Episode 131: Vehicular Cycling and John Forester, Part 1

Doug Gordon: Hey, everybody, it’s Doug here and I am at Velo-city, one of the biggest bike conferences in the world. This year it is hosted in the city of Ghent in Belgium. It’s just been incredible. And randomly, I have been walking around and I have seen a lot of people wearing their Cleverhoods. I guess I should say Paris Lord, welcome to an ad on The War on Cars.

Paris Lorde: Thanks, Doug.

Doug: So Paris, tell me where you’re from.

Paris Lorde: I’m from Canberra, Australia, Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country.

Doug: So you have a Cleverhood.

Paris Lorde: Yeah, it’s a beautiful tool. I was wearing one to work—I wear them all the time, and last year rode to work on just a normal day when it was raining and a colleague said, “You rode in the rain?” I said, “Yeah, some people wear Cleverhoods, some people wear cars.” And she said, “Excuse me?” and I repeated it and then she stopped talking.

Doug: That’s their new tagline. “Some people wear Cleverhoods, some people wear cars.” Maybe reverse that. “Some people wear cars. Some people—smart people—wear Cleverhoods.”

Paris Lorde: It’s just a really good product. I’d never heard of them until the podcast, but people love them and they asked me where I get them. I got one for my partner, and we went out for date night for our anniversary, and she wore it in the restaurant because the air conditioning was too cold, and she felt very comfortable and loved the color.

Doug: That’s a very specific use case for a Cleverhood. I love it. I also want to say just for our listeners, you are a Patreon supporter and you have received the ultimate Patreon perk. We’re staying in the same hotel, so we’ve had breakfast together the past two days.

Paris Lorde: Yeah, this is—I feel I’ve had the sedan chair tier of Patreon supporters. Doug’s been super generous, and I’m forever grateful and I love the show.

Doug: Well, we’re so grateful for people like you, and it’s been so awesome to get to hang out. So thank you for your honest testimony of Cleverhood and thank you for supporting The War on Cars.

Paris Lorde: Oh no, thanks for helping change the world. And I love the episode where people rang in from around the world. You—you’re all farmers and we are the seeds.

Doug: You’re full of great quotes! [laughs]

Paris Lorde: I used to be a journalist.

Doug: Wherever you are in the world, stay dry with Cleverhood. For 15 percent off the best rain gear for walking and cycling, go to Cleverhood.com/waroncars, and enter code SUNSHOWER at checkout. That’s Cleverhood.com/waroncars, coupon code SUNSHOWER.

Doug: Aaron and Sarah, what comes to mind when I say the term ‘vehicular cycling?’

Aaron Naparstek: Oh, immediately gray-haired men with ponytails.

Sarah Goodyear: I just think aggressive. I think asphalt. I think …

Doug: This is the $25,000 Pyramid question. Asphalt.

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: Okay. Wait, I have it. Gray-haired men with ponytails and high-visibility vests.

Sarah: Yes.

Aaron: And taking the lane, like, biking right down the middle of a busy avenue, whether or not someone is honking at them.

Sarah: I think judgmental. I think exclusionary. I think tiresome. [laughs]

Doug: You’re describing the podcast, Sarah. This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon, and I am here with my co-hosts, Aaron Naperstek and Sarah Goodyear. And we are recording this episode right in the middle of a three-lane highway.

Sarah: Honk! [laughs]

Aaron: That’s right. I’m taking the lane. Taking the lane.

Sarah: I’m holding my ground, and everyone can back up behind me and wait for me.

Doug: Okay, we clearly have a lot to say about this subject. Before we get started, if you like what we do here at the podcast, please support us on Patreon. You can go to Patreon.com/thewaroncarspod and sign up today. Starting at just $3 a month, we will give you access to exclusive bonus content, merch discounts, stickers, all kinds of cool stuff.

Aaron: And ad-free episodes.

Doug: Thank you to everybody who is already supporting the podcast. But if you’re not and you like us, go on and do it. Okay, so this is gonna be a very long episode because we’re really gonna dig into this book and vehicular cycling. So here’s what we’re gonna do: if you are listening on the Patreon feed, on the RSS feed that you get when you sign up on Patreon, you’re gonna get the whole episode all at once. If you’re listening on the general feed, you’re gonna get it in two parts. So this is part one, and you’ll hear part two in a couple of weeks. So in this episode, we are gonna be talking about vehicular cycling, and specifically a book called Effective Cycling by John Forester. Aaron and Sarah, tell me what you know, if anything, about this book, about John Forester, about vehicular cycling.

Sarah: I actually first heard of vehicular cycling from Aaron when we first started working together back in about 2007. And Aaron somewhat pejoratively described it to me, and I was just mystified. I really couldn’t believe that it was a real thing. And the more I found out about it, the more incomprehensible it became.

Aaron: Totally. So when I started getting involved in bike advocacy in the early 2000s, I stumbled into this phenomenon of supposed bike advocates, people who would show up to meetings and say “I am a,” quote-unquote, “‘avid cyclist—'” it was always an avid cyclist. And then argue against whatever bike lane was being proposed. And they were espousing this philosophy called vehicular cycling that, you know, from my perspective, suggested that bikes should be treated like cars. Like, bikes should just be allowed to roll down the center of the lane like a car, and should follow all the traffic rules like a car, and should be policed like a car, and shouldn’t have any special kind of infrastructure, because they’re just like a car.

Sarah: Right. And I recall particularly that they advocated this no matter what kind of street you were cycling on. This wasn’t just on a quiet residential street. It included stroads, that you would be on a six-lane suburban strode, and you’d have to make a left turn, and you would just do just like a car and get into the left turn lane and sit at the front of the lane and wait for your chance to make your turn in front of the cars coming the other way.

Aaron: And in that era of the early 2000s, they were really powerful. They were showing up to these meetings. You know, there were a few cities where they were particularly strong, but it was all over the country. And they were ruining bike infrastructure projects. Like, people would be trying to get a new bike lane so they could bike their kids to school safely, or their kids could bike to school safely on their own, and these guys would show up and they’d say, “We’re avid cyclists. We don’t want this bike lane project,” and local officials would be like, “Oh, great! We don’t have to do it now. The avid cyclists don’t want it.” So they were pretty powerful, and they set a lot of cities back for quite a few years.

Doug: We are gonna get into exactly how they set cycling back, and how they set bike infrastructure back. Sarah, you said it was incomprehensible. I assure you, it will not be more comprehensible by the end of this episode.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: You know, I think it would be really easy to just dunk on this philosophy for an hour, and we are gonna do a fair amount of that. But one thing I want to do is kind of put vehicular cycling in a historical context. Like, where does it come from? What is it responding to? What does it actually believe? You know, what are the techniques? What’s the philosophy? And then what is the impact? What are we dealing with even today in 2024? I hold in my hands a copy of Effective Cycling by John Forester. What do you know specifically about John Forester?

Sarah: He’s an old guy with a white beard and glasses, and he’s very judgmental.

Aaron: [laughs] I get him mixed up with—there were two of them. There’s John Allen.

Sarah: Okay, maybe I’m thinking of the wrong one.

