycling Principle: "Cyclists fare best when they act as, and are treated as operators of vehicles"?
I realize that some would argue that, had that been the limit of his polemic, they could support Forester. But, these critics assert, his brusque, even insulting words do more harm than good, and drive away those who would otherwise be powerful advocates for cycling.
I understand this point of view. There was a time when I, too, bristled at Forester's seemingly abrasive words. That was before I met him.
He came to Boston in 2001. He's a charming fellow. Friendly, insightful, and witty. And that's when I began to understand Forester's persnickityness.
Does he savage his opponents? Excoriate them with words? Yes, sometimes he does. But if you look carefully, he reserves this vitriol for two groups of people:
1) Those who use "bicycle advocacy" as a smoke-screen for agendas that are anything but cyclist-beneficent campaigns. We find these kinds of people in areas like:
* Public health ("We need to get more bicyclists out there because Americans are too fat. But we can't expect people to ride in the road -- it's too dangerous! That's why we need facilities!")
* Environmentalism ("We've got to get more butts on bike seats, to reduce air pollution, oil consumption, carbon dioxide and timber clear-cuts! But we can't expect people to ride in the road -- it's too dangerous! That's why we need facilities!")
* Urban planning ("We need to stop sprawl development by getting people to ride their bikes short distances, and make local markets! But we can't expect people to ride in the road -- it's too dangerous! That's why we need facilities!")
* Motoring ("Lycra-clad idiots clog OUR roads, slow OUR traffic, waste OUR time, make us burn OUR gasoline, are a danger to themselves and everybody around them, and should get off OUR roads! That's why we need facilities!")
Not one of these arguments accepts the Vehicular Cycling Principle. Instead, every one champions the idea that only Olympic athletes, fools, or a combination of both would be capable of traveling on ordinary roads by bicycle.
That's what Forester's cyclist inferiority phobia is -- an irrational belief that normal people can't ride in traffic, and shouldn't be expected to try. And when that cyclist phobia is called "advocacy" by people whose agenda isn't to benefit the person who actually successfully rides his bicycle today, but instead, to advance other causes, then Forester is absolutely right to call those people charlatans, frauds, and snake-oil vendors, even if we might personally think those causes are "good." They're selling vapor, and calling them hucksters simply describes exactly what they are.
2) Traffic and transportation engineers and consultants who support the work of the above. These people have access to the research, the data, the logic -- all the honest studies that for the last 33 or so years have ultimately shown two things clearly:
* That there exists no known facility that makes it safe for someone who cannot or will not ride according to simple traffic principles to operate a bicycle, and
* That those who do ride according to these principles are safer, regardless of what facility they ride on -- ordinary road, bike lane, or path.
These people are aware that it's never been demonstrated that facilities create anything more than a couple percent more cyclists than existed before. In fact, there is no society that I know about wherein the middle class has been allowed to own and operate private motor vehicles economically and efficiently, yet have abandoned their use in favor of the bicycle. Every society that's had a modal shift away from private motor use to cycling has done so primarily because the society has made it uneconomic to own and operate a car (with high gas prices, extreme insurance and inspection requirements, high taxes and user fees, and so on), and by refusing to expand the roadway network -- or in some cases, by contracting it -- thereby ensuring traffic congestion and slow speed motoring.
The fact is that the surest way to increase the number of bicyclists is to make every other form of transportation too expensive, too slow, or too humiliating for the middle class to accept. Make the private car a burden, and the bicycle becomes more desirable to more people.
The engineers and planners know these things. But they're paid by the social activists and townspeople who employ them to design and build facilities. So they do. And they buy-in to the snake-oil sales pitches, even though they know they're wrong. Is it so wrong that Forester calls them out?
What about those of us who aren't in these motor-unfriendly societies, yet choose to cycle instead of drive? Why do we it?
The answer is obvious. We ride our bikes not because we have to, but because *we like it*.
Moreover, we understand that we tend to like the things that we do well. So by teaching people to ride safely and efficiently in ordinary traffic, we increase the pleasure of those who choose to ride their bikes, people just like us.
We also show them that the ordinary roads that serve every destination is the primary bicycle facility. That facility is already built, it has simple rules for its use, and it's available to us all months of the year, at all times of the day, serving almost every place we'd like to go.
Thus, we demand that this facility stay open to us, and we further demand that we be accepted on this primary bicycle facility with the same privileges as anyone else. We're fair, too -- we accept the duties of using this facility. So we ride according to traffic rules.
For us, this is bicyclist advocacy. It's education, engineering, and enforcement while riding on the public road. It's the Vehicular Cycling Principle, and John Forester was the first to say it in a simple, understandable form: Cyclists fare best when they act as, and are treated as operators of vehicles.
Like his style, or don't like it. The fact is, he's right. We are not well served when we turn our cyclist-advocacy agenda over to those who aren't interested in our needs, but instead call for our support to endorse other agendas that promote marginal facilities as bicycle necessities. Nor are we served by the planners and engineers who produce the implementations for these things, knowing full well that the promises of the projects cannot be fulfilled by them.
John Forester has the chutzpah to call out the snake-oil bicycle advocates. If that ruffles feathers, well, maybe they ought to be ruffled.
Tom Revay
Boston, Massachusetts