But it gets worse. Keen viewers might have noticed that this same table shows that streets with bike lanes were significantly safer than any other kind. Coincidentally, the lowest accident rate existed for both the categories of all accidents and serious accidents when those incidents that occurred on bike lanes and bike routes were examined. And Forester acknowledges this in his book, in the context of someone who pointed that out to him: The authors misstate Kaplan’s 1976 [sic] study of the experience of club cyclists to say that bike-laned roads are safer. However, Kaplan grouped roads with bike lanes with other roads, and so few bike lanes existed at that date that nearly all the data came from roads without bike lanes. Ah, OK. I get it.
So since this category included signed routes, and there weren't that many bike lanes in 1974, then those 3.2% of miles don’t count. Got it. It’s very obvious that the data from this masters thesis is not sufficient to make any general claims about cycling safety, and Kaplan explicitly mentions this: It is also important that one does not attempt to apply these accident rate values to the general bicycling public. As shown later, cycling experience tends to play an important role in accident involvement (along with age and other factors). The other major source mentioned by Forester is a study by Kenneth D. Cross in 1974. Unfortunately, nobody can find this study anymore because Forester destroyed it with facts and logic: The study had been commissioned by the California Office of Traffic Safety (controlled by the California Highway Patrol) with the expectation that its data would prove (proof is not scientifically possible) the “bike-safety” case and provide a scientific basis for the bikeway program that the CHP and others were promoting.
When I showed that Cross’s study in fact disproved the “bike-safety” and bikeway views and strongly supported the cyclists’ view, the report was hidden and no further copies were distributed. Fortunately for us, in 1977 the California Highway Patrol commissioned Cross to create a much larger report that Forester said also proved him right, but this one wasn’t hidden, for some reason. This is the document that Forester references more often than any other, so let’s look at what it actually says. First off, the writers of this report wanted you to know that this is a very modern analysis, as the introduction confidently states: The data were then encoded, punched onto IBM cards, and entered into a computerized data file. This report is over 300 pages long and it’s a detailed summary of police reports about car-bicycle collisions in four US states. It’s a really tough read, and it is wildly biased in favour of motorists. Which I guess shouldn’t be surprising in a report created by American cops in the 1970s. And even though it mentions that bicyclist fatalities were often caused by motorists speeding or driving drunk, the main takeaway of the report is that the cops should crack down on those lawbreaking cyclists: It is recommended that communities throughout the country be urged to develop and implement a selective enforcement program which focuses on critical violations by specific bicyclist target groups.
But more importantly, it’s not immediately clear why Forester is referencing this report at all. He doesn’t provide any quotes or page numbers when he references this document. He just vaguely gestures towards it and says it proves him right. It is absolutely ridiculous how Forester provides exact page numbers and quotes when criticizing the depictions of cycling in early 20th-century literature, But provides nothing at all when referencing the study that supposedly proves the fundamental underpinnings of his entire philosophy.
When referring to this paper, Forester claims: “This study conclusively supported the cyclists’ view and disproved the ‘bike-safety’ and bikeway views”. Incidentally, Forester insisted on using the word “bikeway”, even though everything written after about 1972 uses the word “bicycle lanes”, including the Cross report. Just add it to the long list of things that are incredibly annoying about this book.
In multiple places, Forester confidently claims that bike lanes are useless to prevent most types of bicycle accidents. Analysis of car-bike collision statistics (Ken Cross’s second, national study done for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) shows that all practical bikeway designs increase the number and difficulty of collision situations that produce some 30 percent of car-bike collisions while reducing the difficulty of only 2 percent of collision situations. Analysis of all accidents to cyclists shows that bikeways are aimed at only 0.3 percent of accidents to cyclists. Earlier in the book, he explained what that 0.3 percent of accidents was referring to: The motorist-caused car-overtaking-bike collision constitutes about 0.3 percent of cycling accidents. First of all, it really annoys me how Forester would constantly lump all "accidents" together: as if a minor crash resulting in a few scratches was the same as being hit by a car at high speed.
But as you’ve probably guessed by now, the Cross report actually says the exact opposite about the dangers of motorists overtaking cyclists. The fear of overtaking accidents is well founded since the likelihood of fatal injuries is indeed higher for overtaking accidents than for any other class of accidents revealed by this study. this problem type must be considered one of the most important, because it accounted for nearly one-fourth of all fatal accidents in the sample--three times as many as any other problem type So how did "one-forth of all fatal accidents" get turned into only 0.3 percent of all accidents by Forester? It’s not mentioned anywhere in the report of course, but another quote from Effective Cycling provides some insight into how Forester might have landed on this number: Bikeway programs are even more useless. They are aimed at only the 0.3 percent of accidents to cyclists caused by urban motorists hitting lawful cyclists from the rear during daylight. Note the caveats in that statement: urban motorists, lawful cyclists, during daylight. The Cross report makes it very clear that overtaking crashes are the most dangerous for cyclists, but many of these crashes happened on rural roads at night. And it was also based on police reports where the driver claimed that the cyclist was riding illegally, even though in many cases, the cyclist was dead and couldn’t give their side of the story. So, if you cut down all of the police reports in this paper to only those crashes that occurred in urban areas, during daylight, where the police report claimed that the cyclist was riding legally, then you're left with an insignificant number of crashes that Forester estimates at 0.3 percent. What’s worse is that nowhere in this report is it stated or even implied that overtaking crashes would be the only type that bicycle lanes would prevent. Forester just decided that himself.