Aaron: No, no. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. John Allen and John Forester. And they’re completely indistinguishable to me. They’re just old guys who are dressed up. They look like human traffic cones, and they want to take away my bike lane.

Doug: Interestingly, I have watched tons of videos now of John Forester, and read tons of interviews and seen tons of pictures. I have never once seen him in what you would describe as cycling clothes. John Allen, who you’re describing, is a guy, I think he was largely based in Boston. He was writing for Bicycling magazine. He wrote a book. He’s sort of a disciple of Forester.

Aaron: Gotcha.

Doug: He’s a little bit younger, and he also had a very big impact—especially in places like Boston. So the last thing I want to do with this episode is really talk about, like, why are we talking about this now? This is a philosophy that has been largely discredited. It lost. We are building bike infrastructure all over the country, all over North America. It’s pretty clear that people prefer it, that it’s safer. So we’re gonna get into sort of why this book, Effective Cycling, which was published almost 50 years ago in 1976, like, why are we still talking about it today? Okay, so let’s get down to who John Forester is. John Forester is known as the father of vehicular cycling, and his philosophy, as outlined in the book Effective Cycling, boils down to this.

[ARCHIVE CLIP, John Forester: Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.]

Doug: That is John Forester, and he is saying, “Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.”

Aaron: When you’re biking through Boston on a Dutch box bike with a four-yearold and a six-year-old, as I was, you want a bike lane on Mass Ave. You don’t wanna be treated like a vehicle. You want to be treated differently. That was the fight that was being had when I was biking through Boston at that era of my life, like 10-12 years ago.

Sarah: To me, the experience of being on a bicycle is closer to the experience of being a pedestrian. Just sort of physically, you have the flexibility of a pedestrian. You know, you can get off your bike and become a pedestrian instantly while keeping your vehicle alongside you. It’s not like driving. It’s just not.

Aaron: You’re not surrounded by airbags. You don’t have a seatbelt, you don’t have a metal exoskeleton shell around you.

Sarah: You can turn around and go in the other direction at any time without endangering anybody. You know, there’s just so many different ways that physically it’s not the same experience.

Doug: Yeah. I think, Sarah, you’re getting at something we’re gonna get at, which is like a fundamental definition of what a cyclist is, and what bike advocates are and all of these different things. There’s just a massive philosophical difference that Forester and his supporters have about what a cyclist is, and it is polar opposite of what the three of us, I think, and probably a lot of our listeners agree with. So John Forester, he was born in 1929 in London. His father was the English novelist C.S. Forester. Do you know who that is?

Sarah: He wrote historical novels, I think?

Doug: He wrote naval novels—the Horatio Hornblower series. He also wrote The African Queen, which is the basis for the Oscar-winning Humphrey Bogart-Katharine Hepburn movie. You know, pretty successful, influential writer, although not a lot of people today probably really know who he is. When John was 10, his family moves to Berkeley, California. His parents divorce in 1945. He is sent to private school on the East Coast. He then graduates from UC-Berkeley, serves in the Navy briefly during Korea, and then basically settles in California and becomes—and this is important—a licensed industrial engineer. Not a traffic engineer, not an urban planner, but a licensed industrial engineer.

Aaron: The military background and the engineering background, that checks out.

Doug: Spoiler alert. Yeah, it’s definitely gonna come into this. So I think anybody who’s ever tangled with vehicular cyclists knows that they can be very argumentative, to say the least. There’s a lot of internet forums that sort of predate a lot of social media that take on the tone of many of the arguments that you see on social media today. There’s a great book by Carlton Reid called Bike Boom, and he talks about Forester and he says that C.S. Forester, John’s father, writes about his son, “He can’t argue without being rude.”

Aaron: Hmm.

Doug: John was 19 years old when his dad wrote that. [laughs]

Aaron: Wow.

Doug: Can you imagine your dad dunking on you in that way?

Aaron: That’s brutal!

Doug: Yeah, terrible. So that might also explain sort of like, where a lot of this comes from. So we’re gonna get to some of this stuff.

Sarah: We’ll have some compassion for him on that count.

Doug: Yeah, it’s actually, I think, kind of a sad story. And in 2000, John self-published a two-volume 870-page memoir/biography about his dad, called Novelist and Storyteller: The Life of C.S. Forester. Essentially, like, after his father died, he found out all this stuff that simply upended his understanding of who his dad was. I think he had a secret marriage after the divorce. There was money that he didn’t disclose in the estate. All kinds of stuff that, I think, really wrecked John in the way that it would almost anyone, of course.

Aaron: So we didn’t get bike lanes for 20 years because this guy’s dad was bad.

Doug: I mean, isn’t the story of the U.S. in the 20th and 21st century just a lot of elderly men working out their daddy issues?

Aaron: [laughs]

Sarah: Yeah. And also the Anglo-Saxon influence. As I’ve said many times before, it does seem like the Anglo-Saxon mindset of punishment and suffering being necessary in order to achieve anything of value is definitely part of the vehicular cycling vibe. So I’m not surprised.

Doug: So John Forester dies in 2020. He’s 90 years old when he dies. And he was, you know, by all accounts, sharp as a tack up until the end. There is a really great interview with the journalist Peter Flax. It was in Bicycling magazine. It was published after Forester died. It gets into Forester’s early relationship with cycling—something he enjoyed as a kid in England, later as a teenager in the U.S. And a lot of it sounds basically like long distance touring cycling. And here is one exchange. So Peter is asking Forester if that style of riding, bike touring and racing, impacted the way Forester considered cycling. Aaron, why don’t you be John Forester for this?

Aaron: Oh, awesome! That’s so great. Okay, John Forester. “I just enjoyed it. I had no social program in mind. I can tell you, you’d be out in the country. You hardly ever saw another cyclist.”

Sarah: “What about riding in towns and cities? What were the conditions like to ride a bike in a place like San Francisco in that era?”

Aaron: “You see, we come off the Golden Gate Bridge and we’d ride over to the Trans Bay ferry after a ride in Marin County. And there was nothing to it. I just followed the rules. I knew how to ride properly, and so I did.” [laughs]

Doug: So there is a lot of what you might call “survivorship bias,” piggybacking, Sarah, off of what you said. He just followed the rules and everything was fine. And look at him now. He’s still riding. I mean, he’s dead. Not now, but, you know.

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: Right.

Doug: But, you know, he made it. And so if you just follow the rules, you will be fine too.

Aaron: Right. But the other people who rode down the middle of a suburban arterial and got run over?

Doug: They’re not showing up to the meetings.

Aaron: They’re not here. They’re not here to tell us.

Doug: No. So Forester eventually settles in Palo Alto, California, and that’s where the entire vehicular cycling philosophy starts to come together.

Sarah: That makes sense.

Doug: We’ll get to this.

Sarah: [laughs] Okay.

Doug: We’re gonna do a lot of table-setting in this episode. I promise you we will get to effective cycling, but I actually feel like it’s a very fitting tribute to John Forester that we’re not actually gonna get to the core of the advice for quite some time. So I think it’s probably worth talking about the state of cycling in the US before Forester really gets involved in his form of cycling advocacy and the publication of Effective Cycling.

