Allister

Don't need to be aware?

Keep practicing, newbie. It is entirely possible. Just because you can't do it doesn't mean it's impossible. Maybe not Everything, but in terms of cycling in traffic, everything you need to is well within anyone's capabilities, even yours.

Nothing will do that, Head. At best they are a convention that all road users more or less agree on that gives a bit of predictability to traffic, but nothing will make it 100% predictable, and when it isn't, you'd better be paying attention. 'Best practices' are an excellent supplement to proper awareness, not a replacement.

In the case you so delight in analysing ad nauseum, here's my simple assesment - Robert admits being distracted. If he'd had his wits about him, he would have braked early enough to avoid the collision. No amount of lane positioning would've prevented the collision without also braking. His delayed response on the brakes is what brought him undone, not his lane position. Robert, please correct me if I'm way off base.

Edit: I should say possibly prevented the collision, as there are no certainties in these things.

urban_assault

OK, back on topic.

HH,

Let me preface this question by letting you know that I have read the original post stating your argument and your thoughts about the *rules of the road* and so forth. I realize my question involves a very non likely scenario, but please just indulge me. A yes or no answer would suffice.

If a cyclist does not follow the rules of the road, but relies mainly on vigilance and situational awareness and never has an collision with a motor vehicle, traffic citation, or altercations (major or minor) with a motorist, is that cyclist a lucky idiot?

mrbrklyn

Define ******baggery


Aside from that, your just wrong. Older communities which include Bed Sty, Downtown, Vinigar Hill, The Heights, Old Brooklyn Town, Parts of Crown Heights, Sunset Park,Fort Green, Cobble Hill, Park Slope, South Brooklyn, Williamsburg, Greenpoint much of Flatbush, Coney Island, Brighton Beach and much of whats left of ENY, Brownsville, Ocean Hill, and Bushwick were built prior to the automobile. Those areas have housing, much of it landmarked, which has no driveways and often thinner roads.

Canarsie, Mill Basin, New areas in Flatbush, Marine Park, Bergan Beach, the balance of Flatbush and Ditmas Park, Midwood, the ballance of Crown Heights, Starret City, new areas of ENY, Sheepshead Bay, Newer Coney Island housing, Manhattan Beach, Bay Ridge and Bensohurst were built after the automobile. Not only do they have Drive Ways, but they also have wider streets, step backs in the houses to give visibility and gardens, all of which give the driver and cyclist considerable vision of cars prior to them ramroding you .

If you need photo's I can provide them.

Ruben

Bekologist

if you could get pictures of head's posterior talking, that'd be a lot more relevant to this discussion.

John C. Ratliff

You guys know what? I've been doing a lot of studying, and really cannot follow all this interrelated dialog.

HH, why don't you spend the time you work on this and write out a manuscript, submit it for publication, and put your views out there for us to read in book form? This seems always to be circling around the same accident that I think we were talking about last spring. You could make wiser use of your time.

John

zeytoun

Something similar has been brought up before a couple times when different posters asked him about studies that show professional bike messengers with relatively low fatalities.

The only thing that Helmet Head could think of as an explanation was that selective breeding had given them superior traffic jamming genes....

I kid you not.

Allister

I pity the editor unfortunate enough to get that manuscript.

joejack951

If Robert Hurst, the 300,000 mile messenger man, can't pay attention to what's necessary while cycling 100% of the time, how can you expect anyone to pull that off? [This statement is not meant to be disrespectful at all by the way, quite the opposite in case anyone cares.]

Where are you getting these "100% predictable" statements from? Where was it posted that "best practices" are a "replacement" for paying attention? You are making stuff up.

Laika

I don't need to... implementing your "rules" for cycling in the streets I named above would do it perfectly.

You mustn't get out much. Even in venerable old Park Slope, there are garages with curb cuts on side streets, and parking garages, firehouses, hospitals, etc, etc, which all have perpendicular midblock access to 40' wide sidestreets. If you need pictures of, for instance, Methodist Hospital, or the beer distributor on Pacific north of Smith, or nearly any corner house in the brownstone blocks of the Slope (you know, the ones with garages & curb cuts?) or any of a thousand other perpendicular midblock incursions, I'd suggest grabbing your camera and going for a ride through Brooklyn... there's apparently a lot you're not noticing from the center of those narrow lanes.