In fact, this report barely mentions bicycle lanes at all, and when it does it says the exact opposite: There is virtually no doubt that off-street bicycle lanes would reduce the incidence of overtaking accidents, if such facilities were available and used by bicyclists who otherwise would be riding on roadways. The obvious problem with off-street bicycle lanes is their high cost and the lack of space in most communities for constructing a comprehensive network of off-street bicycle lanes. There are many good reasons for constructing off-street bicycle lanes, but it is unlikely that the funding and space available in most communities would be sufficient to construct a network of bicycle lanes that would be comprehensive enough to have a significant impact on the incidence of overtaking accidents. That doesn’t say bicycle lanes are not safe, it just says that California can’t be bothered to pay for them, and that there’s no space to build them. Because you have to understand, unlike European cities, the roads in California are really narrow. You could never fit bicycle lanes here. This report is full of conclusions that directly contradict what Forester claims to be true. They even suggest that there is not enough evidence to recommend teaching bicyclists to “take the lane”, a core tenet of vehicular cycling. That’s not really surprising though, because Forester's books are full of gaslighting. He is clearly banking on the fact that nobody will be able to find, let alone be willing to read, a three hundred page document written by bicycle-hating cops. And in one case he actually admits that he is drawing his own conclusions when referencing another study by Cross: In 1980, Cross published a study of “non-motor-vehicle” accidents to cyclists in Santa Barbara County. The most important conclusion that I draw from his data (he did not make this calculation from his data) is the relationship between the accident rate and experience. It is kinda wild how often Forester does this: he references a scientific paper to justify his beliefs, but he’s actually drawing his own conclusions that are different from the conclusions made by the authors of the paper he’s referencing. The value of these studies is in the data they contain, because many of the authors were not cyclists and most did not know that the important question was to decide between the similar “bike-safety” and bikeway pictures and the very different cyclists’ picture.
In other words, since I’m a real “cyclist” I know how to interpret the researcher’s data better than they do. There’s a really long-winded boring chapter about exercise efficiency that I really don’t want to talk about, but there is one quote that truly captures John Forester’s approach to peer- reviewed scientific papers: I pointed out this discrepancy between facts and conclusions to the editor of the Journal of Applied Physiology, suggesting that my hypothesis better explained the facts that had been measured than did the theory of efficiency. The editor refused to publish the letter, with the excuse that it had no experimental support.
Of course it had; its experimental support was the data measured by Hagberg and associates—data that had already been accepted by the journal. There are two real reasons for the refusal: I am not a member of the exercise physiology profession, and my hypothesis runs counter to the current theory. He very clearly believed that he was smarter than any of the actual researchers who studied this stuff. Of course, Forester was never able to publish any peer-reviewed scientific papers himself, but he confidently claims in his books that his interpretations of other people’s data are actually more correct than that of the researchers themselves. The only study that compares these studies and uses them to decide between the two pictures is in my book Bicycle Transportation (MIT Press, 1983, 1994), which supersedes my Cycling Transportation Engineering (Custom Cycle Fitments, 1977). Most of the accident data presented in Effective Cycling come from those books, but are derived from data given by Cross, Kaplan, and the National Safety Council. Incidentally there was only one part of the book with a statistic from this National Safety Council paper, claiming that it showed that car-bike collisions were only responsible for 10 percent of bicycle casualties for elementary children.
But despite my best attempts, I cannot figure out where he got this number, because the paper itself never mentions it. Now, you might have also noticed that all of the studies Forester references are from the 1970s, yet this is the seventh edition of this book, published in 2012. Well, don’t worry, Forester has a very good explanation for that. You may wonder, reading this in 2012 or later, why this book does not contain statistics from later years. The answer is simple. Today, no organization, governmental or private, cares enough about learning new facts about car-bike collisions to fund such studies as I have quoted. Are you fucking kidding me? How did anybody take this guy seriously? Believe it or not, Forester was full of shit, once again. By 2012 there were dozens of published peer-reviewed studies that showed that protected bicycle infrastructure was far safer than riding on the road. This 2009 meta-analysis, of 23 high-quality papers, showed that bicycle lanes and off-road paths were the safest type of bicycle facilities, and that on-road marked bike lanes reduced injury rate, collision frequency, or crash rates by about 50 percent compared to unmodified roads. These 23 studies and the meta-analysis itself were all published well ahead of 2012, and there is no way that John Forester was not aware of them. He just chose to ignore them, because he couldn’t cherry-pick the data to pretend they said what he wanted them to, like he could with the Cross Report. And of course now, over a decade later, there have been dozens of other peer- reviewed scientific papers published that only strengthen that conclusion. This 2023 study, using 13 years of data from US cities, even showed that protected bicycle infrastructure was not just safer for cyclists, it actually make the roads safer for all road users, including drivers. We can argue about what designs are best, and how best to implement them, but anybody who is still arguing in favour of vehicular cycling over bicycle lanes is just wrong. By the early 2000s, even the League of American Wheelmen, now known as the much less cool name League of American Bicyclists, went on to advocate in favour of dedicated cycling infrastructure and against the idea of vehicular cycling. Now, if all Forester had ever done was to advocate for better cycling education, write a terrible rambling book to recruit MAMILs, and wear too much lycra, then that wouldn’t have been such a problem.
But we know that Forester actively fought against the installation of safe bicycle infrastructure, and nothing did more damage to cycling safety than his second terrible book. This is Bicycle Transportation, a book written for transportation engineers, as a guidebook for designing bicycle infrastructure. It was first published in 1977, but I bought the most recent edition, published in 1994. Today, there are a lot of reference manuals that transportation engineers can use when designing cycling infrastructure. The gold standard is the CROW manual. This book provides detailed information about how to design safe bicycle infrastructure, based on research from the Netherlands. The city of Oslo used this, as well as similar guidelines from Copenhagen to design their own bicycle design manual, which is also freely available in English. If you are a transportation engineer responsible in any way for cycling infrastructure, please do not re-invent the wheel. Start by reading one of these existing guidebooks.
Unfortunately American traffic engineers of the 1980s didn’t have that luxury. The CROW manual was available in the 80s, but only in Dutch, and since none of these engineers were cyclists themselves they were looking for guidance. John Forester filled that need by writing this book. Engineering teams across the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK used "Bicycle Transportation" as a reference, and the damage that was done cannot be understated. This book got a lot of people killed. Forester makes the same ridiculous claims here that he did in Effective Cycling, but I think he realised that since this was supposed to be an engineering book, he might need to actually provide a few references, so every once in a while he actually includes a footnote.