Doug: So bicycling in the U.S. after World War II is really at kind of just anemic levels. It’s seen as a thing that kids do. You know, you’ve got the real big construction of the suburbs, the interstate highway system. The US is really congealing into this car-dominated society that we know and love today, right? You know, today’s cyclists are gonna become tomorrow’s motorists is a theme that comes up a lot in the ’50s. So you flash forward to the ’60s and the early ’70s, and things really start to change.

Doug: There’s a great book by James Longhurst, who’s a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. It’s called Bike Battles. And he identifies four factors that create a bike boom after really the invention of the bicycle itself. So one is the development of multi-geared bikes, which we commonly call ten speeds. Most of the 1950s, the bikes are these heavy kids’ bikes with coaster brakes, no gears. If you picture Pee Wee Herman’s bike from Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, that’s basically what you should imagine. That’s the extreme end of that trend.

Doug: Eventually, there’s some tariff changes and government regulations that allow manufacturers to import parts and bicycles from Asia, from Europe, and you get lighter, multi-speed bicycles, the most famous of which is the Schwinn Varsity.

Aaron: Mm-hmm.

Doug: If you went to college in the ’60s and ’70s, that was the bike. It had handbrakes, it had gears. All of these baby boomer kids are 18, they’re going off to college. Like, that’s the bike that they are riding. Then you have stuff like the fitness craze of the 1960s. The Presidential Physical Fitness Test technically begins under Eisenhower, but gets a big boost under Kennedy and LBJ. And, you know, if you grew up in the ’70s and ’80s, you probably took that test in school. Jack LaLanne, his show is syndicated nationally starting in 1959. Diet culture starts to emerge in the ’60s, all kinds of stuff like that. So there’s, like, a real focus on fitness.

Doug: Then, of course, one of the big ones: environmentalism. You have the first Earth Day in 1970. The Whole Earth Catalog by Stuart Brand. That’s published in 1968, all the way up through 1972. Bikes are all in that. Perfect non-polluting tools, perfect for a communal lifestyle. The book Small Is Beautiful by EF Schumacher, which starts to take on fossil fuel consumption and the rapacious nature of capitalism. So there’s kind of this stuff in the ether that we have to change our ways. And then, of course, the big one is the 1973 OPEC embargo. The Yom Kippur War happens in Israel, and the OPEC nations basically stop shipping oil to nations that support Israel. Oil prices go from $2.90 a barrel to $11.65 a barrel in mere weeks or months. And that spurs an interest in smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles and even alternatives to driving altogether.

Aaron: My family was in Washington, DC, in the 1970s, and I remember we had this neighbor. He had been in the Air Force during the Vietnam War, and he was one of my best friend’s dads, Colonel Piper. That’s what we called him. Like, Mister this and Colonel that. You know, that’s—we addressed our friend’s parents like that. But Colonel Piper used to—he was the only dad in the neighborhood, the only parent in the neighborhood who biked to work. You know, it was just a little bit crazy! Like, Bob was out there biking, and it was, like, considered almost—well, he’d been flying jet fighters in Vietnam, and, you know, he just needs the adrenaline. It just wasn’t a normal thing at all that he was biking to work.

Aaron: And then I remember he actually had a big crash, like he was hit by a car or something, and he lost his sense of smell. He got, like, a head injury, and he lost his sense of smell. And then his job in the family was picking up the dog poop after that, because that was the joke. “Bob? Oh, it’s good for a while. He can clean up after the dog. It doesn’t bother him.”

Sarah: He’s still useful. [laughs]

Aaron: Yeah. But so it was kind of a big thing to have this one parent who was a bicyclist, and it was considered very unusual and a little bit radical and even a little bit wild.

Sarah: I remember the late ’70s being the time that I got my first—what I consider my first real bicycle, which was a Motobecane 10-speed. And I got it to do a bike trip, which I did when I was, like, 13 or 14. And it was an organized trip where a bunch of us teenagers rode around Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. And that was the first time that I really had a bicycle that was like it would go anywhere. And I had that feeling of, like, the bicycle being part of my body. And then when I got back to New York, that’s when my friends and I started riding bicycles around New York, actually to go places, not just to have fun or whatever. And it was a very dangerous environment to do that in. And it felt—I mean, when you said it was wild that he did that, it definitely felt like sort of a punk rock, transgressive thing to do, to be riding your bike to the club or whatever, because nobody did that.

Doug: Yeah. And I think you’re getting at sort of where that progression goes from kids’ bikes that you kind of tool around the neighborhood, especially the sort of Levittown kind of post-war suburb, to, oh, this lighter bike with gears. I can go up hills, I can go longer distances. Bicycling becomes this thing that you can use to get from point A to point B for fun or for transportation.

Doug: And it’s sort of a really interesting time because there’s like this sliding-door scenario. The oil crisis in 1973 causes the Netherlands to really double down on bicycles. They instituted, for about three or four months, car-free Sundays. They literally just banned driving on even highways. And there are all these pictures of people having picnics on highways and riding bicycles on them. And there are other things that contributed to the Dutch embrace of cycling, but that was a big factor that really says, like, “Oh, we have this history of cycling. We’ve sort of forgotten it a little bit. Let’s go back and let’s start investing and making it easy and safe so we don’t have to use so much oil.”

Doug: The U.S. takes a very different tack, but let’s get back to John Forester. So in the early ’70s, Forester is living in Palo Alto. According to Forester, it’s at this time that California decides to address the growing number of cyclists and address safety. And this is a quote from Forester. “By establishing a system of laws and facilities that would impose the childish cyclist inferiority system of operation upon all cyclists. Such a system would require both bikeways and laws to require cyclists to use those bikeways.” So hold onto that phrase.

Aaron: The daddy issues are emerging.

Doug: Yeah, just hold on to that phrase, “The cyclist inferiority system.” A variation of that will come up later. And he writes that this is just a continuation of what he calls, “Motordom’s program, started in 1925, to sweep non-motorized traffic from the roads.” What do you guys make of that?

Sarah: Well, I mean, where’s the lie there, right?

Doug: Right.

Sarah: You know, he’s right that it was part of that program, and that program was a highly developed, highly subsidized program to make cars the things that dominated the streetscape.

Aaron: Yeah. There is a very idealistic core to this, where he is just saying, “We just want to be treated, you know, like any other traveler on the public roadways. Like, I’m on a bike, I’m not in a car, but I want to be treated the same.” There was a very core idealism around just wanting the same rights that drivers were being given in post-war America.

Sarah: Yeah. And then going back historically, of course, there’s the whole history, which has been documented by so many great people, that bicyclists were the ones who got these roads built a lot of the time anyway, that the road system itself was originally to accommodate cyclists. So how is it that they ended up getting pushed off of it?

Doug: Yeah. I mean, I think this is the confounding thing about Forester is he’s obviously very smart, and sometimes he’s right, as you said. You know, a lot of why Palo Alto and other California cities wanted to banish cyclists to sidewalks or side paths was because the bike boom that was happening was making it tough for them to accommodate cycling on public roads. And just like today, merchants didn’t want to lose parking, drivers didn’t want to lose convenience, and so they really felt like if they could banish cyclists to the side of the road, we would never have to inconvenience motorists whatsoever. So the kind of inciting incident for Forester, it’s 1971. He’s cycling to work through Palo Alto, and he notices these signs saying, “Bicycles must use this sidewalk.” So he engages in his own form of civil disobedience, and he rides in the road. This is not from the book, we’re gonna get to that, but this is from Forester’s own website. Aaron, I guess for now you’ll be John Forester.