Funny, I grew up in Bay Ridge and have lived in several of the other areas you mention. And plenty of the sidestreets there were in the 40'-50' range. Nothing like the wide-open boulevards you seem to have seen at all. Not saying those streets don't exist- just that your blanket statements about Brooklyn are contrafactual and faintly ridiculous.

Helmet Head

Robert's downplaying of the value of learning and adopting best practices in traffic cycling is a serious weakness in his book. Should he have the opportunity to update the book again, for the sake of all future readers, I would like to see this rectified. But if he doesn't, and I ever get around to writing my book, believe me, I will deal with it there.

Yes, VC best practices make the cyclist more likely to not need to be aware of a hazard in order to be optimally positioned for it - in fact, the vehicular cyclist is likely to be optimally positioned for many common hazards before even the most vigilant among us could be aware of it. This is what Robert's Mercedes crash illustrates so well, and why I spend so much time talking about it. Even Robert has agreed that he should have been further left. But he wasn't optimally positioned, because his approach requires the cyclist to be aware of a hazard (or dumb luck) in order to be optimally positioned for it, and he wasn't paying attention. His approach requires that the cyclist be aware of a hazard in order to be optimally positioned for it, and thus the cyclist needs to be paying attention and aware of the hazard in order to react to it. The VC approach is proactive - destination positioning in particular is all about habitual road positioning optimization for potential hazards - hazards that cannot even be seen yet, much less actually noticed and adjusted for.

You're fooling yourself if you think you or anyone else can be 100% vigilant 100% of the time.

Seems like you're beginning to realize the absurdity in your own assertion already.

Well, it was a good start. You're fooling yourself if you think you or anyone else is capable of being immune to distraction. There is no end to the potential sources that can call on the attention of a cyclist when he needs to be paying attention to something else. These sources themselves can be relevant to his safety. A sudden mysterious noise from your front wheel can cause you to look down to make sure the wheel is not about to lock up on you, just when a truck pulls out of a blind alley, for example. Yes, of course, the particular combination of events is highly unlikely, but we are distracted all the time. In short, well, I can't be any more concise than JoeJack:

You're confusing "protect" with something like "guarantee safety". Seat belts, air bags, helmets and best practices are all utilized for protection, but everyone realizes they improve safety, but don't guarantee it; that they reduce risk, not eliminate it.

Allister, I don't understand what your beef is with me. We seem to be in agreement. Even if you continue to contend that everyone is theoretically capable of paying enough attention to avoid ever crashing, surely you would agree that in practice few if any will actually achieve that level of vigilance (certainly not even Robert), and, so can benefit from the extra protection provided by best practices.

Well, I just realized where there might be some confusion here. Yes, best practices are an excellent supplement to proper awareness. They are not a replacement, in general. But the reason best practices are an excellent supplement, is that in a given situation where the cyclist may not be paying as much attention as he would be ideally, riding in accordance to best practices can literally save his skin. In other words, learning and following best practices can save your arse when you least expect it. That is their value. And the kicker is that in order to achieve that benefit, you have to value, learn and adopt those best practices habitually. It's just like wearing a helmet or a seat belt. You don't strap in or strap the helmet on moments before you realize you're about to crash. By then, it's probably too late. Similarly, you don't suddenly adopt a best practice because you suddenly realize there is a potential hazard right in front of you. Best practices have to be ingrained in your habits in order to protect you. This is what Robert does not seem to realize, and certainly does not convey in his book.

I don't disagree with your analysis, but it totally misses my point. My point is that the incident illustrates that destination positioning, with respect to that blind alley junction, was obviously not a best practice that Robert had adopted. Whether being further left would have prevented that particular crash, which nobody, not even Robert, knows for sure anyway, is entirely irrelevant to my point. Remember, he had ridden on this road thousands of times. Yet he was riding the door zone bike lane as he was approaching a blind alley. That is not an example of someone who has learned and follows best practices. That is an example of someone who relies too much on vigilance alone. And that's exactly the approach he promotes in his book. Robert continues to downplay the value of learning and following best practices on this forum, and even in this thread. He even recently, again, derided the value of the best practice of lane positioning for the sake of conspicuity, something emphasized in motorcycle safety courses (as well as vehicular-cycling courses):

The fact that it is possible for motorists to overlook even conspicuously positioned cyclists (and motorcyclists) is no reason to not think about maximizing visibility. It's also possible for motorists to overlook cyclists in bright clothing, or for motorists to overlook cyclists at night even when they're using lights and reflectors. But that fact is no reason to discount the value (not think about) of wearing bright clothing and using lights and reflectors for the sake of maximizing (not guaranteeing) conspicuity. Similarly, optimizing lane position in order to maximize conspicuity is also valuable - something Robert is mysteriously unable to recognize or acknowledge.