But when you follow them it just says “Kaplan.” So yeah, Forester is using that 1975 master’s thesis about racing cyclists on gravel paths to tell transportation engineers that they should never be building any off-street bicycle paths, separated from cars. This book is shorter than Effective Cycling but because it’s supposed to be an engineering manual everything is dressed up in this pseudo-technical scientific-sounding language so it’s even more painful to read. And there are so many irrelevant rambling chapters, like this part about the eleven types of people who advocate for bicycle lanes, but they only do it because they’re ignorant, they're overly emotional, or they’re just paid the big bucks from those sweet bikeway funds. The seventh type is “greenway visionaries”. Those monsters! It’s also absolutely crazy how often Forester rants about environmentalists in this book. That’s the third type, if you’re curious. And given that this was 1992, those environmentalists would’ve been the people upset about things like leaded gasoline, smog, and acid rain.
In this book, Forester is dismissive of basically everyone and he routinely states that his detractors are intellectually inferior. Most of the time when people talk about vehicular cycling, they reference the book Effective Cycling, but the few times I’ve seen someone talk about this book, they praise it for getting traffic engineers to install the grates on storm drains like this, instead of like this, so that cyclists don’t get their wheels stuck in them. I always thought it was odd that this particular example was almost always the only one referenced by anyone, but after reading this book I finally understand why. Because it’s some of the only good advice in the entire book. The other useful things that Forester suggests are that engineers should calibrate the vehicle detection loops at traffic lights to detect bicycles, and that retail shops should have more bicycle parking. That’s the good stuff. Now, onto the rest. Forester is very clear to state in this book that the number of people who are willing to cycle cannot be meaningfully changed, so it is totally worthless to design infrastructure for people who do not cycle today.
So he tells engineers that by far the most important factor when designing cycling infrastructure is speed, and anything that slows down a cyclist in any way will discourage people from cycling. He therefore advises that all bicycle facilities of any kind should be designed for a target speed of 30 miles per hour. That’s almost 50 kilometres per hour. Every facility for promoting cycling should be designed for 30 mph. If it is not, it will not attract the serious cyclist over the long term, and hence it will not be an effective part of the transportation system. Forester suggests that suburban arterial roads are the best type of road for cyclists because they are wide, straight, and do not have any stop signs.
Therefore these should be the main bicycle routes in any city. He also advises against any kind of design that might slow down cars, including speed bumps or other traffic calming, because it will also slow down cyclists and be unsafe. He specifically calls out Dutch woonerven like this as being extremely dangerous for cycling. WATCH OUT!! CAN’T YOU TELL THIS STREET IS DANGEROUS!? And Forester advises that if an engineer is being pressured to redesign any given road to make it safer for cycling, they should never build bicycle lanes or install any traffic calming, but instead, all they need to do is to make the rightmost lane wider. He goes on to state that all government funds for cycling should be used exclusively for education campaigns, and never for bicycle infrastructure. He also provides helpful design advice, like telling engineers that they should install barriers like these in parks and on paths to prevent cyclists from using them, because off-street paths are dangerous. And I loved how the most technical chapter in the whole book, which included lots of graphics and mathematics, was the one that argued that road cyclists don’t actually slow down car traffic, so people should stop talking about that. Forester regularly claims in this book that his opponents are being funded by the automobile industry in order to marginalise cycling, but the way Forester intensely advocates in favour of car-centric designs just made me think of the phrase, “every accusation is a confession”.
In the 1980s, the idea of building bicycle infrastructure had very little public support, and proposing to install bike lanes was politically risky. Forester plays into that fear to convince engineers not to build any. This lack of significant positive safety effect means, at least, that promotion of urban bikeway systems is a lie. Bikeway systems do not have overwhelming public support, and most of their support springs from the superstition that bikeways make cycling safe. The same is true for bikeway use; those who use them do so because of the belief that they are thereby preserved from great dangers. Sooner or later the public will learn the truth, and bikeways will lose public support. Most people in America were not convinced that they should be spending any money on “cyclists” at all, so Forester uses this as another argument against building bike lanes: It is extremely expensive to attempt to produce any bikeway system that separates bikes from cars. Even bikeways that do not effectively separate bikes from cars cost 3-10 times more per bicycle- mile, at expected levels of use, than roads. The source of those cost estimates is not cited, of course. Forester goes on to argue that These difficulties point out that conventional urban bikeways will be useless for their intended purpose of accommodating cycling transportation safely, and that they will become unacceptable once the public discovers that they are a sham. Quite obviously, endangering all cyclists and discouraging the best are not the ways to develop cycling transportation. And of course there are dozens and dozens of references to the cyclist-inferiority superstition. It’s still “superstition” because he hasn’t had a chance to come up with that clever “phobia” thing yet. the cyclist-inferiority superstition now controls public policy about cycling. Our public policy about cycling is driven by 0.2% of the accidents to cyclists, regardless of the increase in accidents of other types that that policy produces, and regardless of the inconvenience to and discrimination against cyclists that it also produces. Both the cycling transportation engineer and the cyclist advocate must operate in a society in which belief in false superstition controls most of the debate. If they are to accomplish anything worthwhile they must understand why and how this superstition took hold and operates today. Forester does not provide any evidence of his statements, and he also never mentions that his safety statistics are from his own calculations of other people’s data, even though the researchers themselves did not come to those same conclusions.
