Episode 132: Vehicular Cycling and John Forester, Part 2

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Doug Gordon: This is The War on Cars. I’m Doug Gordon, and I am here with my co-hosts, Aaron Naperstek and Sarah Goodyear. This is part two of our episode on effective cycling and John Forester. If you haven’t heard it already, go back and listen to part one. And if you want to hear the entire episode all at once with no interruptions, become a Patreon supporter. Thanks!

Doug: 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’s 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: Yeah, we’re gonna get to that idea of low-skilled, incompetent cyclists in a little bit. And I want to get to the data that he does include in the book because it’s interesting. So he’s got to prove this, right? He’s an engineer. He’s saying that he’s a scientist. He’s got to prove this, and that if cyclists are getting hit and killed because they are not skilled, he’s got to say, like, “Here are the stats that prove that.”

Sarah: Okay, so I am gonna get some stats here?

Doug: You are. You’re right that, like, there’s not a whole lot there there. He basically says, like, “If you set aside subjective fear and you understand these facts, then you have nothing to worry about.” He says that prior to 1974, there were zero scientific studies of crashes involving cyclists, and that everything that was quote, “Thought, said, or written about bike safety was based only on personal experience.” Which is funny, because, like, his one-man experiment is just his personal experience.

Doug: So then he cites a 1974 study by a man named Kenneth D. Cross who, there’s not a whole lot about him. As far as I could tell, he was a very well-respected researcher, he loved cycling, who did some studies for USDoT and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Forester charges that Cross was commissioned by California state agencies with the explicit expectation that he would prove what he calls the bike safety case, that you have to keep cyclists away from cars. And then he claims that when Cross did the study, it actually showed the opposite, that the vehicular cycling view was the correct view. And then he says, “The report was hidden and no further copies were distributed. Once it was, the lid was blown off of the bike safety industrial complex.” Like, they had to hide the report. So Peter Furth at Northeastern, he said that’s just not true. Cross’s studies are still available. He has seen them. There’s multiple studies.

Doug: So let’s break down a little bit of what he says. And Peter really helped me sort of work this out. I want to say, by the way, I’ve mentioned Peter Furth at Northeastern and Peter Flax at Bicycling Magazine. So we have John Allen, John Forester, Peter Furth and Peter Flax. So try to keep it all straight. Okay, so first, Forester says that the study was commissioned with the expectation that it would prove the bike safety case. So that’s not true. The Cross report literally says in it that its purpose was quote, “To determine the causes of bicycle-motor vehicle accidents, and to use data on accident causation to identify potential countermeasure approaches.” It’s possible Forester was told, “Hey look, we hired this guy, and we want him to show that bike lanes are the way to go.” But that’s not what the study says. So, you know, it’s his word against who knows what.

Doug: Forester then claims in a few interviews and articles that the Cross study only showed that 0.5 percent of car-bike collisions are caused by what he calls “same direction motor traffic.” That’s, you know, a driver overtaking you, sideswiping you, something like that. Some interviews, he says it’s five percent, in others he says it’s two percent. Either way, no matter how you slice it, he’s basically saying, like, it’s super low. You don’t have to worry about it. Let’s assume Forester is right, that it’s 0.5 percent. In the Peter Flax interview, Peter talks to John, and he says, “Look, I ride in Los Angeles, and there’s a new bike lane, and, you know, when I’m in it, I feel a lot safer. And sure, when you get to the intersections, you have to be a little careful but, like, that’s pretty good.” And then Flax basically says, you know, there’s this woman who was doored in San Francisco on a street with no bike infrastructure. She falls into traffic, she’s hit by a delivery truck, she’s killed. And Peter is sort of asking him to explain this.

Sarah: “People see these kinds of incidents happening, and then when protected lanes go in, they feel like that particular kind of risk has been erased for that kind of rider.”

Aaron Naparstek: John Forester. “Well, in the first place, don’t ride in the door zone. That’s one of the early rules of the game. And also what you’re reading is, people killed. You don’t read about broken ankles, concussed brains, cracked ribs. They don’t make the news. Only two percent of car-bike collisions are fatal. You’re making the tail wag the dog. And not only are just two percent of car-bike collisions fatal, they’re much more likely to occur during darkness and on rural roads than other car-bike collisions. Furthermore, as I’ve said, only five percent of car-bike collisions are caused by same direction motor traffic, 95 percent by turning and crossing movements. In other words, the people who you are quoting are making the tail wag the dog, and doing that because they are more frightened of traffic from behind than they are of anything else. That’s their phobia. It is a phobia because it is an unrealistic fear contrary to scientific knowledge.”

Doug: Okay, there is a ton to unpack in here. [laughs] This interview that Peter Flax did, it’s great. Peter is a really good writer and journalist, and this interview is really sympathetic to John because it happens really late in his life, right before he dies. But, man! So number one, Forester totally dismisses some pretty significant injuries, like, “Oh, I won’t die. I’ll just get a concussed brain, a broken ankle and broken ribs? Sign me up! Sounds awesome!” That’s not gonna get people on bikes. There’s also the—like you said, the lack of empathy. Like, he’s just described this woman who got doored and killed. And Forester’s response is, “Don’t ride in the door zone.”

Aaron: Yeah, your fault, lady.

Doug: You were asking for it. So that’s pretty shitty. And then there’s Forester’s claim that only five percent of car-bike collisions are caused by same direction motor traffic. So that kind of hearkens back to the Cross study where he said 0.5 percent are caused by that. So I asked Peter Furth about this, and what he said was, basically, “Sure. It may be that a very small number of collisions are from same-direction motor traffic, but those are not a small number or fraction of fatalities.” So even if it’s less likely to happen than other types of crashes, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily less likely to kill you when it does. And, you know, what Peter Furth said is that, like, being hit from behind is really scary. You don’t see it coming. It just happens to you. If a driver swerves in front of you, you think you have some chance to avoid that crash, but if someone just sneaks up from behind you and rams you, you’re fucked.

Sarah: But this is another case where he’s trying to have it both ways, because he’s said earlier, you told us, that people have to be taught to look behind them when they’re riding a bicycle, which it is a thing that is not like looking behind you when you’re walking.

Doug: For sure.

