I don’t know why more money isn’t spent on bike infrastructure. My city has multipath ways almost everywhere so that bikes don’t have to ride on the roads.
Man I remember guys who I guess are his followers on the bike group against bike infrastructure. Its like the l33t git gud gamer bros.
I honestly don’t understand it.
I’m in favor of teaching people how to use the infrastructure we have properly, but that’s mostly to build demand for better infrastructure. Why would you stop at the first when we can have actually good infra?
Oh its so easy to explain. See if you ride a comfortable bike from one destination to another on infrastructure that makes you feel safer. Well then your not a "real"cyclist /s I mean sorta /s that seems to be the way they feel.
As a middle aged man in lycra who enjoys riding road bikes fast for sport and is comfortable riding in traffic: That Forester guy sounds like a dick. One of the things that makes bikes so cool is that they come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes, optimised for different use cases. Road bikes are cool, but so are mountain bikes, cargo bikes, fixed gear bikes, dutch style upright bikes, etc. And even if countless near death experiences while cycling around cars have made me feel comfortable (or complacent?) riding in traffic, I still appreciate good cycling infrastructure. People deserve to be safe and every trip taken by bike instead of by car is a win.
I’d highly recommend the “well there’s your problem” podcast (which is a YouTube-based podcast with slides) that jason (not just bikes guy) was a guest on.
I think in the beginning, guys like him were responding to what they thought was a real threat to their sport. If municipalities all started making Dutch-style good bike commuting infrastructure in cities, and kicked bikes off roads entirely, it would effectively kill the sport of road biking. You aren’t intended to do high speed lycra-biking on those types of bike routes.
The problem is that he, and guys like him, rather than forming a coalition with other vulnerable road users to advocate for good bikes infrastructure and the right for cyclists to use roads, chose to sell out all other users to secure their own continued access to roads.
Obviously, as Jason points out this video, good Dutch bike infrastructure does not actually kill hobby biking, cause you can ride all you want on country roads and country bikepaths.
I agree. I live in a city and cycling for sport in the city sucks, regardless of whether there are bike lanes or not. There are too many traffic lights and traffic gets in the way. The good cycling spots are outside the city like you said and bike lanes are great to get out of the city and to those spots. Plus, I’d wager most people who cycle for sport also do a lot of other trips by bike too.
I also just want my loved ones to be able to get from point A to point B safely. That’s way more important than my sport.
This guy was the guru of the “put a bicycle in the back of a truck to drive to the place where you will ride the bike” kind of cyclist. The bicycle is a sports item, not a mode of transportation for them.
I grew up in a city that has hundreds of miles of cycle paths, you could ride anywhere without ever having to ride on a main road, only the occasional first/last section to get to a house/shop. The nearest path to my old house was 150 yards down the road and when I was growing up before I started driving at 17 (mid 90’s), we used to ride everywhere. It was about 8 miles from corner of the city to the other.
As I got older and relied on a car… I found myself missing cycling. So in 2017, I got a 21spd hybrid city bike… Alas, I discovered that injuries and post op limitations restricted me to at best… 5-6 miles and I was exhausted.
So in 2022, I got myself an e-bike. A Haibike Trekking with the bosch mid drive system. I can now ride with ease once more.
Alas… I also moved from that city with hundreds of miles of cycle paths a few months after getting it… Now I live near to the sea and mountains… and there are 2 cycle routes near me. One I can do a 9m round trip, it would be longer but for some daft reason they never finished the path around the reservoir and it’s boggy and muddy for 5 months of the year or any time it rains in the other 7 months. The other route means riding about 1/2 mile through town to pick up the nearest path and then you’ve got about 7 more miles of pretty flat, open countryside next to a river… but also next to flood planes. So at this time of year, it can flood a section about 1/2 a mile long at the 2.5m mark (from my house). Oh and that first route, also floods long before you ever get to the reservoir restricting your ride to at best 4 miles in total there and back… it’s only 9 miles without the flooding.
I can do an 8 mile trip to an estuary and add another 1 mile I’m on the edge of a huge forest… 2 further miles through the forest and I’m at the beach… making it a 22 mile round trip… But the stony, gravel roads aren’t exceptionally suited to my city bike. I’ve bought reinforced tyres and puncture proof tubes… so maybe I’ll give it a shot next year.
For now, it’s unlikely I’ll be getting much riding done until March.
Keep it up!
I was expecting to read Forester was killed by being hit by a car while cycling , but dude lived to 90.
Very thorough and in depth but a bit long.
This kind of doomerism can fuck right off. The more of us there are on the roads the safer we’ll be. Stop making people think cycling is unsafe; that only keeps people from trying it.