Could it be that Robert's downplaying of the value of best practices, and in particular, his denial of the value of lane positioning for the purpose of maximizing conspicuity and predictability, is because that downplaying and denial forms the foundation of his argument against Forester and vehicular-cycling?

Helmet Head

Another possible explanation for Robert's downplaying of the value of best practices, and in particular, his denial of the value of lane positioning for the purpose of maximizing conspicuity and predictability, is that it is part of his overall discounting of the value of learning and following any rules or principles (with a few exceptions) whatsoever. In other words, it justifies scofflaw behavior. I don't mean to imply that Robert is knowingly doing anything dishonest here or in his book. I suspect the justification is mostly subconscious; that's how denial generally works.

Helmet Head

There is no need to read the whole thread to catch up. If you're just coming here, I would recommend reading (not skimming) the first and last two pages. I try to make my posts as "stand alone" as possible, but much can be missed if you merely skim them.

Part of the reason I haven't started yet is because I haven't figured out exactly what my overall presentation is going to be. I'm approaching this the same way I do software, in which I generally test ideas in small programs until the whole thing "works in my head", and then I write the whole program and debug it.

For example, one of the things I've learned in this thread is that I need to address the cyclist who feels out of place in traffic, and finds the rats in sewers paradigm to be appealing. In other words, I need to help the reader realize what his or her current paradigm is, in order to dismantle it and replace it with the vc paradigm.

RobertHurst

Forester, father of this VC thing that HH is always going on about, emphasized the need for cyclists to simply plug themselves into the normal traffic system that governs all vehicle travel. This system includes destination positioning and speed positioning. IOW, it is Forester himself who does not distinguish VC from LC (although his interpretation of the Uniform Traffic Code is occasionally laughable). Forester emphatically did NOT emphasize maintaining a buffer zone to right side hazards, or to any hazards. Forester emphatically did NOT emphasize the need to maintain vigilance in traffic. What he argued was that simply plugging into the 'near-perfect' system would by itself keep a cyclist safe. Forester in fact derides those who feel that plugging into the wonderful system won't be enough to ensure safety; he suggests that the application of defensive driving techniques in traffic is based on irrational fear. Extracurriculur defensive action is one of these signs of 'cyclist inferiority complex' or some such thing. Cyclists don't need to be defensive 'road sneaks,' he argued, but assertive. That's the VC that I criticize. HH's version of VC -- who knows what the heck that is.

Then, of course, Forester provides a rather comprehensive compilation of statistics which show his assertions about the magical nature of the traffic system to be incorrect. It's an interesting strategy, for sure.

HH's attempted appropriation of defensive driving techniques as 'VC rules,' when defensive strategies were pointedly left out of Forester's Effective Cycling, is ludicrous. So, where did HH get these ideas? We can see that he gets his ideas from books, and from tortured thought exercises, not from actual experience. These defensive 'rules' are apparently something HH first saw applied to cyclists by me, in my book. That he can attack me for not following strategies that he learned from me, based on weird interpretations of other things he found in my book and on the back cover, and call it all a violation of 'VC habits' is triple ludicrous armchair madness run amok. Although it is entertaining.

Real experienced cyclists don't learn 'habits' from books. It is absurd to think that an armchair jockey would do anything on a bike more 'habitually' than someone who is out in traffic five hours a day. That's just another misapprehension that can only exist in the absence of real, on the ground experience.

The ideas in my book are not things I sat around and made up next to the fire, or things I derived from other books or bloviations. They come from my own experience, and the experiences of other high-mileage cyclists.