Sarah: You have to learn how to retain control of the bicycle while you’re doing that. So he’s acknowledged that that’s maybe a difficult thing to do. And he’s also acknowledged that we don’t have eyes in the back of our head. So therefore, it is not irrational for people to be more concerned about things that they can’t see behind them than it is for them to be concerned about things that they can see in front of them. He’s literally contradicting himself there. And in terms of subjective reality, if you look at the ways that subjective reality expresses in the human body, one of those is the release of cortisol, the fight or flight hormone, that when you are in a stressful situation that you perceive as being dangerous, your nervous system is being overwhelmed by stress hormones that have their own deleterious health effects over time, but that also, in the moment are not necessarily the right tools to deal with the dangers that you’re facing in modern life, right?

Sarah: You know, these are hormones that were evolutionarily developed so that you could get away from a cougar or something, you know? And so—but, you know, to say that that feeling of being scared because something fast and loud is coming up behind you all the time, to say that that’s not an actual physical thing that’s happening, it’s just your subjective experience is just bullshit.

Doug: Oh, Sarah. Come on! Cro-Magnon humans, Neanderthals, cavemen, they didn’t have science, so they just couldn’t rationalize this stuff and really, like, disperse with the fear.

Sarah: Don’t fear the cougar that’s creeping up behind you, you know?

Doug: Okay. [laughs]

Sarah: Anyway, okay.

Doug: Okay. Well, let’s get back to the book. So basically, Forester cites a few more stats about cycling fatalities and accidents or crashes based on the experience of the rider. And he says that, “Those cyclists who habitually cycle in the most dangerous conditions of road and traffic have adjusted to those conditions so well that they have the lowest accident rates of all.” And then he writes, “When you mention cycling accidents, most people assume that you mean car-bike collisions, because this is the only kind they worry about. This is wrong, because car-bike collisions account for only about 12 percent of total cyclist accidents. For children, they account for only 10 percent, for non-club adults, 18 percent, and for cycling club members, 17 percent.” So first of all, only a one percent reduction for cycling club members compared to non club.

Aaron: I also just think he’s making up these numbers.

Doug: He’s basically making up these numbers. They’re just kind of surveys that he throws out to folks. There’s no—Peter was like, there’s not a whole lot of science behind it.

Aaron: It’s like, also, you know, Peter Flax does this interview with Forester in 2020. So we’re talking, like, almost 45 years since the man wrote the book. His mind has not changed at all. No evidence has, like, forced him to reconsider a single thing that he wrote in the Torah of cycling.

Doug: We’re gonna get to this because this book, Effective Cycling, comes out in 1976. There are seven editions—the latest was published, I think, in 2012. And there are some updates to it along the way, but none that include things like the Dutch example, or cities that have built bike lanes and seen a reduction in fatalities.

Aaron: Things have really changed with urban biking between 1976 and 2020. And none of this makes it into his worldview.

Doug: So we’re gonna get to the experienced cyclist bit. So he says that, “There are other bicycle accident statistics that astonish most people. Accidents among club cyclists occur somewhat more frequently upon roads with heavy traffic than upon roads with light traffic, but by far the most dangerous facility is the bike path with an accident rate 2.6 times that of the average roadway.”

Doug: So this is really important because this is the fundamental thing that those vehicular cyclists who showed up to meetings in Cambridge would say, and they cite this fact, 2.6 times more dangerous. So he says that this figure is true even for skilled cyclists. He says, “Bicycle side paths in urban areas with short blocks and heavy traffic have been measured as more than a thousand times as dangerous than the adjacent roadway in terms of motor traffic hazards alone.” So I read that and I thought, who did the measuring, John? You did. You did the measuring in your one-off experiment.

Doug: Okay, so he basically says, like, it’s much more dangerous to ride on a cycle path. And he concludes this section by saying, “The most important problem in the American cycling transportation system is the incompetence of cyclists.” So …

Aaron: Yikes!

Doug: It is probably true that the more experienced you are, the less likely you are to get into sort of dicey situations. You know, you make a mistake once and you survive it. You say, “I’m never going to do that again,” or “I’ll learn a better way to do that.” That applies to driving. That applies to all facets of life. Like, the more you do something, it doesn’t mean you’re immune from tragedy and crashes and all kinds of stuff but, like, it is probably true that club cyclists who ride on the road might be more experienced and better at avoiding crashes.

Sarah: I’m sure that we’ve all seen stories of very, very experienced cyclists who’ve been cycling, road cycling for 25, 30, 40 years, getting hit from behind, sometimes in a group by a car that just goes plowing through them.

Doug: Absolutely.

Sarah: There’s no experience that’s gonna save you from that.

Aaron: The thing that doesn’t get accounted for in these kinds of analyses, if you can even call them that, and even in talk of survivorship bias, is the fact that a lot of people just never get on a bike at all. They don’t get hit by a car, they don’t survive near misses because they never got on a bike at all because it just seems too intimidating, too dangerous. It doesn’t look appealing. And this is just a thing that Forester never accounted for, is that there’s this huge population of potential bicyclists in cities, suburbs all across America, who just aren’t doing it because the facilities are clearly not designed for them. And that was what he continued to propagate, like facilities that were not designed for these people who were not biking. It’s just so exclusive what he’s doing here.

Doug: I want to dig into that 2.6 times more dangerous, that bike paths are more dangerous than the average roadway. So I asked Peter Furth about this, and also about the 1,000 times claim, and he said, sort of like we were saying earlier, the idea that he’s citing his own personal study and it will never be repeated, like, that’s not how science works. So he said there are later academic studies, Peter Furth told me, that vehicular cyclists will use at these meetings to say that riding in separated bike paths is more dangerous than riding in the road. Two are by this man named William Moritz, who is a professor at the University of Washington-Seattle. I think he’s professor emeritus now. In both of them, Moritz surveyed bicyclists and asked, “How many miles do you ride on different types of facilities, and how many crashes have you had on them?”

Doug: And he does some comparative ratios, and he concludes in one study that riding on the sidewalk was 16 times more dangerous than riding on the road. And the other study said it was five times more dangerous. So still much worse than 2.6. Not a thousand times, but still not very good. According to Peter Furth, the VCs, they will all stand up and they will say, “That’s why we hate bike paths.” The thing is, these studies—and including Forester’s own study—was conducted on a sidewalk. A sidewalk is not at all like riding on a separated bike path, especially one off the curb between parked cars. You know, when you’re riding on a sidewalk, even in a less-populated area, there’s all kinds of, like, blind stuff around the corner, people walking out of doors, hazards on the sidewalk, fire hydrants, trees, things like that. So it’s just not a one-to-one comparison.