But in a book targeted at engineers, Forester knows he can't just say that there were no other worthwhile studies done since the 1970s, so there's a chapter where he briefly goes over 24 other reports and studies by the Federal Highway Administration, and dismisses each one. His primary argument is usually that because the authors weren’t “cyclists”, they didn't understand what they were studying, and so their conclusions should be dismissed. Or he just says they’re too intellectually inferior to understand what they were doing. At other times his "debunking" is just Forester saying the researchers are wrong, without any follow-up or counterevidence: The authors grossly misrepresent the accident facts. They write that "over one-third of bicycle-motor-vehicle accidents occur when the motor vehicle overtakes the bicyclist with nearly 80% of these accidents occurring at night." Of course, these researchers actually provided references for their statistics, which was more than Forester ever did.
But what I found even funnier is that the other crash data referenced in this paper ... is from the Cross report. The only difference is that they're directly quoting the conclusions of the Cross report, rather than using the cherry-picked subset of the data that Forester liked to use. Forester also included a story of when he tried to publish his own scientific paper, but it never made it through peer-review because of basic errors in data collections and analysis.
So he spends multiple pages ranting about how the scientific community is trying to silence him. Sure, John. This book was published in 1992, so Forester obviously doesn’t provide any new sources that weren’t already mentioned in the 2012 edition of Effective Cycling.
But he does actually provide a source for one of the wild claims that I was having trouble finding a citation for. Multiple times in Effective Cycling he claims that bicycle paths are a thousand times more dangerous than riding on the road. These dangers are so great that bicycle sidepaths in urban areas with short blocks and heavy traffic have been measured as more than 1,000 times more dangerous than the adjacent roadway, in terms of motor-traffic hazards alone. Wow! That sounds really bad! I wonder how that was measured? Well, I finally found out, as the only time he ever mentions where he got this number, is on page 101 of Bicycle Transportation. I rode at the same speeds I used on the road at the same time of day, and I counted the incipient car-bike collisions that required all my bike-handling and traffic skill to avoid. They averaged two per mile, on a road on which I had previously cycled at least 500 miles without any problems. The eighth near collision nearly killed me; it was just chance that I was not hit headon. Therefore, I terminated the test at 4 miles. Yeah. It comes from that one time when John Forester rode really fast down the sidewalk in Palo Alto in 1972. This is the high level of scientific rigor that I’ve come to expect from advocates of vehicular cycling. It is so infuriating to read the garbage that John Forester wrote. He routinely makes absolutely ridiculous claims about bicycle safety, states them like they’re fact without any references, and then it’s like the world’s worst scavenger hunt trying to track down where it came from. And when I finally find the source of it, it’s from some stupid typewritten report written before I was born that doesn’t even say what he says it does, or worse, he just pulled numbers out of his ass and called it “science.” I’d like to remind you again that people told me to read what he actually wrote. And yet what he actually wrote was a bunch of rambling bullshit. How did anybody ever take this guy seriously? I was so disappointed in these books. There are legitimate criticisms that could be made of many bicycle lane designs, but Forester doesn’t talk about any of that. He just pretends that all bicycle infrastructure is the same, that a dedicated car-free bicycle path is identical to a trail through the forest or a Palo Alto sidewalk, and he makes implausible safety claims as a result. These books show a willful ignorance on the part of Forester, but I know why he did it. Because if he had pointed out the actual problems with most bicycle lane designs, then that would’ve opened up the possibility of fixing those issues, rather than throwing away the idea of bicycle infrastructure completely, which is what he ultimately wanted. Like, this kind of bicycle lane that puts cyclists in the “door zone” is dangerous.
But the solution to that is not to throw away bicycle lanes, it’s to put them on the other side of the cars, with enough of a gap to allow a car passenger to open their door. This was the design used in Davis, California in 1972.
But today it’s a worse and more dangerous design, partially due to the objections of Forester, and other vehicular cyclists. It’s also a problem when bicycle lanes are too narrow and you can't even pass anyone who’s cycling slower. One of the worst examples that I’ve experienced was when I livestreamed a ride down the newest bicycle lanes in Toronto in 2021. Going downhill in these super- narrow narrow bicycle lanes with these stupid plastic sticks that were higher than my handlebars was actually really nerve-wracking. This whole ride was a shitshow of bad bicycle infrastructure, and if you want to see me suffer through it, you can watch the full video on my livestreaming channel NJB Live, I’ll put a link in the description. The most glaring problem with most bike lanes though, is the intersections. Especially right hooks. This is where a cyclist, riding in a bicycle lane, is hit by a right-turning car. I’d like to thank CycleYYZ who provided me with some of these bicycle riding clips. His channel has a lot of videos about how to ride a bicycle safely on less-than-ideal infrastructure, so definitely check it out if your city looks like this. The vehicular cycling method advises cyclists to pass right-turning cars on the left-hand side, and this is generally good advice. This can be done in a bike lane as well, but it is more difficult, especially if your view of the intersection is blocked. Forester used this fact to argue that the only type of crash that bicycle lanes could ever prevent is being hit from behind by same-direction motor traffic. And this is why he would regularly state that bicycle lanes could only prevent 0.3 percent of crashes, or 2 percent of crashes, or whatever data he decided to make up that day. Some traffic engineers have tried to encourage cyclists to follow the vehicular cycling method by explicitly designing the bicycle lane so that right-turning drivers cross over it before turning right.
