Interesting comments on bicycle safety and bicycle infrastructure. I still own my copy of John Forester’s Effective Cycling from the mid 1970s. Forester was vice president of League of American Wheelmen (now known as League of American Bicyclists). Even then these arguments resonated, e.g. the title of section 4.6.5: Emotions, Not Logic, Power Bikeways and Restrictions. The reasoning behind the statistical foundations of this current article appear sound to me. Channeling has given me a broken bone, but has not made me feel safer around distracted drivers. Thank you Justin McMurtry for a truly interesting read.
Thank you, Randall — and what a direct line back to the source. I have copies of the 1984 and 1993 editions of Forester's "Effective Cycling", myself, and I consider them historical artifacts. I'm sorry to hear about the broken bone, which is an unfortunate example of the gap between what certain kinds of infrastructure promise and what they sometimes actually deliver. I'm glad you enjoyed the article, and thanks very much for your support!
There are some good points here. And the argument about bicyclists who encounter drivers vs drivers who encounter bikes is numerically valid. However, on the whole I think there's a little missing of how critical the role of education and social expectation on the driving as well as biking side actually is. Education is portable, while infrastructure is not. Except in the densest cities, most bike trips will require using roads with no special facilities for at least some part of the trip - around me, the overwhelming majority of it. Setting aside how most bike infrastructure is designed in willfully politicized ignorance of the prevailing bike risks and actually puts bikes in positions of maximal intersection-dominated danger rather than any sort of safety, the reality is that trips are going to require using unmodified roads as well. So in practice, communities are precisely as bikeable (or un-bikeable) as their driving and biking cultures perceive the presence of bicycles in ordinary road space to be appropriate, vs inappropriate. What we've horrifically lost in recent decades is the idea that bicycles belong in ordinary space - replaced by the limiting idea that one should only bike in special spaces. Living in the infrastructure free outskirts of a city that like many has succumbed to the murderously false promise that special routes are what enables biking, I really value how my neighbors still understand that if you are going to go somewhere by bike, you are biking on an ordinary road. There's work to do to educate non-intuitive aspects of the safest bike position on a road, but the fact that the idea is still "thinkable" vs elsewhere harmfully "unthinkable" is key to making bicycles an actual transportation option, and not a "drive the bikes to the rail trail on a Sunday afternoon" novelty.
I agree completely — and you've articulated something the piece doesn't fully develop. There's a line from bicycle-driving advocate Wayne Pein: "The acceptance of cyclists using the normal lane is inversely proportional to the volume of bicycle-specific infrastructure." That's essentially your point compressed into a single sentence — infrastructure doesn't just fail to protect cyclists on the roads it *doesn't* cover, it actively erodes the cultural expectation that bikes belong on ordinary roads at all. Really well put, thank you.
Interesting comments on bicycle safety and bicycle infrastructure. I still own my copy of John Forester’s Effective Cycling from the mid 1970s. Forester was vice president of League of American Wheelmen (now known as League of American Bicyclists). Even then these arguments resonated, e.g. the title of section 4.6.5: Emotions, Not Logic, Power Bikeways and Restrictions. The reasoning behind the statistical foundations of this current article appear sound to me. Channeling has given me a broken bone, but has not made me feel safer around distracted drivers. Thank you Justin McMurtry for a truly interesting read.
It's a pretty realistic situation showing a rider who rides with the knowledge that she belongs. My main quibble actually would be that it's a one way roadway, as is common in major cities but rare elsewhere. And it's usefully illustrating how a rider aware of the preponderance of intersection surprise in actual bike crash risk, is choosing to eschew the dangerously misleading suggestion to ride in a minimally visible position at a curb, and instead take a maximally visible position in an ordinary traffic lane. That puts her safely before or after any traffic turning right rather than lethally trapped by someone turning across her path, and it drastically improves her visibility to anyone turning left off the road or entering or crossing it from a sidestreet. All of those are drastically more common causes of collisions (and in built areas causes of death) than the sorts of intuitively feared but statistically very rare hits from behind that guided the murderously ignorant layout of the offered marginal bike space that is practically too dangerous to use.