Doug: And the problem with the Moritz study is that he didn’t even ask people, “Do you ride on the sidewalk?” His survey asked, “Were you riding on a bike path, a bike lane or other?” And the most frequent thing people wrote under ‘other’ was ‘sidewalk.’ But according to Furth, ‘other’ could have been things like a parking lot, a driveway, a junction of some sort, you know, a place where you’re turning from a bike lane into no bike lane. So there’s just no way to say definitively that riding, even on a sidewalk, is that much more dangerous. And on top of that, across the two studies, there were 11 reported crashes that happened on ‘other’ in each of them. So 22 total. It was just a coincidence that it was the same number across both. That’s just not enough data.

Sarah: But also, I want to know what kind of crashes they were, what injuries were sustained. I think we’ve all wiped out on our bike. I certainly have on a sidewalk. You know, I’ve hit the curb wrong and fallen off my bike. I will admit that that has happened to me. And I skinned my knee. The people who got plowed into by a F-150 from behind aren’t answering this survey because if they survived it, they probably have brain damage.

Aaron: And again, the people who just never got on a bike at all …

Doug: It’s too scary.

Aaron: … because it’s too scary, because the street doesn’t have a bike lane for them to take their kid to school or to make a grocery run, they’re not in the study at all either, because they’re just—they’re not there.

Doug: And Forester is basically saying, Sarah, that, like, because there are all these other ways in which accidents can happen, and because car-bike accidents, as he says, are so rare, why are you worried about the car-bike accident? Well, I’m not worried about falling off of my bicycle and banging my head because that is a thing that I can largely control. I can control the speed of my descent down a hill, but I can’t control a driver’s actions. So yes, I’m going to be more worried about what other people can do to me than what I have control over.

Sarah: Right. And also, this reminds me of some of the discussion about roundabouts, right? That when you put roundabouts in a community, the number of crashes sometimes is slightly higher. The severity of crashes goes way down, so that you almost never have anything that’s more than a fender bender in a roundabout situation because of the speeds that people are going at and just the way it’s configured. So I wonder if it’s the same with bike paths. Yes, do people bump into other bicyclists more often? Maybe they’re riding clipped in where they shouldn’t be or they’re not in control of their being clipped in or whatever. But are they fatal accidents? Are they life-altering injury accidents? That’s what I want to know, and I don’t see that.

Doug: Forester also is never dealing with the rate of cycling. So maybe there are more crashes in a bike lane, but maybe that’s because there are more people cycling in it because it feels more comfortable to them.

Aaron: And there’s that famous study, Peter Jacobson’s “Safety in Numbers,” which showed that, like, the more people you have out on the street biking, the lower the rate of crashes is for all bicyclists.

Doug: Absolutely. There is one study that at first appears to support Forester, and again, a lot of vehicular cyclists will cite it to prove that bike lanes are more dangerous than riding on the street. I want to quote from a book called City Cycling. There’s a chapter written by Peter Furth, and this is what he says. “Only one credible American study by Wachtel and Lewiston from 1994, at first glance appears to support Forester’s theory. It was published more than 20 years later. It compares the rate of motor vehicle-bicycle collisions for cyclists who rode in the street versus on sidewalks that had been designated as bikeways on three Palo Alto, California, streets, and found that the relative crash risk of the sidewalk bikeway was 1.8, far less than Forester’s 1,000, but still greater than one.” Nice little dig there from Peter at the end. Peter calls the study “Grossly incomplete.”

Doug: There are two big problems. So one is it only considers crashes at junctions. This is a thing vehicular cyclists will say. Bike lanes are more dangerous because when you exit into an intersection, the drivers are not able to see you coming. They have no idea that you’re there, and then boom, you suddenly appear at the intersection and that’s where the crash occurs. Why is this important? When I spoke to Peter, he said, “You know, when you’re riding a bike, you don’t just hop like a kangaroo from intersection to intersection. You actually have to ride the segment between the intersections.” Crazy concept. The types of crashes that happen on street in those between segments, such as getting hit from behind by a car, don’t happen on sidewalks. So interestingly, that study by Wachtel and Lewiston did collect the between segment information, just for whatever reason wasn’t included in whatever was shared or what VCs like to share.

Doug: So his first colleague, Ann Lusk, is a very respected researcher as well. She recalculated and she found that when you include the crashes between junctions, no statistical difference between riding on the sidewalk and riding on the street. It gets better. Furth then writes, “Because much of the risk associated with sidewalk riding was due to the relatively few cyclists who rode along the left side of the street, they found that for cyclists who follow the keep-to-the-right convention, a discipline enforced by one-way cycle tracks, riding on a sidewalk bikeway carried only half the risk of riding on the street.” Basically what it means is, like, if you’re riding on a sidewalk and there are no bike facilities, you might be going quote-unquote “the wrong way.” You might be on the left side of the street going against traffic, even though you’re separated from it. And let’s say a driver is exiting a driveway and only looking for cars coming in one direction. They’re not looking for you. But if you put bikeways, one-way cycle tracks on either side of the street, you get the bike riders off of the sidewalk, and they now more of them start riding in the proper direction. And so the risk goes way down.

Aaron: You know, there’s a way in which this is reminding me of, like, this whole bike advocacy scene of the early 2000s. Anne Lusk was doing great work, Peter Furth was doing great work. So much of this was just about disproving the vehicular cyclists. So much energy went into coming up with these studies to disprove what John Allen and John Forester were saying. Like, an entire academic industrial complex of studies to try to make these guys shut up.

Sarah: It was essentially a generation or two generations of cycling advocacy loss because there was so much energy, as you say, had to be expended to counter these people instead of countering what should have been all of our common enemies, I guess, who say that people shouldn’t be cycling at all. It’s like this civil strife within the “cycling community,” quote-unquote, distracted us from actually being able to deal with the larger motorist lobby and fossil fuel lobby and asphalt lobby.

Aaron: The city DoTs and the state DoTs that just didn’t want to build bike lanes, they loved the vehicular cyclists. They loved it because the vehicular cyclists were giving these kind of recalcitrant DoTs the excuse they needed to not build the bike lanes that they didn’t want to build. Worked out great for them.