But this just creates a new point of conflict earlier in the turn as drivers have to cross the bike lane. The Netherlands also experimented with this kind of design in the 1990s, but very little of it exists today, because newer designs were found to be significantly safer. Some of this supposed “bike infrastructure" that I see in Ontario, Canada is …. so … bad. I have way too much harmathanatophobia to ever consider cycling here. The safest type of bicycle lanes are curb- protected, that is, up a curb and at or near the level of the sidewalk instead of the level of the road, This is what it looks like when a typical curb-protected bicycle lane crosses a side street in most of the Netherlands. Notice that the bicycle lane doesn’t drop down to the level of the road, like what you would see in most other countries. Instead, it stays at sidewalk level through the entire intersection. This means that any car wanting to turn in or out of this street needs to effectively go up a “speed bump” in order to turn. This has several benefits. The raised crossing makes it clear to everyone that the people cycling have priority over turning traffic. It also ensures that any driver who is making a turn needs to slow down significantly, in order to go up the ramp. The bicycle lane is set back from the street as well, so before the driver crosses the bicycle lane, they have already started their turn, and so they have much better visibility of people cycling in the bicycle lane. This can be installed on roads of any size, but on wider roads where there is more room, the bicycle lane curves even farther from the road at the junction. This means that a driver can totally exit and wait for people cycling without blocking traffic on the road, and it gives the drivers an even better view of people in the bicycle lane. It also means that a left- turning driver can wait for a gap in car traffic, make the turn, and then wait for a gap in bicycle traffic, without having to worry about both at the same time, making everything safer and less stressful for everyone. A similar design is used at roundabouts whenever there's space. And some large roundabouts will have a lower bicycle path, totally separated from the traffic on the roundabout. Or in the case of Eindhoven, a giant bicycle ring over the entire road junction. The other major source of bicycle crashes is at four-way intersections. While Forester used this fact to pretend that bicycle lanes could never prevent crashes at junctions, Dutch engineers created the protected intersection. And as I mentioned before, an early design of this kind of intersection was published in that 1972 UCLA proposal, the one Forester was so proud of killing. Today these kinds of intersections are found all over the Netherlands. There are many elements that make them safe, but the core of this design are these concrete islands on every corner. These ensure that right-turning drivers need to make a relatively sharp turn, which means that they cannot take the corner too quickly, and the bicycle lane is set back so that any turning driving has a clear view of anybody cycling. This kind of intersection design is significantly safer for people cycling, as it provides curb protection from cars for as much of the intersection as possible. Bicycle Dutch has an exceptionally good video about the design of these intersections that is definitely worth watching. He illustrates the problems with the typical North American intersection design, And shows how a Dutch junction can be designed in exactly the same amount of space. There is also a video and website created by a transportation planner in Portland that breaks down the most important aspects of a protected intersection. I’ll leave a link in the description.
Unfortunately this kind of intersection design is very rare outside of the Netherlands. I have seen a few examples of this in other cities, but the design is rarely up to Dutch standards But it’s even more typical for a city to do nothing, or maybe just a bit of paint, leaving cyclists to YOLO their way through intersections. Most notably, Copenhagen still just uses blue paint through intersections, and only in two of the four directions. Copenhagen is known as a cycling city, and they have built some very good bicycle infrastructure over the years, but their intersection design is totally inadequate, and I wish they would start following the Dutch example.
So that might make you wonder, what did John Forester think about the rise of cycling in places like the Netherlands and Denmark? Well, despite being published in 2012, the seventh edition of Effective Cycling barely even mentions the Netherlands or Denmark. American cycling transportation knowledge now far exceeds European knowledge. European knowledge declined as motorization took over from 1960 on. Particularly in northern Europe (Germany, Holland, Denmark, Scandinavia), bicycle traffic became relegated to second-class status and cyclists acquiesced (even cheered) as they were diverted to bike paths and prohibited from using the better roads.
In many of these places, they accept slow and dangerous bike-path congestion that would cause American cyclists to rebel, but they do so because the motor traffic congestion makes motoring even less convenient for the short distances involved. America now has the best cycling transportation knowledge in the world, one part of which is in this book. I honestly don't know how delusional and/or willfully ignorant you would need to be to believe that America had the best cycling transportation knowledge in the world at any point in time, nevermind in 2012.
But he does mention that Danish and Dutch bicycle lanes actually increased collisions: The Dutch and the Danes have done more of this than elsewhere, and their research results are illuminating. Recent extensive and well-designed Danish studies have concluded that their sidepaths, even with their extensive signalization, have increased the car-bike collision rate. Within blocks, the rate decreased, but the sidepaths produced even greater increases wherever traffic crossed. As usual, Forester doesn’t provide any reference to these supposed well-designed Danish studies, but I strongly suspect he was talking about this one, because I found it linked as proof that bicycles lanes are unsafe on several vehicular cycling websites, as well as a document written by Forester himself in 2009. This study concluded that the construction of protected bicycle lanes, what Copenhagen calls “cycle tracks”, resulted in a 9 to 10 percent increase in accidents and injury. CHECKMATE URBANISTS!! But they also saw a much higher increase in bicycle traffic of 18 to 20 percent.
In other words, the main reason there was an increase in crashes is because a lot more people were cycling, especially novice cyclists, now that the infrastructure was safer. the study did find that painted bicycle lanes were much less safe than cycle tracks, but that's just more reason to build protected bicycle lanes instead of painted bicycle gutters. And of course this study was also done in Copenhagen with intersection designs that are objectively less safe than what is common in the Netherlands.
When Forester claimed that biking in the Netherlands was unsafe, he was just wrong, and there was plenty of evidence available to him that he just ... ignored. This year 2000 paper found that that “bicyclist fatalities per billion kilometres cycled are only a fourth as high” as in the United States, And this 2008 study found that cycling was over five times as safe in the Netherlands as in the USA.
Of course the book Bicycle Transportation, was targeted at engineers, so Forester couldn’t just pretend that the Netherlands didn’t exist, like he did in Effective Cycling.