Aaron: I get to be John Forester?

Doug: Cranky old man. I mean, come on!

Aaron: Yeah, it works for me. “After some days, the police came alongside and instructed me nicely to use the sidewalk. I refused until they charged me with violating a municipal ordinance. When I read the ordinance, it also required cyclists on streets with bike lanes painted to turn left from the curb lane. So I went around to find a police car where there was a bike lane and turned left from the center of the roadway. Then I had two tickets that ordered me to violate the standard rules of the road. There was a real trial—not a traffic court hearing. I prepared diagrams showing why movements in accordance with the standard rules of the road were reasonably safe and within human ability. My other diagrams showed why the movements ordered by the ordinance produced more car-bike collision conflicts, and required abilities that humans did not have, like eyes in the back of the head. I was convicted just the same, but when the conviction was settled, the city repealed its ordinance.”

Doug: So I think the lesson here is, don’t give a ticket to an industrial engineer unless you want them to show up to court with diagrams.

Aaron: My man is the Rosa Parks of riding bikes in the middle of the road.

Doug: Oh, you don’t even know! We’re gonna get to some of that stuff.

Sarah: [laughs] No no no no no.

Doug: That is sort of how they see themselves. I don’t know, some people might disagree, but that is sort of how they saw themselves.

Aaron: That’s definitely how they saw themselves.

Doug: Yeah.

Sarah: I mean, seeking out the opportunity to commit the infraction in front of a police officer, it is an act of civil disobedience. I’m gonna give him that.

Aaron: I mean, later you would show up to meetings and they would talk about, you know, we don’t want these quote-unquote, “segregated” bike lanes. Like segregated bike facilities. That was their language. They believed they were being shoved off to the corner, forced to use a segregated facility, like a—like a special water fountain in Alabama in the ’60s. So they really thought they were fighting, like, a civil rights battle.

Doug: Yeah, but I just want to say before someone writes us an email saying, “What is Aaron talking about?” There literally is language where John is using phrases like, “Cyclists are the lepers of the road.” He uses the N-word at one point in some of his letters.

Sarah: No!

Doug: Oh, he does. Oh, he does! Yeah. And this is all out there. He really did see himself as fighting some sort of righteous crusade. Okay, so the local ordinance is overturned. Forester is still really worried that cyclists are gonna be banished to side paths and sidewalks and the side of the road. And he is convinced this is not just a violation of their rights to the road, but it’s actually dangerous. So he goes out and he conducts this experiment.

Doug: “I rode the sidewalk at the same speed that I had been using on the roadway. I figured that with my foreknowledge of the dangers and my bike-handling skills, I would survive. I was threatened by collision situations that I figured most cyclists would not escape at several times per mile. Then I rode the sidewalk of another street, which had four lanes at 35 miles per hour.” Just to be clear, I think he’s saying the street had a 35 mile-an-hour speed limit. Not that he’s riding 35 miles an hour, although just wait.

Doug: “Intending to turn left, I looked ahead and there was a platoon of cars a long way away. I looked behind, and there was another platoon of cars a long way away. So I turned left across the roadway. I had missed that the platoon of cars coming from behind me had a lead car in the number one lane ahead of the others, and I was cycling directly into its path. I was leaning for the left turn and could not turn right away from that car, but I could tighten the turn to ride toward that car on the lane between the two lanes. The two lanes of cars passed by me on each side. I got to the center line, waited for the platoon coming the other way to overtake me, and rode to the curb, where I sat down to think things over. Quite clearly, these facilities and laws were at least as dangerous as I had initially figured, and maybe more so.”

Doug: So that’s a pretty crazy experiment. He’s just, like, coming off the sidewalk at full speed for him. I think sometimes he says he’s doing it at a slower speed, and basically just cars are zooming by in every direction. And because he’s coming off of the sidewalk, like, with no visibility, all this kind of stuff, he concludes that it is incredibly dangerous to make this move.

Sarah: I mean, what he’s doing here is he’s trying to do both, right? He’s driving like a car on the sidewalk, and then being surprised that when he comes off of the sidewalk onto the road, that people are surprised.

Doug: Yeah, it’s unclear to me. There are times where people are saying, “Oh, he’s coming off the sidewalk at full speed.” There are other times where he’s saying he’s carefully inching into traffic and then going for it. But, you know, I think a driver coming out of a driveway who’s just seeking their chance to get between a platoon of cars coming from either direction would also find that it’s pretty dangerous to do it like this.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron: Right. I mean, it’s like there’s a way in which, you know, he’s not being very flexible here. It’s like he’s looking for this kind of like, clarity of rules and regulation, and that he can just almost act like an object in a computer program. It’s like, “Oh, I should be able to go 35 miles per hour and just …

Doug: Yeah.

Aaron: And it’s like, well, no, you’re on the street. You’re a human. You have to be contextual.

Sarah: Right. That’s really interesting because one of the beautiful things about bicycles is that they are contextual, they are flexible.

Aaron: We can look each other in the eye, we can hear each other. We can see.

Sarah: You can adjust your speed and your trajectory so quickly, so intuitively, in much the same way as you do as a pedestrian. This is again why I think it’s more like being a pedestrian in a lot of ways than it is like being a driver.

Doug: Sarah, you just have the childish cyclist inferiority complex. I’m sorry, you have been brainwashed.

Sarah: Okay, I accept that. [laughs]

Doug: All right, so basically he does this test, which he calls “The one valid test of a side path system.” And he concludes that sidepath-style bikeways are, quote, “1,000 times more dangerous than riding on the same roads.” Now I don’t know if that’s hyperbole or if he literally means that it’s an order of magnitude more dangerous than riding just on the road, but this claim that it’s a thousand times more dangerous, this is gonna come up a lot in his book.

Sarah: But wait, “The one valid test?” Like, one? One incident? Like, this is not science. Hello. I’m like “Mr. Industrial Engineer?”

Aaron: Yeah, where’d you get your numbers, pal?

Sarah: Just one test is enough for …

Doug: Look, we built the Titanic. It floated in the dock. Clearly it’s gonna survive the trip across the ocean.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: So this really then leads to the other core tenet of vehicular cycling, other than cyclists faring best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles, they really believe that riding on side paths or protected bike lanes—especially those separated or segregated from automobile traffic with parked cars—are inherently more dangerous than just riding on the street.

Sarah: I just want to say that what’s interesting to me about both of those tenets is that they completely fly in the face of the intuitive experience of pretty much anybody I know who’s ever ridden a bicycle. It’s just—this is what’s so frustrating to me about this whole philosophy or approach is that it erases the way that people actually act in public. It’s the same thing as saying, like, desire lines, pathways that people follow, like, well, they just shouldn’t be doing that. Well, but they just do. And when you put a person on a bicycle, and you put them next to a road and there’s a sidewalk that they can ride on instead, and there’s cars going 35 miles an hour, almost everybody will be like, “I feel safer on the sidewalk.” Like, that’s just the truth.