Doug: Okay, so we’re actually finally at where he talks about the “cyclist inferiority complex,” although he referenced it a couple times before. In this chapter he asked why, if facts and logic are so clearly on his side, do so many people, whether it’s highway administrators, bike advocates, just regular people, accept things like bikeways or propose mandatory sidepath laws that ban cyclists from the roads.” And he says, “Like most Americans, they suffer from the cyclist inferiority complex, which has convinced them that cyclists must either plug up the roads or cause horrendous accidents. The only known cure for the cyclist inferiority complex is learning to properly ride in traffic.” He writes, “This is safe and equitable. It is the way that all competent cyclists have ridden for the last 50 years. That is good enough for anybody.” Again, Aaron, getting back to your thing of, like, he just keeps saying the same thing for, like, 50 years. That’s what he said about coming off the bridge and riding in San Francisco. Like, this is how we did it forever, and it worked perfectly fine. It’s basically like, you all have equal rights to the roads so, you know, if there aren’t more cyclists out there, it’s because you’re just wimps.

Sarah: I just want to make a note, because I thought about this earlier when he was saying, “Well, don’t ride in the door zone if you don’t want to get killed.” But then at the same time, he’s saying you might be overtaken sometimes by traffic. And when you’re being overtaken and there’s only one lane of travel, how are you going to be overtaken without going into the door zone? I would just like to ask him that question from beyond the grave, because it’s not possible.

Aaron: But you don’t want to ask him that question because he will have a three-month long email correspondence with you about this. Like, that’s what he used to do with Anne Lusk and Peter Furth. And John Allen would post this stuff to his blog. So you can actually see a lot of these, you know, old correspondences about, like, the Western Ave. cycle track in Cambridge. These people were relentless.

Doug: Peter says that they would call it “invective cycling” instead of “effective cycling” because the vitriol that they would be exposed to for, like, talking about these studies. I do want to talk about the door zone thing, because what I asked Peter was, you know, there are bike advocates, including myself, who will sometimes say that these painted lanes that you have next to traffic between the parked cars and the moving cars are bad. And Peter actually kind of shut me down and said, like, “No, no, no, no, no. Like, that’s actually not really all that true.” And we have to be careful about how we talk about that as bike advocates, as people who are advocating for safer streets, and that the vehicular cyclists would say those painted lanes are bad because they will put you in the door zone. Something that I think a lot of us believe.

Doug: And what he told me was there is a study out of Cambridge that basically said, are these painted bike lanes putting people in the door zone and exposing them to more risk? So they install these painted bike lanes, and they get some cameras out there to measure where people are riding. And it turned out that when there was a painted bicycle lane, people would ride farther away from the door zone, closer to the outer edge of that bicycle lane, because that line on the outer edge told them, “Oh, I know I’ll be safer over here because this isn’t where the cars will go.” The line on, let’s say, the right side, next to the parked cars, they say, “I will stay away from that because doors could swing open there.” If you remove the line and you have fast, fast, fast traffic, what ends up happening is that cyclists naturally go as close to the parked cars as possible. So in this study from Cambridge, it kind of appears that not having the painted bike lane exposes you to more dooring than having it.

Aaron: I mean, it makes sense. It’s like the painted bike lane also tells motorists, like, “Hey, there’s gonna be bicyclists.”

Doug: Even when there isn’t a bicycle there.

Aaron: Right. It’s just like, you need to be heads up for bicyclists here. And it also tells bicyclists, this is a good street for biking, so more of them bike there, and then there’s more awareness of cyclists. You get safety in numbers.

Doug: Okay. This is gonna be the longest episode we’ve ever done. I think it is important to point out that we are 176 pages into a 330-page textbook. And other than emergency maneuvers and the five basic traffic cycling principles at the start of chapter four, we actually haven’t gotten into a lot of any real instruction for how to act like a vehicle.

Sarah: Oh, you forgot about the boil, the pimple.

Doug: Everyone knows drivers also have to remove boils. Have a gentle friend.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: [laughs] Okay. So we finally do get to that stuff. There’s a big, long section called “Changing Lanes in Traffic.” That’s the real vehicular cycling stuff. And it’s kind of the riding style that really is the core of techniques and instructions. And this is what Forester writes.

Sarah: “The driver who intends to change lanes must first determine that the movement can be made in reasonable safety. And if another driver will be affected by the movement, the lane changer must signal his intent to that driver, provided it is lawful to use the new lane, for example, it is lawful to use a left-turn-only lane only for approaching a left turn. That’s all there is to it. Everybody should obey these requirements, and if you do, you are entitled to change lanes, whatever your mode of power.”

Doug: Easy peasy.

Sarah: Does he anywhere talk about the drivers who are freaking out on you from behind, who are honking and screaming and accelerating and swerving around you?

Doug: He does, and we’re gonna get to that. There’s a lot of contradiction in here in which he’s basically saying if you respect the rules, if you obey them, drivers will respect you. Most drivers are law abiding. It’s this dance, this partnership. But he does get to what to do if you confront an angry driver. We will get to that because it is wild.

Doug: 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 Lorde, 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.

Sarah: A few weeks ago, I just happened to be in a situation where I was making a left turn, and I was like, you know, I’m gonna do a kind of vehicular cyclist type of move here because it seemed like the best thing to do in that case. And I went to the left turn lane to make my left turn. And let me just say that the other vehicles in the area were maybe not so pleased with my choice to do that.

Doug: He just removes human behavior from the equation. There are rules, people respect them. Anybody who doesn’t is a complete deviation from the norm. Don’t worry about it. So a big thing that he gets into about how to change lanes safely is negotiation. And let’s talk about what he means by that. So he writes, “How do you persuade? You persuade by negotiation. You ask and you watch for the answer, be it yes or no. Generally it is yes, because motorists often find themselves in exactly your position: wanting to change lanes through crowded traffic. They agree, because they know that if nobody allowed anyone else to change lanes, traffic would stop and nobody would get home.” Anybody who’s ever merged on a highway knows this is not exactly how it always works. I think the hands down, funniest part of this entire section, it’s called “Lane Changing in High-Speed Traffic,” where Forester admits that at anything faster than 15 miles per hour, negotiation is impossible.

Aaron: Yeah.