So he provided an entire chapter on European bikeway design. And in it, he shares his story of meeting a Dutch traffic engineer for the first time. Velo-City is a cycling planning conference, started in Bremen, Germany in 1980, and it has become a major industry conference for bicycle policy and infrastructure design. The first time this conference was held outside of Europe was in Montréal in 1992, and John Forester was there. The dean of traffic engineering at one of the three schools in Holland that teach traffic engineering, and researchers in charge of the largest current bicycle planning research project in Denmark [sic], did not even understand (although they are fluent in English - language was not the problem) the cycling-traffic-engineering questions that Americans asked of them. The questions that had been debated and investigated in the U.S.A. for two decades (the questions discussed in this book) were so far removed from their frames of reference that they didn't understand them. The Dutch dean of traffic engineering was asked to describe the principles and data upon which Dutch traffic engineers based their bikeway designs. Once he grasped the significance of the question (which took several minutes of discussion in itself), he said that they had none, that they just used "common sense." I would love to hear a recording of that conversation, because I strongly suspect that the reason it took so long for the Dutch to understand what Forester was talking about was because he was saying so many incredibly stupid things that they couldn’t believe he could actually be that ignorant, and still be at this conference. It’s also pretty ironic that Forester is attacking the Europeans for having a lack of hard data in 1992 when the sum-total of Forester’s data was whatever he cherry-picked from two papers from the 1970s, while somehow also coming to the exact opposite conclusions of the researchers who actually published those papers. He then goes on to claim, without evidence, that the solutions the Europeans have come up with for things like right-turning motor traffic are, quote, “much worse solutions than ours”, and says that the only reason the Dutch have dedicated traffic lights for bicycles is because they need to, quote, “correct the dangers that bikeways produce.” He also mentions that many Dutch cyclists have realised that their approach is flawed, but they’re being silenced. His source for this? A friend of his who lives in California, but who was born in the Netherlands. He also has one of the dumbest footnotes I’ve ever read, where he claims that the Dutch needed to create slow cars because people who grew up riding bicycles there, couldn’t learn how to drive normal cars. What he’s referring to are vehicles like the Canta that were built for disabled people, so that they could use the safe cycling infrastructure, even if they could not physically ride a bicycle because of their disability. Of course, Forester never mentions disabilities or anything about people who can’t ride a racing bicycle for whatever reason, because he is working on the assumption that cycling is reserved only for physically fit people who can cycle at 30 miles per hour. Forester concludes the chapter with, It is quite clear that the European experience with bikeways gives us more knowledge, but that knowledge is rather different from what bikeway advocates expected. That is, it amplifies and confirms the knowledge that we American cyclists have worked out, that bikeways are bad for cyclists. There is no known way of combining cyclists on bikeways and motorists on roadways (to say nothing of pedestrians on sidewalks and bike paths as well) that makes cycling safer or more convenient Of course, at no point in the chapter does he provide any evidence or references to support that position. At other points in the book Forester acknowledges that Europe exists, but since they design for “inferior cycling", it is not applicable to America.
In one chapter he actually shows what might be a Dutch-style intersection, but he either doesn’t realise, or wants to purposefully hide, that it is supposed to have a curb that would make it impossible to make the dangerous turn that he marks as M4.
But if you think it’s hard to read what John Forester wrote, you should try listening to him speak.
In 2007, Google invited John Forester to give a talk at their silicon valley campus, and it turns out that he rambles just as much when talking as he does when writing. Some roads have nice, smooth gutter pans, although most aren't. I can remember the years when paving was restricted because of World War II. We rode on the gutter pans because the concrete was smoother than the tar, which hadn't been maintained for years. Of course, that got fixed later on, and now we generally stay off gutter pans. Bizarrely, he spends almost half of his presentation time arguing that cars are the best form of transportation ever invented. Some of you may not like it. Some of you may think, well, we should stick with the bicycle age. Well, that would be nice, wouldn't it, but we can't, something like 80% of the growth since then has been in suburbs, which cannot efficiently be served by mass transit, and therefore your two choices are car or bicycle. That's what it amounts to. Well, there's lots of value in riding a bicycle, but you cannot expect that bicycle travel is going to take the place of very much of the automotive travel that's being made.
But there it was. The motorists invented the bike lane system, and they invented it for their own convenience, on the excuse that cyclists were too dumb. Did you know? Did you know that here you are, Stanford graduates and all that, did you know that straddling a bicycle destroys your brains? It turns you into children who don't know how to drive. Yeah, yep. Forester also really wanted his audience to know that most people don't actually want to ride bicycles, so it's useless to try to encourage cycling. Even here, I'm going to say that I doubt whether you have reduced the motoring intake into Google by 1%. I doubt it.I may be wrong, OK, but all I'm going to say is that it's unfortunate that motoring is not going to be significantly reduced-- such that you're going to save significant amounts of oil or do away with significant amounts of highway or whatever-- as a result of the amount of bicycle transportation being done. It just doesn't have that capability. and then they quote enormous numbers of people who say, oh yes, haven't you seen this review? Why, 72.34% of the people who answered this question said, yes, they would ride to work if they had a bikeway. I mean, you see these all the time and not one of them makes any statistical sense at all. Unsurprisingly the only reference he provides for any of the nonsense he says is from the Cross report, which was 33 years old by this point. You can hear him fumble through his justification for using only part of Kennth Cross's data, because at this point he had surely been called out on it by others and felt the need to justify his interpretation. and at this time we first started getting decent statistics from a man named Cross in Southern California. [...] he got a contract for a national sample–four different states representing different parts of the nation, and more representative of the country. And there, you might look at the figure and it might be 2% or something like that, depends whether you want to count daytime ones only or nighttime ones as well, were there other complications, or whether you want to count rural ones, which are different from urban ones. Small number.
But the absolute best part is when he starts talking about the Netherlands. Also we’re talking about America. You find that many people say, oh yes, Dutch bikeways are wonderful. Dutch bikeways, they've got a 40%, 50%, 60% bicycle modeshare in Amsterdam. Well, sure they do. It's a medieval city. It's a pre-automotive obsolete city–Isn't that a nice word? OK, ignoring the fact that even the centre of Amsterdam that most people think about was mostly built in the 17th century, more than half of the area of Amsterdam was built out after 1945, and much of it was built to be car-friendly. This is what huge parts of Amsterdam looks like. Does this look "medieval" to you? And yet it's perfectly safe to cycle everywhere here, even the places that were originally designed for cars.