Aaron: I have this amazing tool that allows me, like, to jump up on the sidewalk pretty easily and then come back down when it feels safer. It’s like you can have this flexibility with a bike that John Forester clearly was not interested in.

Doug: Yeah, there’s a theme that’s gonna come up a lot in this episode, and that is that Forester completely dismisses the very concept of subjective safety, that there is no such thing. Like, there are facts and figures and science, and then there are your feelings. And sort of like the conservative mantra these days of, you know, facts don’t care about your feelings, that’s what he is getting at with this of like, you may feel, you may think that you prefer riding in a separated sort of bike lane or even on a sidewalk. You might feel that that’s safer, but you’re wrong and fuck your feelings basically.

Sarah: Right. Okay. He should do more than one experiment then, if he’s gonna be scientific about it.

Doug: So let’s keep going. So at this point, Forester gets really involved in his own form of cycling advocacy. He’s writing articles, he’s meeting with traffic engineers in California. And this all leads toward the publication of this massive textbook that I have here, Effective Cycling, which we will get to after this break.

Aaron: As a 15-year-old growing up in Edmonton, Linda Young used to ride her bike to school. One afternoon, she came out of class eager to ride home, only to find that her front wheel had been stolen. Now most people would just kind of curse, kick the dirt, walk home, and that would be that. But not Linda. Her stolen front wheel started her on a lifelong mission to develop the ultimate bicycle security solution. She founded Pinhead in 1997.

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Doug: So Effective Cycling by John Forester is published in 1976. It’s basically a textbook. Forester develops a course to go along with the book to teach his principles of how to ride not in traffic, but as traffic. And that’s also a really important distinction. They really felt like cyclists are not riding in traffic, they are a part of traffic and have a right to be there. Let’s read just a couple of paragraphs of the introduction.

Sarah: “Cycling is great sport. Most Americans think of it as a good way to exercise, preferably by riding along bike paths at 10 miles an hour. But not many do it regularly because cycling has a bad reputation. People think of it as being hard work, riding on an uncomfortable and complicated machine, unsuitable roads, in dangerous traffic where they don’t belong and aren’t wanted. Those two opinions explain the American cycling scene. There are many bicycle owners, but far fewer active cyclists. Too many people have never felt the real pleasures of cycling because they haven’t learned the easy, safe, and efficient way to cycle.”

Doug: So right off the bat, “Cycling is great sport.” And at first I was like, well, he’s British, so maybe he means, like, “Great sport, chap.” But no. I mean, I think he’s really leaning into it’s like a physical activity that you do with your body.

Aaron: And it’s interesting because his approach was so oriented toward transportation. Like, I should be able to get from point A to point B efficiently and safely, just like I’m in a car. And yet he still refers to it as “sport.” So he’s kind of in both places at the same time.

Doug: I think from my understanding of vehicular cycling is that they didn’t really see cycling as transportation as much as they had a right to be on the road with cars. Like, these were guys who were club cyclists, who went out for long-distance rides. And a lot of those rides happened, just because of the nature of our built environment, on what they would describe as highways in the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s sense of that word. And they didn’t necessarily see it as primarily a means of getting to work or to school or to do your grocery shopping. So they really did lean more into, like, this is a physical activity that you do for exercise, and if you do it right, you become more fit.

Sarah: I also just think that there’s just so many assumptions that he makes in this paragraph that it’s kind of mystifying to me where he’s getting them from. Again, a man who is supposedly coming from this hyper-rational approach. He’s saying, “This is what people’s opinion is. This is what people do it for. This is how people feel about it.” But did he ever ask anybody how they felt about it? It seems like these are just his feelings, and he’s just projecting them onto everybody else.

Aaron: Yeah, he didn’t conduct surveys, I don’t think.

Sarah: No, I mean, it’s just …

Doug: We’re gonna get into some of the alleged data in this book. I mean, I think there’s a lot—he’s a really good writer, you know? And I think he obviously has a way with words. He was very argumentative. He loved a good debate, and there was a lot in the intro that captures a lot of what I think we love about cycling. And anybody who listens to this podcast, who gets around on a bike loves about it, whether they’re riding to work or for fun. But he also kind of contradicts himself. You know, he’s basically saying, “Cycling is hard work. I’m gonna teach you that cycling is actually quite easy.” But then there’s a lot in the book that’s like, yeah, it’s really hard work, and you got to get your body in top physical condition.

Doug: So along the lines of the stuff that I think is rather poetic, he says, “Cycling is real travel. It is the ability to go where you want, with the pleasure in both mind and body of knowing that you have powered yourself to your destination. There’s nothing like the satisfaction of having gotten yourself to where you want to go, a satisfaction amplified by moderate fatigue.” So, you know, there it is. It’s like, “You think it’s hard work. It’s actually quite easy. But part of the pleasure comes from mildly fatiguing your body.”

Sarah: Again, I would just like to say this is a very Anglo-Saxon, Puritan view of the world, which is that in order to truly achieve anything that is virtuous and lasting, you must suffer. And I just think that that is at the root of a lot of problems that we have in this society, including vehicular cycling. [laughs]

Doug: Absolutely. So in the introduction, he gets to his first mention of riding in traffic. He says, “Most people start by believing that cycling in traffic is dangerous and threatening and that they don’t belong there. Heavy traffic is not one of the joys of life, but once you learn how to ride in traffic, you will realize that you are a partner in a well-ordered dance, with drivers doing their part to achieve a safe trip home.” Sarah is, like, ready to smack her head against the table. “Then traffic ceases to become a mysterious threat, and becomes instead just one of the conditions that you can handle with reasonable safety.”

Aaron: Man, that’s wild! That’s wild.

Doug: It’s a well-ordered dance.

Aaron: A well-ordered dance. I mean, to be fair to John, there were not, like, gigantic SUVs. You know, like, every vehicle was not an enormous tinted window gigundo SUV back then.

Sarah: What year was this?

Doug: The book comes out in 1976.

Sarah: Okay. This is right when I was learning how to ride a bicycle in New York City, and I will tell you that a ‘well-ordered dance’ is only a description that you would use if you think that, like, a taxi intentionally trying to hit you while you’re …

Aaron: Right. By the way, a well-ordered dance of, like, air full of leaded gasoline.

Sarah: [laughs] Exactly!

Aaron: Being like, you know, turned into exhaust for you to breathe.

Sarah: Right. Noise that’s setting off your cortisol levels and, like, causing permanent damage to your vascular system.

Doug: I actually want to kind of stop right there and say, like, there’s a real thing that we have to distinguish here, is that you were talking about riding in New York City. That is a style of riding that we all do because we live here. He’s living in California, and he’s living in Palo Alto, which is not really that developed at this point.

Aaron: Mm-hmm.

Doug: So he’s doing a lot of suburban riding. He is, at his core, a suburbanite, and this is gonna be a thing that comes up. There’s a sort of disdain that he shows later for urban elites and bicycle advocates. And so for him, he’s riding along these suburban roads, and there aren’t thousands of cars that he’s contending with, probably. There’s maybe like a few dozen, depending on his route, maybe a few hundred. And so it’s like, sure, it’s pretty easy.