Robert

The Human Car

It’s simple, whatever is contentious HH is all over it.

mrbrklyn

After this is esentialy a troll. I have a photo colleciton of nearly 4,000 different streets in Brooklyn as part of my "www.brooklynonline.com" project with a collection of over 40 years of Brooklyn Photographs and notes. Tell me which street you want to use to support your theory based on your very small frame of reference and I'll whip it up and show you visually how your just wrong.

Ruben

zeytoun

I think he already did.

Helmet Head

I don't know where you get your ideas of what Forester says is vehicular-cycling, for you don't provide any references here (and you don't in your book either). You seem to rely on your impressions that you gathered in internet forum discussions.

As to my impressions of vc, with respect to defensive cycling, I can quickly find many references supporting my view. Doing more research in a few minutes than you apparently did for your entire book, here is what I have found.

This is from VC advocate Fred Oswald's site, bicyclinglife.com:

https://www.bicyclinglife.com/Practic...mmuteguide.htm

This is from ohiobike.org, which bases it's material on John Allen's and John Forester's work, in an explanation for why "you could be dead wrong" is bad safety advice:


The first time I learned about the writing of Mighk Wilson was when the LCI teaching my Road 1 course handed out a copy of one of his papers. Here is an excerpt from "Freedom from Fear":

https://www.floridabicycle.org/freedomfromfear.html

Here is a quote from VC advocate (and BF member) Steven Goodridge:
https://nicomachus.net/category/published-works/

From a UC Davis bike program:
https://www.taps.ucdavis.edu/bicycle/...cdcyclist.html

And here's a post from me from back in April 6 of 2005, before I read your book (in fact, during the time that I had it ordered and was still waiting for it to arrive from Amazon):

Or, if all that's not good enough to convince you that there is nothing new or original about tying defensive driving to vehicular-cycling, take it from the horse's mouth:
John Forester, Bicycle Transportation, p. 20.

By the way, Forester wrote those words well over a decade before your book was published.

The idea that I (or anyone else) got my ideas about the relationship between defensive driving and cycling safety, and it's consistency with vehicular cycling, from your book, is ludicrous. You give yourself a bit too much credit, Robert.

Allister

Your own downplaying of the role of staying aware is yours.

You need to be paying attention and aware of the hazard in order to react to it no matter where you're riding, Serge.

'VC' might give you a slight advantage once you become aware of the hazard, but if your inattention persists, no amount of lane positioning will help you, unless you rely on the other party to see and react to you, and only a fool would do that.

I'm not saying everyone can or does achieve it, merely that it is possible. It's really just a matter of practice. The more you practice, the closer you get to it. Every collision or near collision should be a reminder to WAKE UP and pay attention. Eventually it becomes second nature. If you start from a postition of thinking that it's impossible, you've defeated yourself before you've turned your first crank.

In Robert's case, I'm confident he's learned from his mistake, and to date it hasn't been repeated (as far as I know). THAT is the reason he described it in his book. That's how you get closer to perfect attention. Being honest with yourself about whether your own inattention contributed to the crash, and vowing to not let it happen again.

[QUOTE=Helmet Head;5552167]You're confusing "protect" with something like "guarantee safety". Seat belts, air bags, helmets and best practices are all utilized for protection, but everyone realizes they improve safety, but don't guarantee it; that they reduce risk, not eliminate it.

Seat belt, helmets and airbags don't reduce risk, only damage. I think you're the one that's confused.

My beef is that when you say 'best practices', going by your analyses of the various crashes desribed here, you actually only mean 'move further left'. While it may be advisable in some instances, it is by no means a universal solution. I know you're going to deny ever saying that, but I'm not the only one here that thinks you sound like a stuck record.

Not if that inattention persists. At some point you must become aware of the hazard to avoid it, hopefully not to late. If you're relying on the other party to do it, you are the one that's fooling yourself.

I don't get that impression from Robert at all. The only argument I see is what those 'best practices' actually are, and that 'riding further left' isn't necessarily always the best or most practicable thing to do. Your own faith in habitual practices is gonna bite you in the arse one day if you don't maintain attention, guaranteed.

Allister

I really must get hold of a copy of Robert's book. It sounds like a much better read that Forester's.

I even took a crack at writing one myself a few years ago. I re-read it recently, and I think it could do with a bit of a revision, mainly for style, but here's a link if anyone's interested.