But the absolute best part of this presentation is when he opened it up to questions, because the audience was not having any of it. They immediately started asking about Europe. The question is the classic comment that they have much more like cycling in places like the Netherlands particularly, and some other northern European countries, than they have here. Now, the Netherlands–all the cities there were started medieval times or before. Now, it may surprise you to learn that John Forester, bicycle expert extraordinaire, never visited the Netherlands. I’m sure that was really difficult to guess by the way he’s wrong about everything he says about it. There are lots of cities in the Netherlands that were founded well after "medieval times”, most notably the entire province of Flevoland that was constructed on reclaimed land, with cities such as Almere and Lelystad that were built in the 70s and 80s. I made a previous video about another town, Houten, which was built in the 1980s. And yet it’s a better place to cycle than anywhere in the United States. Let it be known ... this is the kind of horror your city will become if those type-7 "greenway visionaries" get their way. I wouldn't expect the average American to know about all this in 2007, but as a self-proclaimed expert in cycling, it is embarrassing how willfully ignorant John Forester was about Dutch cycling. There was an audience member from Sweden who had lived in Amsterdam for years, and said he cycled in Europe but that he didn’t feel safe cycling in San Francisco and asked why bicycle lanes can’t work there. Well, yeah, I mean, stay out of the door zone and don't run into double parked cars. Just go around them.
But I agree with you. San Francisco is an extremely congested city for motor traffic. However, here is the point. There's nothing practical that we could do about it that would improve the situation for cyclists. There's no extra room for bike paths on the Amsterdam model This is just so stupid I don’t even know where to start with it. San Francisco was founded in 1776. How is Amsterdam great for bikes because it's old but San Francisco isn’t? And no room for bike paths? That’s absolutely ridiculous. I used to live near San Francisco and I've been there dozens of times. There’s tonnes of room for bike lanes on almost every major street! Certainly more room than most streets in Amsterdam. It's just such an absolutely absurd excuse from a supposed cycling expert. The rest of the video continues like this as the audience asks him more and more questions, especially why bicycle paths can work so well in Europe but not in America, And it's painful listening to John's rambling ignorant responses. I’ll leave a link to the full video in the description if you’re that kind of masochist. OK, so you might be thinking, why should we care about what some racing cyclist said almost twenty years ago? Well, the problem is that, even though John Forester is no longer with us, he left behind a cult of vehicular cycling advocates who continue to promote his outdated ideas. I’ve been making videos on Not Just BIkes for over six years now. "... and it certainly explains why I liked living in London, England" "... but hated London, Ontario" When I started out I had no interest in becoming a channel that’s watched by millions of people every month. I just wanted to share the reasons why my wife and I moved our family to the Netherlands, and what I loved about Dutch city design.
But after one of my early videos went viral, I started getting a lot of hatred online. There was even one person who harassed me for months, tried to doxx me, and sent me lots of hate mail.
So what was it that made these people so angry? Was it because I wanted more car-free streets? Was it because I showed that car-dependent suburbia was financially insolvent? Was it because I called American cities car-infested shitholes? No, it was because I said I preferred riding this type of Dutch-style bicycle. Seriously. No video I’ve ever made has attracted as much vitriol and hatred as this one, and it all came from Forester’s cult of the vehicular cyclist. They were absolutely infuriated that I promoted the idea of riding an upright bicycle that required almost no maintenance. That comfort might be more important than efficiency. And that bicycles could be used for reliable urban transportation instead of for sport. Or maybe they were just upset that I kicked a stuffed animal in the head. It’s now one of my most-watched videos of all time with over six- million views, and that makes them even more upset. Before I moved to the Netherlands, I was involved in safe streets advocacy for several years, and one of the common tropes that advocates used to joke about was the “avid cyclist.” At any community meeting, the moment anyone started a question with “I’m an avid cyclist myself but …” we knew they were part of the Cult of the Vehicular Cyclist, and everything else out of their mouth would be total nonsense.
But as funny as that was, those people caused real damage to the cause of making streets safer for people on bikes. Because to the planners, engineers, and politicians, here was a “cyclist”, supposedly the exact type of person they were designing for, up there telling them that bicycle infrastructure was a waste of time and money, that all the people injured or killed while cycling were just filthy amateurs who didn't git gut, that all that was really needed was more education campaigns. And these cult members used John Forester’s books and “research” to prove their point. Encouraging vehicular cycling was much cheaper, both financially and politically, than building a bunch of safe bicycle infrastructure, so in many cases, that’s what those engineers and politicians did instead. And this is still happening today. As I was writing the script for this video, a fan told me about a large group of vehicular cyclists who showed up to a community meeting about bike lanes in the UK. They were, of course, opposed to building bike paths, and were arguing that nobody who rides a bicycle wanted any of this. This really gets to the core of the problem, because despite what Forester or his cult members would tell you, you aren’t building bicycle paths for the people who ride bicycles today. You’re building them for all of the people who would ride a bicycle, but they don’t, because it’s too dangerous. As the former chief planner of Vancouver often says, “Never forget, it’s hard to justify a bridge by the number of people swimming across a river.” Especially when that river is infested with sharks. Or worse, hippopotamuses, because they’re more dangerous than sharks. Cities that build high-quality bicycle infrastructure see a large increase in the number of people cycling. Nowhere is this more obvious than in Paris where they have built out substantial bicycle infrastructure recently. They still have a ways to go before they’re as bicycle- friendly as the Netherlands, but they’ve already made incredible progress that would have been unimaginable ten to fifteen years ago. I visited Paris a few years ago and documented the incredible surge in new people cycling, and I’ll put a link to that video in the description. I should really get around to making a similar video about London.
In his books Forester laments that in America, cycling is not taken seriously by the rest of society, but what did he think was going to happen? Any place designed for only one form of transportation will always result in all other forms of transportation being inferior. It’s like designing a city only for cars, and then expecting to be able to add public transit later. It will never work as well or be respected as much as a place that was properly designed for public transit. Bicycles may be “vehicles” in the broadest sense of the word, but they are not the same as cars, and I can't believe I even need to say that. Bicycles are slower, lighter, and smaller than cars so there will always be a power imbalance on roads designed for cars.