Aaron: And by the way, the burbs, you know, in the ’70s, they often were a safe place for kids to ride. Like, kids would ride around their kind of cul de sac or their little part, their little corner of their suburban neighborhood. And that’s probably why he was fighting against this idea that bicycling is so childish, because he’s probably out there with a bunch of little kids.

Doug: I will also say, however, that there were 1,100 cycling deaths in 1976. That number remains pretty constant throughout the ’70s. It ranges from about 800 to about 1,100. You know how many cyclist deaths there are now in 2023? 2024? About 800.

Aaron: Hmm.

Doug: So, you know, we have a much larger population. More people in those giant SUVs, more people distracted by phones. And yet cycling fatalities have, if not totally gone down, remained rather constant. That’s as cycling rates have gone up. It’s not exactly a one-to-one comparison, because there are fewer child cyclists actually today than there were in the ’70s for a host of reasons, which is a whole other episode. But, like, it’s not like there was some perfect time, the halcyon days of cycling, and everything was safe, and it was this well-ordered dance, like, even in rural California.

Doug: Okay, we are already a long way into this book. We have not yet gotten to chapter one. We are actually gonna skip over most of the first three chapters of the book because they are so mind-numbingly dull. And almost none of it has anything to do with vehicular cycling techniques. To be fair to Forester, he writes that he doesn’t expect anyone to pick this book up and read it in one sitting from beginning to end. He says it’s more like a reference book, and you can kind of pick it up, look stuff up as you need it.

Doug: I do just want to give you both a taste of what is in the first 148 pages. So chapter one is titled “The Bicycle,” and it gets into mechanical operation. It’s basically like, how does a bicycle work? There is so much minutiae in the section on clothing, like, what kind of bicycle clothing to wear—shorts and chamois and all that kind of stuff—he gets into the most intimate of detail. He has a paragraph that [laughs]— “Cycling shorts and trousers must not be washed in detergent. The detergent residues get rubbed into the skin and causes sores very like chemical burns. Use only pure soap, or even no soap when washing by machine.”

Aaron: All right.

Doug: Have either of you seen the old Phil Hartman Saturday Night Live sketch “The Anal Retentive Chef?” The whole premise of that sketch is, like, he’s gonna teach you how to cook something, but he never gets to the recipe because he’s so anal retentive. He’s, like, cleaning up and putting things away. He’s focused on, like, the most—the tiniest detail. That’s what’s happening here. There is a very long section on, like, how to steer your bike and handling and brakes and brake repair. There are 12 pages on gear calculation and selection. There’s a full page chart showing teeth per rear sprocket, and all the different combinations of gears for 27-inch wheels. There is literally a subsection called “Using the Logarithmic Graph to Study and Select Gearing Systems.”

Aaron: This is like taking a 16-year-old to go learn how to drive, and then telling that kid, like, they can’t drive unless they know how a carburetor works. You know what I mean?

Doug: Gear ratios. You cannot understand.

Aaron: Like, you need to be able to change your own spark plugs or something. It’s just like, there are bike shops, dude. Like, bring your bike into the shop. It’s fine. You don’t need to know all of this.

Doug: I wanted to be charitable as I was reading it, because this is pre-internet. You know, a lot of the stuff that you might have of, like, “Oh, my skin is irritating me.” And you could go to Reddit or any bicycling website and find just that article. So he’s throwing everything in here like an encyclopedia. But there were times when I was just like, honestly, people can’t figure out how to wash their clothes? [laughs] Okay, so there are 31 pages on bike maintenance, with hand-drawn diagrams of rims and tires and bearings. There’s a section on wheel building, with diagrams of various spoke patterns. And again, it’s so anal retentive. The bicycle maintenance chapter, it closes with a subsection called “Leather Maintenance: Saddles and Toe Straps.” And it advises cyclists to, “Save your old toe straps when they wear out, because they make excellent tie-down straps with many uses.” All this kind of stuff that you could just figure out on your own.

Sarah: But here’s the thing—and I remember this era of cycling quite well because my dad was really into road cycling, and he probably had this book or something like it at some point. And I really remember all this stuff about gear ratios and how big that was. But to me, it’s like, this is—it’s a form of gatekeeping. It’s literally implying that if you don’t understand gear ratios, as you were saying, Aaron, about driving a car, like, imagine having to understand all the mechanics of a car in order to be considered competent to drive it. It was very much the same with bicycles, but in this case, I think it’s really being used to gatekeep people out, you know, and to say, “If you’re the kind of person who can understand these concepts of physics and mechanics, then you’re going to be an efficient, effective cyclist. But if you can’t do those things, you really shouldn’t be part of this group.”

Doug: Yes. And I think that gets to the fundamental argument that we—I’m saying ‘we’ as being the sort of bike advocates who want Dutch-style infrastructure, for example—have with the vehicular cyclists, is that we think that we are both arguing for mass adoption of cycling as a means of transportation, but we’re not. We are. They are not arguing for that. They want a certain type of person. They don’t want 10 percent mode share. They want people like them riding bikes, and whether that leads to 10 percent mode share or not is irrelevant for them.

Aaron: But that was always what was striking about them when they’d show up to meetings and advocate against bike lanes. You know, you’d have these kind of like, parents getting up at the meeting and they’d be like, “I’m just trying to bike my kids to school safely.” And then these guys would argue against that. There was just a lack of empathy with them, just a lack of empathy for other people, and an inability to see, like, that the thing that they needed and liked as a bicyclist was not the same thing that other people needed and liked.

Doug: I just want to say #NotAllVehicularCyclists, because there probably is someone writing in right now saying, like, “Well, actually, I wanted there to be—you know, I hate cars, blah, blah, blah.” But that is …

Aaron: “We’re really worried about the fucking …” I mean, come on.

Doug: No, we’re not. No.

Aaron: Do they have to do that shit for every time we make a comment? Really?

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: Come on!

Doug: Thank you for—thank you for giving me that permission just to say, “Fuck it.” Okay. Okay. I promise we’re gonna get to the vehicular cycling stuff, but you have to read chapter three. This is where he’s gonna get into even more detail about posture, saddle selection, even saddle soreness. I’m not gonna force this on either of you. Which one of you wants to read this?

Sarah: I think that’s Aaron’s. [laughs]

Aaron: “Some cyclists—” this is crazy shit! “Some cyclists are subject to saddle boils, white-headed pimples containing a hard core that develop in the areas of greatest frictional movement and moderate pressure. For normal cyclists, a few days off the bike give relief. It is an uncomplicated pimple, and providing it is carefully done, opening the top of the pimple with a needle and gently squeezing out the core provides complete relief. When these develop, you cannot treat them yourself. Now is when you need a gentle friend.”

Doug: [laughs] I read this—I’ve already read this, and I’m like, you need a gentle friend, someone to squeeze a pimple on your butt?

Sarah: I think he means a wife.

Aaron: Oh, yeah.

Sarah: [laughs] That’s what I’m guessing. That’s my guess. That’s what you have her around for. You know, this person, she’s gentle, she’s probably got a cyclist—what is it? Cyclist deficiency syndrome?

Doug: Inferiority.

Sarah: She probably has a cyclist inferiority complex.

Doug: Yes.