Doug: It’s like, so basically, in the majority of places where the speed limit is higher than 15 miles an hour—which is everywhere, essentially—you can’t negotiate with drivers. You basically, he says, “Have to play the road sneak and just assert yourself. Look for the gap and just go when it’s safe.”

Aaron: I wonder if he ever drove. You know, I wonder if he’s ever in a car. Because when you’re in a car, 15 miles an hour feels just like, “Oh my God, this is so slow!” You know what I mean? Like, no drivers in New York City are going 15 miles per hour. This never—his scenario here never happens.

Doug: And certainly where he was riding on largely rural California roads.

Aaron: Nobody’s going 15 miles per hour.

Doug: Or even more built-up areas, nobody is going 15 miles an hour. But 15 miles an hour is pretty fucking fast when you’re on a bike. So, you know, then the book continues. There’s advice for how to handle various turns with and without dedicated turning lanes, how to treat stop signs and signals. And then he finally gets to bikeways and how to navigate them. He says, like, well, there’s one kind of bike lane that’s not too bad. And that’s one on a straight road quote, “With adequate width and no intersections or driveways.” So basically he’s like, you know, if you’re riding along the beach or around a lake, that’s a pretty good place to have a bikeway.

Doug: The chapter kind of rounds out with riding at night. That’s 14 pages of stuff. There are a few pages on riding in the rain—big shout out to Cleverhood—because he says, “The proper wet weather clothing is the cyclist cape, helmet cover and spats,” and then goes on to explain, like, how a cape works. So finally, we get to chapter five, “Enjoying Cycling.” So we are 231 pages into the book, and this is now the first time he gets into commuting or utility cycling.

Aaron: We’ve got our gear ratios, we’ve popped our butt pimples, and now we can finally enjoy cycling.

Doug: Yeah, if you haven’t enjoyed it yet, now you will. This is actually where he really lets his disdain for bike advocates show. And I want to say that he is distinguishing cycling advocacy—which is what he does—from bike advocates, which is sort of what we do. He says that cycle commuting is, “Politically controversial because the people who advocate for it maintain that cycling in motor traffic is so difficult and dangerous that cycle commuting requires commuter bikeways.” He criticizes bicycle advocates for staging theatrical demonstrations where they will talk about how dangerous cycling is and dress up in bandages or, like, do a die-in to stop traffic. And basically says that these activists make cyclists look like social freaks who hate motorists—which is our new social media bio, by the way. You know, he basically says, like, the average person looks at this and says, “Well, I don’t hate driving, so why would I ride a bike? These people are strange.” And I actually think he kind of has a point that there are some types of advocacy that do turn people off. It’s a big debate, of course.

Sarah: I’m sorry. Like, also, his type of person is probably the number one type of person that I hear invoked by anti-bike people: the Lycra-clad guy, club cyclist who’s going 30 miles an hour down a mountain or whatever in front of your car. These are the people that everybody loves to hate. And he seems to be completely oblivious to the idea that he, too, is one of the people who’s hated. He doesn’t want to acknowledge that he’s part of this group that is disdained.

Doug: There’s sort of a horseshoe theory here where you are right, people use the Lycra-clad cyclists as, like, those are the people who we’re building bike infrastructure for. And we, the people who want our parking, shouldn’t accommodate those people. But then you have the vehicular cyclists who say, “Oh, we also don’t want bike lanes.” It’s sort of like NIMBYism and vehicular cycling meet in the middle. So it’s true. They don’t love these people. But I will say those NIMBYs love it when the avid cyclists, like, sort of like Aaron was saying, show up to the meeting and say, “I don’t need a bike lane. Why are you taking these poor people’s parking?” And he doesn’t just have this disdain for bike advocates, he really—Forester has this disdain for everybody. So he writes, “The fact that a very large number of people say they don’t cycle commute because of the lack of bikeways and the dangers of motor traffic doesn’t prove anything.” So even if you say, “I don’t bike because I’m scared,” he’s saying, “You can’t even believe yourself. You’ve been brainwashed.”

Sarah: Yeah, that’s called gaslighting.

Aaron: There’s so much projection here. Like, I used to see these guys as the real freaks. Like, they would show up to meetings, they’d be dressed in Day-Glo, looking like human traffic cones. They all had, like, you know, little rear view mirrors on their helmets. And they would show up to the meeting looking like—you know, and I wore a lot of that gear, too, sometimes.

Sarah: Yeah, sure. No, and that gear can be very helpful.

Aaron: There’s nothing wrong with the gear but, like, you don’t look like just a regular Joe off the street. You’re, like, coming in as this, like, very theatrically costumed cyclist. They were, like, the weirdos.

Sarah: Right. And the idea that they are somehow the norm, and that everybody else is a social loser, it’s very sad to me, actually. And I am trying to have compassion for these people, but it seems that the only way that they can get self worth is by saying that everybody else is inferior. And that just really turns me off. [laughs]

Aaron: Or just that they’re the norm, and, like, the whole world should conform to the way that they want to bike, you know? And so they just prevented a lot of infrastructure from being built, so it’s hard to be too sympathetic.

Doug: So along that theme of, like, them being the standard or them being the norm, Forester goes on to list a lot of reasons why people don’t cycle to work, none of which have to do with perceptions of safety, and all have to do with personal circumstance, such as, like, the type of job you have. If you need a car for your job, no, you can’t ride a bike. If you have to travel really far to get to work, no, you can’t do that either. If you have to be publicly presentable early in the morning, nope, you can’t ride a bike to work. But then again, like, he has to address, well, why can people like him cycle everywhere? And he says that one of the reasons why cycle commuting is the most prevalent among “technically complex professionals and civil service protected jobs” is because …

Aaron: “If you are technically proficient at a difficult job that requires lots of education or training, you are the kind of person most likely to see the practicality of cycle commuting, and your employer is least likely to think less of you for doing it. And if promotion is by seniority and examination, as in civil service, such activities don’t matter.”

Doug: I was immediately struck when you were talking about the kernel, because this is the passage that I was thinking of. Like, biking to your civil service job or your engineering job, you know, in DC, or, you know, you work in Cambridge at MIT or something like that. It’s so elitist. You know, I think bike advocates are often like, “We are accused of being elitist,” but this, to me, is like the most elitist shit.