Interesting comments on bicycle safety and bicycle infrastructure. I still own my copy of John Forester’s Effective Cycling from the mid 1970s. Forester was vice president of League of American Wheelmen (now known as League of American Bicyclists). Even then these arguments resonated, e.g. the title of section 4.6.5: Emotions, Not Logic, Power Bikeways and Restrictions. The reasoning behind the statistical foundations of this current article appear sound to me. Channeling has given me a broken bone, but has not made me feel safer around distracted drivers. Thank you Justin McMurtry for a truly interesting read.
Thank you, Randall — and what a direct line back to the source. I have copies of the 1984 and 1993 editions of Forester's "Effective Cycling", myself, and I consider them historical artifacts. I'm sorry to hear about the broken bone, which is an unfortunate example of the gap between what certain kinds of infrastructure promise and what they sometimes actually deliver. I'm glad you enjoyed the article, and thanks very much for your support!
There are some good points here. And the argument about bicyclists who encounter drivers vs drivers who encounter bikes is numerically valid. However, on the whole I think there's a little missing of how critical the role of education and social expectation on the driving as well as biking side actually is. Education is portable, while infrastructure is not. Except in the densest cities, most bike trips will require using roads with no special facilities for at least some part of the trip - around me, the overwhelming majority of it. Setting aside how most bike infrastructure is designed in willfully politicized ignorance of the prevailing bike risks and actually puts bikes in positions of maximal intersection-dominated danger rather than any sort of safety, the reality is that trips are going to require using unmodified roads as well. So in practice, communities are precisely as bikeable (or un-bikeable) as their driving and biking cultures perceive the presence of bicycles in ordinary road space to be appropriate, vs inappropriate. What we've horrifically lost in recent decades is the idea that bicycles belong in ordinary space - replaced by the limiting idea that one should only bike in special spaces. Living in the infrastructure free outskirts of a city that like many has succumbed to the murderously false promise that special routes are what enables biking, I really value how my neighbors still understand that if you are going to go somewhere by bike, you are biking on an ordinary road. There's work to do to educate non-intuitive aspects of the safest bike position on a road, but the fact that the idea is still "thinkable" vs elsewhere harmfully "unthinkable" is key to making bicycles an actual transportation option, and not a "drive the bikes to the rail trail on a Sunday afternoon" novelty.
I agree completely — and you've articulated something the piece doesn't fully develop. There's a line from bicycle-driving advocate Wayne Pein: "The acceptance of cyclists using the normal lane is inversely proportional to the volume of bicycle-specific infrastructure." That's essentially your point compressed into a single sentence — infrastructure doesn't just fail to protect cyclists on the roads it *doesn't* cover, it actively erodes the cultural expectation that bikes belong on ordinary roads at all. Really well put, thank you.
Excellent!
Interesting comments on bicycle safety and bicycle infrastructure. I still own my copy of John Forester’s Effective Cycling from the mid 1970s. Forester was vice president of League of American Wheelmen (now known as League of American Bicyclists). Even then these arguments resonated, e.g. the title of section 4.6.5: Emotions, Not Logic, Power Bikeways and Restrictions. The reasoning behind the statistical foundations of this current article appear sound to me. Channeling has given me a broken bone, but has not made me feel safer around distracted drivers. Thank you Justin McMurtry for a truly interesting read.
is that an Ai generated image if so you should make sure people understand it's fake
It's an illustration, created painstakingly with the help of AI, in a painterly style.
It's a pretty realistic situation showing a rider who rides with the knowledge that she belongs. My main quibble actually would be that it's a one way roadway, as is common in major cities but rare elsewhere. And it's usefully illustrating how a rider aware of the preponderance of intersection surprise in actual bike crash risk, is choosing to eschew the dangerously misleading suggestion to ride in a minimally visible position at a curb, and instead take a maximally visible position in an ordinary traffic lane. That puts her safely before or after any traffic turning right rather than lethally trapped by someone turning across her path, and it drastically improves her visibility to anyone turning left off the road or entering or crossing it from a sidestreet. All of those are drastically more common causes of collisions (and in built areas causes of death) than the sorts of intuitively feared but statistically very rare hits from behind that guided the murderously ignorant layout of the offered marginal bike space that is practically too dangerous to use.