The video is about a guy called John Forester, who was a road racing cyclist who vocally opposed all cycling infrastructure, arguing for what he called “vehicular cycling” where you ride on the road among cars following the same rules as cars, which, in his view, was safer than separate bicycle paths, which according to him were very unsafe. He was a vocal critic of cycling infrastructure and apparently quite influential in the US.
He wrote a 800-page
bookmanifesto titled Effective Cycling where he argues that any form of cycling except riding racing bicycles at high speed wearing lycra is a complete waste of time, fit only for children. It’s also full of more questionable traffic safety advice.I’m still baffled that anyone would argue that separate bike paths are more dangerous than mixing with cars. How did this guy not get laughed out of the room every time ye claimed that?
I’m all for making mixing with cars safer too (lower speeds, more training and awareness for drivers), but separate bike paths are so much better.
There is exactly one case where separate bike paths can be more dangerous and that’s at right turns at intersections. In my city half the deadly collisions with cyclists are of this type.
Because there are some that are, because they contain dangerous design errors. So Forester fans find a city that made a load of serious mistakes in their bike paths, get the collision data, and bingo: an example where bikeways are more dangerous than roads.
More importantly, Mr. Forester tried to use dedicated bike paths like a freeway, trying to maintain 30mph and only dodging obstacles. Because he almost had a few collisions, and he claims he only almost had a collision once in many years of road cycling, he calls bike paths 1000 times more dangerous.
There’s quite a few other instances of lying with statistics, and using studies to disagree with those same study’s conclusions thinking himself smarter, but I think the one time he tried to collect his own data was the worst.
Yes, Forester was more brazen than many of his fans. His use of anecdata is the sort of argument that gets dismantled on social media and bike forums. It’s amazing he got away with it for so long, with his books being re-printed and updated. Maybe highways designers who didn’t want to bother with cyclists were happy that an ‘avid cyclist’ gave them a reason not to, so ignored the silly footnotes and bad references.
The faster you ride, the better you blend in with vehicular traffic. The trouble is, not everyone can ride that fast. Now that I’m old, I appreciate dedicated MUPs and bike lanes because they’re better suited to my current abilities than they were 30 to 40 or even 20 years ago.
But also, the faster you ride, the more tiring it is, the more stressful it is, and the more severe the consequences when anybody - especially nearby drivers - makes a serious error.
Cycling doesn’t have to be that way. No matter what Forester and other ableists say. If you remove most of the motorists, it can be fun! And proper fun, not the ‘I jousted with drivers and survived’ type.
Well, 40 years ago it wasn’t all that tiring because I was a very fit young bike racer, but I get what you mean.
Maybe, but still more tiring than being able to coast through on a more direct, comfortable and convenient cycleway instead of a motorway limited by sucky truck turning radii and visibility.
Sure, but riding among cars will never be the safest option. Good, dedicated separated bike paths ought to be the most comfortable to exercise-oriented riders too, given that they have all the upsides of roads (and then some; no potholes!) with no cars.
No potholes?
*Laughs in Saskatoonish
Yeah, those saplings are tenacious aren’t they!
I guess there are a few places with 30+ year old pavement “sidewalks” that are cratered out too.
I’ll beg to differ… Stanley Park in Vancouver is an example. Stanley Park Drive is an automobile path but running alongside it is the Seawall, a bike and separated pedestrian path. In many sections the path is too narrow to pass, due to a cliff face. They’ve improved it somewhat in the last couple years, but I think very fast riders still prefer going on the car path so that they don’t have to wait to pass people on rented bikes going slowly trying to simply take in the park.
I do think fast cyclists should be able to select their risk level and speed, though speed limits should be no more than 40km/h (25mph) to even begin considering a road to be a safe path for cycling.
I haven’t yet watched it, but it is a Not Just Bikes video and therefore I expect it will be thorough, reasonable, and enlightened — and that you have completely mischaracterized it. Are you just guessing what it’s about from the title?
I am, because OP couldn’t be bothered to provide a text summary that would tell me more and/or let me know if the video was worth watching.
And why are you commenting on things you didn’t even watch? What’s the point of the comment if you don’t even know what you’re talking about
You probably need to actually watch the video, it sounds like you didn’t
Of course not. I have visual processing issues and video links without a text synopsis are one of my pet peeves. I’m not going to waste my time, energy, and mobile data watching a video that the submittor couldn’t even be arsed to write a summary for.
So you have visual processing issues but like text which is all visual?
Text is textual. Don’t be an ass.
Yet somehow you determined that it was a good idea to waste your time and energy to write a wholly inaccurate comment.
It’s a terrible headline and I continue to have no tolerance for it.
It’s mostly talk anyway so you can just listen to it. That’s what I did.
See, that’s helpful information.