Sarah: Anywhere you go in the United States, and you observe people who are riding bicycles in almost any environment outside of, like, a group ride environment or whatever, you are going to see people who are not in a job that requires lots of education or training. You know, here in New York City, certainly that’s not the case. And it’s not the case anywhere you go in the United States. People riding along are a total cross section. He just erases completely anybody he doesn’t want to think about.

Aaron: You know, now that you mention it, the vehicular cyclists, they were strongest in Boston, Washington, DC, and, like, Palo Alto, sort of the Silicon valley burbs. Those were their strongholds. And those are kind of like the three, you know, elite power centers. And in New York, we had them, too, but they were a little different. They were a little bit more like bike messengers. They were more like guys who were just like, “I just want to be able to do my deliveries, like, in the middle of the street.” But these three elite places were the bastions of effective cycling.

Doug: This book is published by MIT Press.

Aaron: There you go.

Doug: You know, like, that’s sort of the epicenter in some ways as well. We are wrapping up the book. I really have to share—we were talking about this a little, and I said, “Wait for it.” This is under a subheading titled “Intimidation and Education.”

Sarah: “Above all, remember that in many cities, traffic is so consistent that you meet the same people day after day. If you treat them right, they will treat you right, but it sometimes takes a bit of education. If you meet someone who insists on running you off the road, don’t let it happen. The driver won’t succeed, of course, because you know how to handle that by now. But don’t let the driver get away with the attempt. First time, let it go, but note the car type, color and even license number if you can. Second time, so long as the driver is disobeying the law and you are obeying it, stick up for your rights. It’s a bluff. The person who will kill you in front of witnesses is rare. They try this one on lonely roads, if at all. Call the bluff. Keep some escape route open—even if it is over the curb—but don’t let the driver get away with it. Give that person the choice of obeying the rules of the road or going to court for it. If the driver tries the merely annoying scheme of driving behind you, honking the horn when it’s possible to either pass you or go away, or if it’s hard to pass because there’s too much traffic ahead and all the person wants is your place in line, stall the whole works. Wait till traffic stops, dismount, place your bike crosswise in front of the car and ask if you can help. If your annoyer tries to scrape you or shouts at you as he or she goes by, give chase to the next traffic stop. Ride up beside the driver’s window and say you have exactly as much right to use the road as he or she has—no more, but certainly no less. Two or three of these in two months, and you will probably never be mistreated again on your commute route.” Because you will be dead.

Aaron: Right. You will have been shot.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: Can I just say, Sarah, by the way, there’s something so cognitively dissonant about your, like, Terry Gross, NPR read, reading the words of, like, the crankiest old white dude you’re likely to see on or off the internet. I loved how you read that.

Sarah: Happy to serve.

Doug: I mean, there’s so much wrong with this. Even in rural California, are you really gonna see the same people day after day? And if you teach one of them a lesson a couple of times a month, like, that’s the end of your problems? Who’s gonna feel comfortable doing this, gumming up the works, stopping the whole thing and telling a driver, like, “Debate me, bro.” Who is this for?

Sarah: Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you one person it’s not for. It’s not for women at all. Period. And I haven’t really said much about that up to this point because I do know there are women who subscribe to this philosophy, but everything about this is just something that women would never, ever do unless they were, you know, a real outlier. This is not how women move through the world. This is not how women see the world. Women know that angry men are dangerous and that they will kill you, and they won’t care about going to trial later. Not to mention that this is also a very white perspective.

Doug: I was about to say, like, Black men in the South, like, we have people who are running through neighborhoods and getting murdered. Like, I doubt that biking through a neighborhood is going to increase your chances of getting away with confronting a driver. Right.

Sarah: Yeah. Putting your bike crosswise in front of that pickup truck.

Doug: Especially today, with stand your ground laws. Yeah, exactly.

Sarah: You know, I mean, it’s just the most cocooned, privileged perspective possible. And that brings us back to the question that we had at the beginning, and I think we really need to come back to: why the fuck are we listening to these people at all? Like, why do we have to think about these people? And it’s because they really have had an effect, right?

Doug: We are gonna get to that. Our listeners are very patient because this is gonna be a long episode, but it is worth the setup for the effects here. So at this point, he starts to wrap up the book. There’s advice for mountain riding—this is actually before mountain biking. So he’s really talking about, like, ascending on roads up mountains. Club riding, bicycle touring, there’s a whole part about “cycling with love,” where Forester says that quote, “Courting is harder for male cyclists because there are so few female cyclists, and fewer still of these are eligible.”

Sarah: [laughs] Yeah, and fewer still of them will want to pop your butt pimples.

Doug: Exactly. Then he says, like, “If you’re lucky enough to find a woman who will ride with you, you can use a tandem.” And then he goes into excruciating detail about how tandem bicycles should be ridden. It’s crazy. So we get to the next chapter. It’s called “Education, Regulation and Politics.” This is where the philosophy all comes together, and it is really what sets the stage for the decades-long impact of this book. He basically argues that all of the problems related to bicycle safety have to do with poorly educated, incompetent cyclists, bad laws, bike lanes and the cyclist inferiority complex. And his solution? Effective cycling. You know, ride this way, read my book, and that’s it. It’s non ideological. It is science. It is not anti car. It is apolitical. It is the only way to keep people safe. You would think this is where the book ends. You would be wrong. This is where Forester unloads on bicycle advocates. Now I think some of this is the factor of this being a later edition that I have, but this is the edition, right?

Aaron: Right. Because when he first wrote the book, there wasn’t even that much bicycle advocacy.

Doug: No. Transportation Alternatives here in New York is only a year old at the point that he writes this book.

Aaron: Brand new.

Doug: So he believes that basically there are bike advocates who demonize cars and says that, like, this is the fundamental fight between people who believe in the cyclist inferiority complex and people like him who believe in vehicular cycling. One is purely based on emotion, the other facts, science, engineering. He literally says, “Remember this, the vehicular cycling principles have no intellectually respectable competition.”

Aaron: Yeah, he’s such a snob and elitist. It just comes through.

Doug: In the edition I have, he name drops, like, the Sierra Club, Transportation Alternatives, Montreal’s Le Monde à bicyclette. Like, all of these advocacy groups. He actually could be taking direct aim at us. He says basically that because bike advocates want to solve all of these different problems and love bikes and et cetera, they go, “looking for popular problems that they claim bikeways will solve. They go from bandwagon to bandwagon: cyclist safety, child safety, air pollution, conservation, urban congestion, social justice, economic democracy, and low technology, seeking a cause that will give them bikeways. These people are controlled by the cyclist inferiority complex, and the fear and hate of automobiles it produces.”

