You mean there's an insiduous conspiracy? a master plan to get all cyclists off the road which was put into play 20-30 years back? Is our future already pre-determined and we are destined to be dropped into the boiling pot of zero road access with absolutely no say in the matter? If not then your analogy doesn't really work.

Perhaps the changing attitudes by society as a whole towards the place of the bicycle and towards the automobille has something to do with the increasing trend towards segregated and other 'special' facilities for cycling. It's not a change that many of us are happy with but the reality of the situation is that we (utility cyclists) are a very small minority of the total road using population and accordingly have a very small, virtually insignificant say in the matter. that's just the inevitable outcome of being heavily outnumbered within a democracy.

Rest assured that this situation will change in our favor, but not for our advocacy efforts. It will take fundamental and cataclysmic shifts in society as a whole for such change to happen and we simply do not have the power to impact society in such a way. Perhaps if peak oil predictions are correct and affordable crude oil goes into decline, or if global warming has the worst-case impact some are predicting then maybe we'll see the end of society's love affair with the automobille. Untill then we are the mouse in a cage full of angry gorillas and as such I'll take whatever I can get, if that means some segregated facilities then so be it.

No you didn't, but I find it funny that some can't resist putting the shoe on and running with it as soon as it is mentioned. This thread is already proving my point...some people simply refuse to compromise and will do anything in their power to ensure NOBODY compromises. Seriously, Brian, how many times have we seen this happen in A&S in the past? I figure we probably got a better chance getting peace in the middle east.

How sad that those who claim to want to retain their right to the road will ultimately be the cause of that right getting taken away because they were too freakin stubborn to put reality over dogma.

HH has his analogies and lobsters that define his own thought process better than cycling issues; Galen just loves his straw man arguments to belittle other cyclists who don't meet his standards. Before he had the straw man "extremists" demanding special facilities for bike on every street and road; now Galen can belittle those straw man "extremists" seriously planning to add additional infrastructure to wilderness areas just to accommodate cyclists.

Why not take your "advocacy" to Chainguard? They love this "stuff."

I see your points. I can see how if a governing board has an ulterior motive or is looking to find justification/support for a particular proposal, that extremists can hinder the process. And I did not want to imply that Chip's scenario is impossible.

My casual observation is that the A&S forum is far more polarized than typical discussions among local groups. Mind you, I have only become involved since moving to the DC area. So this locality might be the outlier. I also suspect that there are a lot more moderates in this forum that simply read the posts and choose to participate on a less frequent basis. Although by the very nature of the statement, I can't prove it.

Moreover, I believe that if we gathered the forum's usual suspects and had face-to-face conversation, we could find a lot of advocacy topics that we agree upon. In another thread, I mentioned DC's mandatory registration laws as an example. The topics that incite the most fervor tend to be fairly expensive projects. So there should be a lively discussion. But I still think that if the parties were brought together to hash out a deal, it would be made.

I read about the League of American Bicyclists and a subgroup that wanted to take over. Are they now leaving the League?

The LAB-Reform group left, departed, and/or were ousted several years ago. Their chief issue appears to be that the LAB organization fails to promote John Forester Brand education programs.

Several of the handful of their members are participants in BF discussions. Bruce R. and John F., charter members of the LAB-reform group, even ran for seats on the LAB Board recently. The membership turned thumbs down on 'em in the vote. The organization appears to have gone dormant since then.
http://www.labreform.org/

Yes, ILTB, Galen's straw man is indeed made of straw. First of all, there isn't enough wilderness to create a coast-to-coast bike trail, and although I keep most of the jokers in this thread on ignore, I didn't see anybody say this was a wilderness trail. (You guys do know that bicycles are not allowed in designated Wilderness, right?)

I think what was said was a coast-to-coast bike trail completely separated from cars so that you couldn't even see or hear them. Basically, not just a bike lane on the Interstate, but a special trail to enjoy the countryside in relative peace and tranquility and to have it be a bicycle adventure, not just a road trip by bike.