Sarah: But she’s gentle. And when you need that boil squeezed …

Doug: The entire episode could just be us dunking on this paragraph, by the way.

Aaron: But these mad men, these guys were like—they were very influential for about 20 or 30 years.

Doug: Oh, we are in Dr. Strangelove territory here where it’s like bodily fluids. Let’s talk. It’s really crazy. I really want to keep going.

Sarah: Okay.

Doug: Okay, you continue through chapter three, and there is a small section called “Carrying.” That’s the subsection, “Carrying,” which I thought was gonna be how to carry stuff on your bike, like groceries. No, it is literally instructions for how to pick up your bicycle and carry it. Forester writes, “To carry your bike, stand beside it, and pick it up by one front fork blade and one seat stay about halfway between hub and rim. It balances well, and can be lifted over things or onto things.” Oh, thanks, John. This is not a thing I could have figured out on my own. I would have picked it up upside down by a wheel. It’s mind blowing to me that the core part of his philosophy is, “If you can’t ride along tractor-trailer trucks, you are an incompetent idiot who’s afraid of his own shadow. But hey, if you’re smart enough to be reading this book, oh, let me tell you how to pick up your bicycle.”

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: Okay, so we finally get to our first bit of vehicular cycling techniques. There’s a section titled “Emergency Maneuvers,” which covers things like what to do if you have to, like, suddenly dodge a rock that’s in the road, or how to panic stop without flipping over your handlebars. Just kind of important stuff. Then there are 20 pages under the heading “Keeping Your Body Going,” which includes information about anaerobic and aerobic systems in the body, how you process oxygen, glycogen stores, fat conversion. I mean, I run marathons, and this would be like reading a marathon book if 45 pages were devoted to, like, how to tie your shoes. Nobody is gonna read this book and think, “Oh, cycling is easy,” when he’s literally saying, “Here’s how your body loses its glucose stores.”

Doug: Finally, chapter four, “The Cycling Environment.” We are nearly 150 pages in, and we are at the main event: vehicular cycling. And he starts the chapter by listing what he calls the ‘basic traffic cycling principles.’ And they are, “Number one, right side of roadway.” So drive on the right hand side of the roadway, never on the left, never on the sidewalk. Basically, you know, go in the direction of traffic. Number two, “Yield to cross traffic. When you reach a more important or larger road than the one you’re on, yield to crossing traffic.” Okay, pretty basic.

Aaron: Don’t bike into traffic.

Doug: Yeah. “When you intend to change lanes or move laterally on a roadway, yield to traffic in the new lane or line of travel. Yielding means looking forward—” parentheses, “(easy.) And backwards—” parentheses “you have to learn) until you see that no traffic is coming. For destination positioning, when approaching an intersection, position yourself with respect to your destination direction. Right turners on the right, left turners on the left near the center line and straight through riders between them. Speed positioning. Between intersections, position yourself by your speed relative to other traffic parked at the curb, then slower near the parked cars, then faster near the center line.” Does anybody need instructions that when you are stopped or parked, you shouldn’t stand in the middle of traffic?

Aaron: When my kids were in grade school, other parents knew that I was, like, the weird dad who was letting his kids bike to school at a pretty young age. And they would sort of ask me, “Okay, what should—my kid wants to bike, too? What should we do?” And I was always trying to figure out, like, what are just the three rules? Like, how can I boil this down to three rules? Forester took a different approach.

Sarah: Yes.

Aaron: He had more rules.

Doug: But did you tell your kids about their butt pimples?

Aaron: I did not get into the butt pimples.

Sarah: Aaron, you failed as a parent. Maybe they’ll find a ‘gentle friend’ along the way who can help them.

Aaron: But no, this is just so intimidating. It’s like you said, Sarah, it’s exclusive. It doesn’t make me feel like I can deal with this.

Sarah: No, it’s quite clearly saying to me, “You can’t deal with this.” And it’s scary, it’s confusing, and it is intimidating. I mean, when you’re telling people you need my instructions on how to pick up your bicycle, you’re telling them you don’t know anything.

Aaron: But it’s also like he thinks he’s being kind. He thinks he’s being helpful. He thinks he’s being inclusive by providing all of this information. It’s interesting.

Doug: He’s saying, “Oh, look. You don’t have to read this from beginning to end. It’s a reference book, essentially—especially the first 150 pages. You can just go back if you have a flat tire and want to learn how to do that.” But if I went to a ostensibly cycle-friendly place, and before I even got on my bicycle, someone tossed a 300-page book in my face and said, “Look, you don’t have to read the whole thing, but if you want to ride in this country, you should know some of the stuff in here.” I’d be like, “Fuck that,” you know? Like, I don’t want a book to have to go ride my bicycle. I just want to plop down, show me where the bike lanes are, and I’ll go. If I get lost, I’ll turn around, but I won’t die.

Aaron: Well, and they never did that, right? Like, these guys, they would show up to meetings in the early 2000s, and there’d be bike advocates like us who’d be talking about, like, “Well, here’s what they’re doing in Copenhagen, and here’s what they’re doing in Amsterdam. And here’s how they’ve made this city and that city more bike friendly.” These guys never did that. They never had, like, examples from other places. That just wasn’t part of their repertoire at all.

Doug: Fun fact: according to multiple sources, Forester never visited the Netherlands. Not once. And when he was asked to explain the high rates of cycling there, he said—this is from an article by Carlton Reid. “The Dutch produced a very dangerous bikeway system compared to cycling on the road, but they overcompensated for those dangers by installing protective measures that make it extremely inconvenient compared to cycling on the road.” If it’s so inconvenient, why are so many people doing it as their primary mode of transportation? He really only devotes, like, one paragraph at the end to any European example, and he doesn’t really even name the Dutch or the Netherlands. He says, you know, sure, northern Europe has a lot of cycling, but cycling there has, quote, “Low social status and low utility.” And again, if it has low utility, why are so many people doing it?

Sarah: It’s just not true. And again, I’m just so infuriated by the guy who is, “I’m Mr. Rational Diagram Man,” but has zero data. And not only does he not bring the data for his side, if you tell him any data that is against him, he’s just like, “La la la la la!” This is like the most mansplain-y thing that I’ve ever heard.

Doug: You might say it’s a thousand times more mansplaining than any other mansplaining thing, Sarah.

Sarah: It really is. It’s like, it’s exponentially more mansplaining.

Doug: [laughs]

Aaron: I mean, they were probably out there, but I never saw a female vehicular cyclist show up to a meeting.

Sarah: When we were putting together the Streetsblog network, there was this woman in Florida.

Aaron: We found one.

Sarah: There was a woman in Florida who apparently really liked cycling along the stroads of Florida with a lot of other people. That’s the other thing. You mentioned a lot of these people are club cyclists, right? Let’s not forget that a lot of this vehicular cycling, as it was practiced, was done in groups, which completely is a different experience than cycling when you’re going by yourself to a destination.

Doug: And that’s a huge thing, because a lot of what they were rebelling against was the laws in California that were saying cyclists have to be on the side paths. But I spoke to a few people for this episode, Peter Furth, who’s a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Northeastern, and one of the things he said is that there’s really no evidence that these laws as they existed in California, as Forester was afraid of them, really would apply to club cyclists. Like, there’s no evidence that if a cop saw five cyclists riding together on a road, he would have stopped them and said, “You gotta be on the sidewalk.”