Aaron: Like, why does he think we want bikeways? What ulterior motive?

Sarah: The thing is that all of these are problems that need to be solved. And the beautiful thing about the bicycle and bicycles for transportation is that they go some way towards solving all of these problems.

Aaron: But they’re bandwagons. They’re just bandwagon to bandwagon.

Doug: The book wraps up. That’s it. That’s the end. There’s a long appendix. I think that since Forester died, there’s kind of a misunderstanding of what he knew at the time. I think sometimes we look at historical figures big and small, and we say, “Well, they were just reacting to the evidence available to them.” Like, we excuse racism from even not that long ago because we’re like, “Oh, that was just the way people talked back then.”

Sarah: Or misogyny.

Doug: Yeah, misogyny, homophobia, all kinds of stuff. And I think this is a sort of version of that, where we look back and we say, “Oh, he was just like a cranky old man. He didn’t know any better,” et cetera. But, like, there actually was a lot of research at the time that this book came out that showed that he was wrong. You know, we were talking about some of the studies that were, like, 20 years later. So Davis, California, was right there, a hundred miles from Palo Alto. An easy bike ride for John Forester.

Sarah: Yeah.

Doug: And there were so many studies to show that that really famous network of Dutch-style bike lanes there worked. They weren’t perfect, but they worked. So there’s a 1972 study that showed that even though there were some sight line issues, they were generally safer, resulting in more bike trips and very few car-bike collisions. There was a 1975 study on bicycle facilities by those radicals at the Federal Highway Administration, which showed that not only did bicyclists prefer separation, but there were fewer crashes between cars and bikes on streets with bike lanes compared to streets with shared lanes. There’s a 1976 study that showed the bike lanes in Davis attracted people from routes without bike lanes—they literally were biking out of their way to get to the safer route. And that, like, women and teenagers, people we see today as the quote-unquote “indicator species” for good cycling, were much more likely to ride on streets after the bike lanes were installed. There is a paper by Bill Schultheiss, Rebecca Sanders and Jennifer Toole, three—again, very respected research. It talks about these studies, including Forester’s refusal to consider anything about them.

Aaron: “Of particular interest for later debates was the parking-separated bike lane on Sycamore Street, which was one block in length and serviced over 550 cyclists per hour during peak weekday hours. Despite a lower crash rate per mile than other facilities in the Davis study, as well as clearly high bicycle traffic, this protected bike lane became a poster child for bad design, according to Forester, due to its seven collisions over a two-year period.”

Doug: Seven collisions in a two-year period. Sort of like you were saying earlier, Sarah, like. they could have just been, like, cyclists bumping into each other or like, you know, riding their front tire over the curb and falling, but not being hit by a car. Forester just hand waved that away and said it was unethical for planners and traffic engineers to indulge people’s fears. He never engaged with data. None of these studies, nothing appears in these later editions. There’s just never an update or a correction or anything like that.

Aaron: What’s wild is that this paper is written in, like, 2018, and that we’re still debunking Forester in 2018. This just went on and on and on.

Doug: Oh, yeah. These are still working, practicing researchers who, like, I know and follow.

Sarah: Right. And that’s the cost. The very few resources that are available to get good data on what does work for people riding bicycles, so much of it has to be spent on debunking these absolutely baseless beliefs that have been perpetuated by this group.

Doug: That’s it for the book. I think it’s really notable to say that this is a 331-page book, the copy that I have, and only about 60 pages are about how to ride in traffic. The rest is just all the minutiae about gears and bike lamps and butt pimples and all the rest. And a big chunk is Forester just, like, lashing out at anybody who disagrees with him. I got a message from James Longhurst on social media, and I was saying that we were prepping this episode, and he said, “You know, one of the most important reasons Forester’s philosophy won out so many times is because it asked cities for nothing. No funding. Maybe you have to turn the sewer grates so that bike tires don’t get caught in them, but you don’t have to inconvenience motorists, and you don’t have to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on any sort of infrastructure.”

Aaron: Well, except the car infrastructure. You can just keep building the car infrastructure you’re building.

Doug: Exactly. If you’re still with us, congratulations! Your glycogen stores must be very low by this point.

Sarah: [laughs]

Doug: The legacy of Effective Cycling. So in 1977, Forester publishes another book. It’s called The Cycling Engineering Handbook. It’s later renamed as Bicycle Transportation. It is designed towards engineers and planners. And in it he says, “Every facility for promoting cycling should be designed for 30 miles per hour. If it’s not, it will not attract the serious cyclists, and hence, it will not be an effective part of the transportation system.” You can see that’s just ridiculous. Thirty miles an hour.

Doug: So Forester isn’t just writing books, he’s really getting involved in advocacy. So in 1975, the California Department of Transportation, Caltrans, starts work on a new design guide for statewide bicycle facilities. Forester got a colleague appointed to the committee and claimed quote, “In my attempts to redirect the committee to making cycling safer, rather than discriminating against cyclists, I wrote probably about half of the paperwork produced by the committee.” This design guide is released in 1978, and here is what it recommends.

Sarah: “Billions of dollars have been spent on a road system to allow people to travel almost any place they wish. Most of these roads are sufficient to accommodate shared use by bicyclists and motorists, and hence, most bicycle travel has occurred and will continue to occur on that system.”

Doug: So it essentially codifies vehicular cycling as official policy. This then goes national. So it’s 1981, and AASHTO, which is the American Association of State Highway Transportation Officials, is updating its guide for the development of new bicycle facilities.

Aaron: The so-called “green book.”

Doug: And they actually had an earlier version in the early ’70s that had different criteria for protected bike lanes. It didn’t wholeheartedly endorse them, but they were in there. And in updating this guide, they basically just take the Caltrans guidebook and use it as a model. They seek public comments. There’s a sort of—possibly anecdotal, but this one paper that I read said that “Mr. Forester provided over half the comments, and he is said to have constantly badgered the engineers.”

Aaron: Oh, it’s totally believable.