Anyway, thanks, ILTB, also for the little update about LAB reform. Makes sense they are some of the most ignorable people around this forum.

Maybe you should quit pretending to be a cyclist and just hire a rickshaw

Do you we are better off being inclusive and tolerating all opinions?

Personally, I think that having a few people take a strong position at opposite side of the spectrum is a good thing. Long story short, it prevents "group think" where quite silly, naive, and/or ignorant proposals actually get implemented.

It can make certain conversations a lot of work ... especially in an electronic forum.

Since we have been talking about the extremes and extremists and in some fashion or another HH always comes up, let me write that I do not find HH and some of the other VC proponents particularly extreme. That is, there is a logic and stream of reasoning behind the arguments and I find that you can have a discourse on the subject matter without it becoming a shouting match. Without a practical problem at hand--say the changes to the Montgomery County road-code linked below--it is hard to come to a compromise since most of the discussion is abstract/anecdotal.

http://www.internetigloo.com/mobike/

I am listed as a supporter on the LAB-Reform web site, and I think they have made constructive progress at improving LAB's policies and their education program.

This weekend I completed my LCI training and am now a League Certified Instructor. The veteran instructor who trained us at the seminar described how there has been a renewed effort at improving the LAB's education program, including improving the quality of the instructors. The instructor manuals and student manuals are being revised. John Allen, a regional director of LAB, is an essential part of this education reform movement, and is in constant communication with the LAB-Reformers, although his name does not appear on the LAB-Reform page. I think John Allen is playing "good cop" while the LAB-Reform organizers are playing "bad cop". Personally, I prefer playing good cop when I can.

At the seminar, I was inspired to learn about successful bicycle education programs for junior high students. Our seminar instructor works full time in bicycle education, teaching sixth graders in school, with lots of on-bike practice. He owns and maintains all of the bicycles and related equipment, bringing them to school in a trailer. However, they must practice all their skills on school property. In Hawaii, the school systems teach cycling starting in fourth grade and the skills development includes practice on the public road system.

http://www.honolulu.gov/dts/bikeed.htm

I was inspired to hear how much these education programs increased cycling in those communities, such as the before/after ratio of bikes parked in the bike rack at the school. I would really like to see more of this type of bike education program in our schools. At some of our local schools, kids aren't even allowed to ride bikes to school.

I have seen this website. I get the sense that a big portion of their argument is that process has been changed to prevent alternative opinions from being represented and that membership has decreased due to ineffective advocacy. They also have a page that criticizes (loosely defined) LAB policies and actions ...

http://www.labreform.org/BFC.html

Anyway, like other organizations, they are entitled to their opinion and act in a legal fashion.

I served on a planning board and personally stopped lots of bad designs from being implemented.

If nobody in the engineering department, development review staff, or planning board understands vehicular cycling, door zones and sidepaths will proliferate, because the political desire for continuity in facility type will encourage developers to install the wrong facility type in a given location rather than using best practices based on context.

For instance, if a bike path starts on one side of a neighborhood and continues on the other, the developer will get pressured to shoe-horn a multi-use path through the development, in the form of a badly designed sidewalk-type sidepath if need be, rather than bike lane stripes, wide outside lanes, or just low-traffic residential streets.

If a bike lane starts on one part of a street and continues on another part of the street, those installing on-street parking in the middle will be encouraged to stripe door-zone lanes rather than wide outside lanes with or without sharrows outside the door zone.

Engineering and planning departments need to be educated about how to avoid violating normal vehicular cycling rules and best-practices engineering in context when building facilities intended for cycling. Unfortunately, the political emphasis for bicycle facilities has prioritized quantity over quality, continuity over effectiveness.

Don't dare teach anybody anything... they might figure out you don't need a bike lane...(parish the thought...)

IMO, it doesn't help when the "quite silly, naive, and/or ignorant proposals" are nothing but straw man arguments (see Galen's examples on this thread) offered up repeatedly by a handful of extremists in order to misrepresent the views of all others.

Nor does idle speculation accompanied by fanciful and imaginative analogies (see HH's lobsters) make for useful or productive debate, IMO.