But blindly treating bicycles as cars eliminates many of the benefits of bicycles as well. Bicycles don’t get stuck in traffic like cars do, as large groups of cyclists easily move around one another. And a cyclist can instantly become a pedestrian, something that’s also not possible to do with a car. Bicycles are very quiet and so large amounts of bicycle traffic can be routed through dense cities without a lot of negative effects on the surrounding neighbourhood.
In the Netherlands there are veritable bicycle highways that go through parks and move just as many people as a suburban arterial road. You could never do this with cars, at least, not without destroying the park. and a parking lot for bicycles takes less than 5 percent of the space required to park the same number of cars.
But fundamentally, I just don’t understand how Forester could have spent so much time advocating for cities to be designed for cars, and yet somehow expected that cyclists wouldn’t be treated as second-class citizens. He wrote so often about wanting the police to treat him and his cycle buddies fairly, for his neighbours and other drivers to respect him, and for people to enjoy the sport of cycling. And yet here in the Netherlands, all of that is true. And they accomplished this by doing the opposite of everything Forester advocated for. Here cycling is completely normalised. Nobody judges anyone else for riding a bicycle. Friends ride their bicycles together, side-by-side. People go on dates on bicycles. No extra tandem bike trickery required. There’s ample bicycle parking in front of every shop. Including the grocery store. Even when I go to a music festival the very best parking, right by the front gate, is the bike parking. And some of the indoor bicycle parking garages are seriously impressive. With controlled entry and 24 hour security. There are bicycle shops everywhere who can fix any issue that I can’t fix myself. It’s easy to get anywhere I want to go by bicycle, and most cities are set up so that people cycling can take the shortest and most direct route to get somewhere, while drivers have to take the long way around. And while every major street will have safe, protected bicycle lanes Many other streets will have none. Not because bicycle lanes are unsafe, but because access to cars has been restricted, and when you don't have a lot of cars, you don't need bicycle lanes. Since there are almost no stop signs, and many intersections have cycling underpasses, it means that you can cycle for a long time without ever having to stop.
But if you do have to cross an intersection, the traffic detection loops work just fine with bicycles, and the bicycle paths even have their own detection loops just for bikes. And some traffic lights have an extra detection loop ahead of the intersection so that the traffic light goes green for people cycling, before they even get there. There are even cities that have traffic lights that go green more often for cyclists when it’s raining. The drainage grates are also always turned the right way. Imagine that. I used to have negative encounters with angry drivers several times a year in Toronto, but after seven years in the Netherlands, I was only ever honked at once … and that was by a friend who was driving by and wanted to say “hi.” No one has ever tried to run me off of the road, indeed the vast majority of drivers are very accommodating, and there’s a good reason for that: because almost every driver in the Netherlands also rides a bicycle, so they know what it’s like to be on a bike around a bunch of cars. And yet, the way that happened, and I would argue, the only way that can happen, is to have a society where cycling is made available to everyone, so that it is a normal part of life for most people. Not just the young and fit who can cycle between motor vehicles at 30 mile-per-hour, but genuinely accessible infrastructure. And even if you’re completely Forester-brained and only care about race cycling, that’s better here too. It’s very common to see wielrenners out on the weekend, enjoying the sport of cycling, just like Forester wanted. And yeah, sometimes you get stuck behind people riding too slowly in the bike path.
But you also get to ride on wide, smooth, straight cycling paths outside of the city on infrastructure that is objectively better to cycle on than a typical pothole-filled American road. There are an estimated 700 thousand people in the Netherlands who ride bicycles for sport, which comes out to a little under 4% of the Dutch population. That is an order of magnitude higher than the percentage of people who cycle for sport in the United States.
So if you really and truly want people to “enjoy the sport of cycling”, then this “inferior cycling” is still the right approach. John Forester and the vehicular cycling movement did immeasurable damage to cycling in every English-speaking country, and they’re about 30 years behind the Netherlands as a result.
But the good news is that it’s also easier than ever to build proper cycling infrastructure. There’s no more guesswork needed, and proven designs are available for the taking, just copy and paste from resources like the Oslo guide or the CROW manual. Cycling projects can be built quickly and at relatively low cost, and the cities that are designing for “childish cycling” are reaping the benefits.
But a necessary first step is to throw away Forester’s dogma and admit that vehicular cycling is not a viable alternative, except as an emergency maneuver for dangerous roads. Because after what I've learned about vehicular cycling I would argue that if you don’t hate John Forester, it’s because you haven’t read what he actually wrote. Thanks so much for watching, I really appreciate it. Special thanks to Thomas Frank for reading all of the John Forester quotes. It’s not easy to read such bad writing out loud. I’d also like to thank Brent Toderian who read the quote by Brent Toderian, as well as Ray Delahanty, George Weidman, and TierZoo for lending their voice to various quotes in this video. And of course, Nicole Conlan who not only helped with research and writing, she also managed to get through all of Effective Cycling without killing me. Making quality videos takes time, money, and involves a lot of people. This video took hundreds of hours to make and I’m very happy with the result, but I must admit that it’s difficult to compete on social media when an AI slop creator can churn out multiple low-quality videos in a day. It would have been much easier if, instead of hiring Nicole and spending dozens of my own hours writing, I had just asked an LLM to generate a script for me. The problem is that not only would that AI script be terrible, it would also be wrong. Which is one of the many reasons why I don’t use generative AI. Well that plus I can't imagine unironically saying, "and remember: Don’t be a Forester, be a Fietser." My videos are researched by humans, written by humans, edited by humans, with humans doing the voices, and with real footage, recorded by humans. Because I ultimately believe that you shouldn’t spend your time watching a video if someone else didn’t spend their time creating it.
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