Doug: Yeah, he was, like, constantly calling them, writing letters, “You should include this.” And when this guide is released, it effectively banned parking protected bicycle lanes. It said that, “Bicycle lanes should always be placed between the parking lane and the motor vehicle lanes and otherwise recommended vehicular cycling style behavior at intersections.” That prohibition stays in place in the guide. Again, these are recommendations, not outright, like, illegal, but it’s de facto illegal. It stays in place for almost the next two decades. There are some exceptions here and there in the ’90s. Most notably, you get NACTO being founded in 1996. That’s the National Association of City Transportation Officials. That’s what leads to New York in 2007 putting in its first protected bicycle lanes under Bloomberg and Jeanette Sadik-Khan. And it isn’t until 2018 that the AASHTO guide is fully revised, allowing for and recommending protected bike lanes where appropriate.

Aaron: Yeah. I mean, when Forester got his stuff into the AASHTO green book as a guideline, that’s when it really became dangerous. And, you know, it became the standard for roadway design all around the country, and you couldn’t get funding from the federal government for your municipality unless you were following the standards. Engineers refused to design bike lanes in places because they didn’t want to risk losing their license or getting sued. So getting those recommendations into AASHTO, that was really what kind of weaponized Forester’s ideas.

Doug: So there’s the much larger government effect, like you’re talking about, Aaron, but then there’s the effect on advocacy. So in 1976, John Forester created the education program for what was then called the League of American Wheelmen, now known as the League of American Bicyclists. I mean, interestingly, I think the name change came while Forester was involved, because they understood they had to include women in this idea, and that wheelmen, either way, was an outdated term. He actually became president of the league in 1979 and serves in that role until 1983. Again, you could do a whole episode on his tumultuous time at that organization.

Doug: But his big issue while he was there was vehicular cycling, opposing bikeways, and then things like nighttime lighting equipment. And then these acolytes of his, his disciples, kind of spread. Vehicular cyclists were in charge of the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition, the Ohio Bicycle Federation. Boston has a bike coordinator in government who was a vehicular cyclist, and basically made sure that Boston never got on street bike lanes. That doesn’t change until, like, the mid-2000s under Tom Menino when he launches Bike Share and sort of vows that Boston will become a bike-friendly city. Getting much better currently under Mayor Wu. Dallas had a bike coordinator. So think about this. Dallas, like, one of the most car-dependent places, had a bike plan in 1985 for on-street bikeways. Lots of reasons why it doesn’t get implemented funding, but this guy, PM Summer, is hired in 1991 and was in the position until 2008, and he was a vehicular cyclist. So that’s like more than a decade of time lost, even in a place like Dallas. This is the thing. We have made tremendous progress in the last 15 to 20 years since those first bike lanes are installed in New York on Eighth Avenue and Ninth Avenue. But, like, what if we had been doing it for 40 years, 50 years?

Aaron: I mean, to me, one of the takeaways of this whole thing is how effective Effective Cycling was. And it would be great if the good guys were just as effective. I mean, here you have this kind of bike advocate, John Forester, advocating a pretty terrible set of ideas, not really listening to other people, not really having much empathy with other people. But he did have a very distinct set of ideas and philosophy, and he was utterly relentless about propagating these ideas and then getting those ideas embedded into the AASHTO green book, the actual, like, guidelines that state traffic engineers use to design streets, and then sort of having these acolytes go take jobs in city government. I mean, it was a real, like, multi-decade kind of takeover approach. I don’t know if he strategized it from the beginning. He’s a lot like the Federalist Society, you know? With this kind of like, long-term strategy of actually embedding their ideas in the institutions that can implement the ideas. It just seems like bad guys are better at this than good guys sometimes.

Sarah: But I think in this case, it’s really important to note that he started doing this at a time when white professional men, especially in a career like engineering, had a just absolutely unquestioned position of dominance in the society. And he worked that. You can say, “Well, why aren’t the good guys doing this,” or whatever, but when the good guys aren’t part of the in-power group, they don’t have the ability to embed like that. They don’t have the ability. That’s why, you know, all the things that have been trying to happen over the last, you know, 20-30 years have required that people with different perspectives get into those institutions.

Sarah: And the gatekeeping is so incredible. The gatekeeping is so intense that not only does “effective,” quote-unquote, cycling or vehicular cycling exclude people from positions of power, it excludes them from even entering the first rung. And when he dismisses “childish” cycling inferiority—and I see there’s other places in the book where he specifically goes out of his way to say “childlike,” “childish,” and denigrate that, then he’s literally saying that children should not have the right to learn how to cycle. You won’t even allow children entry into this system. And that is the most effective gatekeeping of all. You don’t just close off avenues of higher power, you close off the ability to even get in on the first rung.

Aaron: You know, we touched on it a little bit—a minute ago, but one of the ways that we did eventually defeat these guys was through Jeanette Sadik-Khan, the New York City Department of Transportation Commissioner in the mid-2000s. She did sort of elevate the National Association of City Transportation Officials as a viable alternative to AASHTO. So part of the strategy was to just create a new organization that could have a new set of guidelines. So the good guys in many ways are doing this strategy now. AASHTO was ruined, but the strategy became to create a new organization that can establish a new set of guidelines for cities to follow. I think it’s happening, but it took Forester decades to wreck it.

Sarah: And he didn’t necessarily want to grow the number of people cycling. So that also was non threatening to the status quo. You know, he’s just like, “Yeah, we’re the avid cyclists. We’re those weirdos wearing Lycra and Day-Glo. But you don’t really have to worry about us, because there’s just not that many of us. We all know that there won’t ever be that many of us because we’re such a particular, outlying type.”

Aaron: Can I make a quick plug for my Tumblr from 2012?

Sarah: Oh hell, yeah.

Aaron: It’s called, “Bostonize: Vehicular Cycling Chic.”

Doug: [laughs]

Aaron: And I only ever posted one photo on the Tumblr. I never actually did the Tumblr, but I was like, “There’s all these guys biking around Boston. They look like human traffic cones, and they’re throwing down their hand signals. They’re taking the lane. I’m gonna start taking pictures of them and posting them on this Tumblr.” I never took a single picture, but I did make the Tumblr.

Doug: [laughs]

Aaron: Bostonize, baby.

Doug: That’s it for this episode of The War on Cars. It’s a slog, but we got through it. Thank you so much for listening.

Aaron: Please support us on Patreon. 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 Yessenia 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.