The current issue of American Bicyclist distributed by the LAB shows pictures of presumably the best bicycling facilities in each of the communities awarded BFC status. It's sad how many show door-zone bike lanes and narrow bike lanes on wide, low-volume 2-lane streets. The BFC program emphasizes quantity of segregated facilities (striping, paths) with almost no consideration of quality (door zone, sidepath) of those facilities. When Andy Clarke visited Cary to present the LAB BFC award before city council, he smiled on camera and praised the town's bike facilities and the town's bike map, which he held folded in his hand. But as he later admitted, he had not looked at the town's facilities and hadn't even opened the map.

Incidentally, the photos of Cary in this issue of American Bicyclist were taken by yours truly. They show the intersection of Chatham and Academy street downtown, in front of the historic Ashworth's Drug Store, where I brign my son on the bike to get ice cream, and they show the Black Creek Greenway, which I ride to the local parks and to nearby singletrack MTB trails.

-Steve Goodridge

For ignoring them, you sure do talk about them a lot and get your chamois in a bunch about them! ;)

That is indeed what I said, and also said I fully understood it's not even remotely practical. If you have a wish, though, why not got for a Quixotic one!:D

I disagree.

You know, this could be productive if you would explain what is about my statement that you think is wrong.

Also, please do not confuse a person's statement with the person. If you say something that is wrong, that makes what you said wrong; it doesn't make you wrong.

The lobsters in a pot metaphor is a common way to describe a situation that seems comfortable at the moment, but is imperceptibly getting worse a tiny little bit at a time; by the time everyone notices, it will be too late.

There is no implied conspiracy or master plan. The fact that people with a plan (cook and eat the lobsters) put the lobsters in the pot is not necessarily relevant to the metaphor, nor is the fact that east coast lobsters have claws, but Pacific Coast lobsters do not.

Hey, I did not say it was efficient! :D

But I agree that there is a balance between allowing debate and moving on towards a conclusion.

Newsflash, the rail right-of-way goes right through all of the towns, too.

And not everyone wants to pedal over the mountain; and you should stop expecting everyone to want to do everything just like you, otherwise the world would be filled with overly sarcastic mofos with bad ideas that no one would like. Did you adopt that attitude from your idol, JF?

:rolleyes:

There are some really nice recreational bikepaths in the Black Forest and other parts of Germany and Europe. They go around lakes, through forests, up and down hills, to vista points, to beer huts, etc. And it's certainly nicer to ride on those paths than sharing twisty narrow roads with motorists. But it's mostly for the relatively slow family/recreational style of biking. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not a solution for serious utility cycling, sport cycling, or commuting of distances longer than a few km, and where speed matters.

Not everyone wants to be spoon fed the warmed-over Pablum of MUPs and bike lanes the cycling-skills challenged want to construct so they can ride their tricycles in their own nether world of thoughtless utopia... (or pay for it)

Your opinion may be valid but unfortunately is made worthless by your sucky attitude. I find it quite ironic that the VCers are driving potentially sympathetic cyclists away with their lousy attitudes. Y'all should (1) be embarassed, and (2) STFU. KMA dude, KMA!

Here is the LAB-reform's stated vision on their website:

Vision for a Cyclist Friendly America
LAB Reform promotes the following goals for Cyclists Advocacy:

• Everyone knows that bicycles are vehicles used on the same roads, under the same rules, with the same rights and duties
• Everyone understands the best practices of Vehicular Cycling
• All bicycle traffic laws are fair and promote safety
• Law enforcement officials enforce the laws fairly to promote safety
• Road rage and other crimes against cyclists are not tolerated
• Parents understand that a bike is a child's first vehicle
• Driving a bicycle is a grown up activity that children are allowed to do
• Traffic engineers treat bicycles as design vehicles
• Every road is regarded as a bicycle facility and every lane a bike lane

Of course, stating a vision and implementing it are two different things, but they seem like good goals.

Substituting acronyms for curse words shows a great attitude....!!!!! NOT

Now go play in the bike lane.....it's safe...really....