Helmet Head

If my words have every conveyed downplaying of the role of the staying aware, then my intended meaning was not conveyed. What I've done is noted that cyclists are humans, and so our ability to pay attention is not infallible. This is where best practices help.

Robert, on the other, does not dispute that he downplays the value of being using conspicuous lane positioning and other best practices, and "rule-following" in general.


Of course you don't. I'm sure I avoid tons of glass all the time that I never notice, simply by riding away from the curb.


Do you think I've written anything that implies a disagreement with this? If so, what? If not, why do you feel the need to state this?

Ah, I see your point. I take it as a given that everyone understands and values the need to pay as much attention as they possibly can. Do you know anyone who does not understand that?

I understand why Robert wrote about this incident. My whole point is based on unintended consequences that were revealed about him and his approach based on how he described the incident, and analyzed it. What's most revealing is that he completely neglected the potential role of riding too far right, though he managed to remember noting that he might have been riding a "tad too fast", which is relatively mundane.

They don't reduce risk of collision, but they do reduce risk of serious injury, which is what I meant, and should have clarified. I remember thinking about that, and assuming it would be self-evident. I guess it wasn't. Sorry about that. Hopefully my point makes sense now.

I'm not going to deny sounding like a stuck record. But that's not a criticism of the content of what I say, no matter how often I repeat it.

And the real practice is "conspicuous lane-positioning". It just so happens that most of the time that is accomplished by riding further left than most cyclists typically ride.

If the hazard is a potential collision with a vehicle, the driver of which notices you and refrains from crossing your path, then there is no actual need for you to ever be aware of the hazard in the first place in order to avoid it. I'm not advocating that anyone rely on that, I'm just pointing out a rather obvious fact. That, combined with conspicuous lane-positioning makes the cyclist more likely to be noticed in the first place, and the fact that it's possible for a cyclist to be distracted makes conspicuous lane-positioning a valuable practice, not to mention that it's advantageous to have people notice and yield to you more often. That's just simple logic and reason.


Robert scoffs at the value of "rule following" in general, and the value of positioning yourself conspicuously in particular. I've recently quoted him doing so in this thread. Sorry, but I'm not going to take the time to dig it up again.

And I don't have the blind/absolute faith in conspicuous lane positioning and other best practices that you seem to think I have. But if that's what I've conveyed, it's definitely my fault.

sbhikes

That's not a book, it's a poem. And it contains joy. Joy is not to be tolerated here unless it is an outgrowth of self-righteousness and pompous assed-ness.

Brian Ratliff

It's a poem? I thought he was doing the ol' school kid's trick of increasing the number of pages by making the margins bigger.

Allister

Sh1t. They're on to me.

Although I am kinda proud that I encapsulated the entire cycling experience (or tried to as best I could at the time) in less words than a single Helmet Head post.

RobertHurst

The only thing I feel the need to rectify is your continuous and heinous and occasionally comical misrepresentation of what I have written.


If you do write a book, HH, which we can predict will be as full of glaring errors as your posts on this forum, you should know that it's not like the internet. You can't just make stuff up about people and get away with it. You'll get massively sued. Actually the publisher will get sued, but you'll be responsible for the damages due to clause in your contract. Good luck.

Robert

RobertHurst

'Optimally positioned.'

HH, you wouldn't know 'optimally positioned' if it chomped you on the ass. The optimal positioning for this incident, that wouldn't have been obviously illegal, would be very near the double yellow, as far away from the offending motorist as possible, even in the oncoming lane if the space is available. Are you telling me that you would be 'habitually' positioned near the double yellow? I highly doubt it; nothing you've written here has hinted at that. So quit babbling about 'optimally positioned,' because you don't know what you're talking about.

HH has the typical disease of the VC-addled in which one fails to recognize the advantages and differences of an extreme left position versus one simply described as 'between the tire tracks.' To them it's all the same -- as long as it blocks traffic.

'Optimally positioned.' What a joke. I guess one of the big reasons some folks fail to grasp that compromise is inevitable is that they don't understand what optimal positioning really is. They soldier on under the misapprehension that their mid-lane position is 'optimal,' quite happy with themselves.

With that I actually have to go to work, riding my bike, so I can't sit here and respond to the endless laughers.

Robert