Doug: Forester in the book—we’re gonna get to it—is gonna get to the differences between “club cyclists,” as he calls them, and child or college cyclists. We’re gonna get to this. So then we get to the “Whys and Wisdom of Traffic Law.” And I actually found this to be the most fascinating part of the book. It’s a very philosophical section. It kind of gets into why do traffic laws exist? Who are they written for? What behavior are they trying to enforce? It tries to parse, I think in the way that we do, the difference between traffic laws that exist to enforce a generally socially acceptable type of behavior, and laws that don’t really benefit people on bikes. It’s a really interesting thing, and I think it sort of would be a fascinating discussion with the ghost of John Forester. But then he divides at this point road users into pedestrians who must, by law, stay off the roadway, and drivers who travel on the roadway. Since cyclists travel on the roadway, they are drivers, period.

Sarah: This kind of reductive logic, it’s just so—it’s so fake.

Doug: So then he’s basically saying that, you know, since highways are public goods paid by taxpayer dollars “maintained by the people,” as he says, “All persons have an equal right to use them for purposes of travel by proper means, and with due regard for the corresponding rights of others.” This is another core tenet, he says. “In general, if you treat other users as they should treat you, you have exactly the same rights that they have.” So sort of a golden rule but for right to the road, it’s the opposite of Vision Zero in many ways, which basically says, like, “Hey, people are gonna fuck up and they’re not always gonna follow the rules, but they shouldn’t die as a result.”

Aaron: It’s the opposite of the law of the sea, which is like, if you’re in a bigger vessel, you yield to the smaller vessel. Like a bicycle versus a truck. You should treat each other well, but you’re in a truck, that guy’s on a bike.

Sarah: Yeah.

Aaron: You’re not the same thing. So you’re much more powerful, you’re bigger, you’re deadlier. You have a different set of responsibilities.

Doug: So it’s in this chapter where Forester is taking on the idea of different rules for different road users, and he says that “If cyclists accept that they shouldn’t be on main roads with general traffic, they’re accepting an inferior legal and social status that would actually make them less safe.” He says, “The motorist who smashes a cyclist by an illegal action is liable to go to jail and pay heavy damages. The prospect of punishment and financial liability is expected to help prevent that motorist from being so careless that the lives of others are endangered, and to make him repay, so far as practicable, for the trouble caused.”

Aaron: My man has never heard of no-fault insurance, apparently.

Doug: I mean, yeah, he’s basically saying, like, there are laws that prevent drivers from getting off scot free if they kill you, and because they don’t want to be subject to the punishment that comes with that, that’s why they’re gonna treat you nicely. Which is true for some drivers, but certainly is not—it’s not gonna work in every situation. He says that basically, in contrast, if you accept laws that don’t allow cyclists on the road, it would just be open season on cyclists, because if you were on the road that you were not legally allowed to be on and a driver killed you, you’d have no recourse. I also want to say that the prospect of punishment for the driver who injures or kills me is not a comfort to me if I’m injured or killed.

Aaron: Yes. Once you’re dead, you don’t really care that much.

Doug: Yeah. Like, if the driver goes to jail after I’m dead, that’s of little comfort to me, my family, my kids.

Aaron: But it’s also just not true. I mean, for the most part, motorists don’t get punished very severely for injuring and killing people on the road.

Sarah: Yeah, whether they’re cyclists or pedestrians or other motorists, they usually get off.

Aaron: Unless you’re drunk, maybe.

Sarah: Drunk, yeah.

Aaron: And when he’s writing, that wasn’t even true. In 1976, drunk drivers also got off scot-free.

Sarah: Absolutely.

Aaron: That didn’t change until the ’80s.

Doug: Yeah. This is where he says that basically, if you accept inferior legal status, then that turns cyclists into the ‘lepers of the road.’ He says “The actions of fear beget greater fear. Remember that this hasn’t happened yet, and be thankful and confident that today you still have equal right to use the highway.” Once he establishes that you have an equal right to the road, and that so long as you act in a certain way, you can expect to receive the same treatment in return, he has to reckon with the fact that crashes still happen. What he says basically is like, if you are hit or even afraid of being hit, it’s because you’re a dumbass.

Aaron: He writes, “Car-bike collisions do occur to competent cyclists, but these are much less frequent than those to average bicycle riders, and they’re basically similar to motorist-motorist collisions.” What? No, they’re not.

Sarah: [laughs]

Aaron: “They’re caused by general mistakes in driving, not by the peculiarities of cyclists. Unfortunately, most car-bike collisions are caused by cyclists of low skill committing the most elementary kinds of mistakes—disobeying the law, which implies a very low level of skill in traffic cycling. Competent cyclists are reasonably safe, even though when hit, they will suffer more than motorists. Nearly all motorists cooperate with other traffic within the rules of the road. If might really made right, the only vehicles left would be gravel trucks and armored cars. Motorists typically cooperate with cyclists as well as they do with other motorists, barring a few understandable mistakes because of the special conditions. So long as cyclists act reasonably, most motorists will treat them reasonably. Those that act unreasonably—either cyclist or motorist—are acting illegally. So be confident that most drivers will cooperate, but be watchful for those who don’t have.” This is bonkers!

Doug: Yeah, we can dig in here. I read this and I thought, this is what people say who hate bikes. Crashes happen. If there are 200 cycling fatalities in your state every year, it’s because 90 percent of the cyclists were doing something wrong. And I just—basically, my note that I kept writing as I was reading this book was, “Citation, please.” Like, where is he getting this idea that when car-bike collisions occur, they are caused by general mistakes in driving, and that they are caused by incompetent cyclists doing something wrong? I mean, is he getting that from any sort of police report where the cyclist is dead and can’t tell the officer what happened? I mean, I just don’t know.

Sarah: There is no data in here at all. It’s just making these assertions that I can—as far as I can tell, are not based on anything other than his own gut feeling. And then it’s just basically saying that if you get hit by a car, it’s because you’re a low-skill cyclist.

Doug: Okay, so that is a great place for us to wrap up part one of this episode. If you’re listening to this in the general feed, you’re gonna hear part two of our conversation about effective cycling and John Forester in about two weeks. If you want to hear the entire thing all at once, sign up on Patreon. Become a Patreon supporter and you’ll get the entire episode.

Aaron: Go to TheWaronCars.org, click “Support Us“. Pitch in $3, $5, $10 a month. We’ll send you stickers, you’ll get discounts on merchandise, access to dozens of bonus episodes, and ad-free episodes, too.

Sarah: We want to thank our top Patreon supporters: Charley Gee of Human Powered Law in Portland, Oregon, Virginia Baker, Mark Hedlund and the Parking Reform Network. This episode was recorded by Josh Wilcox at the Brooklyn Podcasting Studio. It was edited by Yesenia Moreno.

Doug: Our music is by Nathaniel Goodyear. Our transcripts are done by Russell Gragg. I’m Doug Gordon.

Sarah: I’m Sarah Goodyear.

Aaron: I’m Aaron Naparstek. And this is The War on Effective Cycling.

Doug: [laughs] The War on John Forester.