Man I remember guys who I guess are his followers on the bike group against bike infrastructure. Its like the l33t git gud gamer bros.
As a middle aged man in lycra who enjoys riding road bikes fast for sport and is comfortable riding in traffic: That Forester guy sounds like a dick. One of the things that makes bikes so cool is that they come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes, optimised for different use cases. Road bikes are cool, but so are mountain bikes, cargo bikes, fixed gear bikes, dutch style upright bikes, etc. And even if countless near death experiences while cycling around cars have made me feel comfortable (or complacent?) riding in traffic, I still appreciate good cycling infrastructure. People deserve to be safe and every trip taken by bike instead of by car is a win.
I was expecting to read Forester was killed by being hit by a car while cycling , but dude lived to 90.
I grew up in a city that has hundreds of miles of cycle paths, you could ride anywhere without ever having to ride on a main road, only the occasional first/last section to get to a house/shop. The nearest path to my old house was 150 yards down the road and when I was growing up before I started driving at 17 (mid 90’s), we used to ride everywhere. It was about 8 miles from corner of the city to the other.
As I got older and relied on a car… I found myself missing cycling. So in 2017, I got a 21spd hybrid city bike… Alas, I discovered that injuries and post op limitations restricted me to at best… 5-6 miles and I was exhausted.
So in 2022, I got myself an e-bike. A Haibike Trekking with the bosch mid drive system. I can now ride with ease once more.
Alas… I also moved from that city with hundreds of miles of cycle paths a few months after getting it… Now I live near to the sea and mountains… and there are 2 cycle routes near me. One I can do a 9m round trip, it would be longer but for some daft reason they never finished the path around the reservoir and it’s boggy and muddy for 5 months of the year or any time it rains in the other 7 months. The other route means riding about 1/2 mile through town to pick up the nearest path and then you’ve got about 7 more miles of pretty flat, open countryside next to a river… but also next to flood planes. So at this time of year, it can flood a section about 1/2 a mile long at the 2.5m mark (from my house). Oh and that first route, also floods long before you ever get to the reservoir restricting your ride to at best 4 miles in total there and back… it’s only 9 miles without the flooding.
I can do an 8 mile trip to an estuary and add another 1 mile I’m on the edge of a huge forest… 2 further miles through the forest and I’m at the beach… making it a 22 mile round trip… But the stony, gravel roads aren’t exceptionally suited to my city bike. I’ve bought reinforced tyres and puncture proof tubes… so maybe I’ll give it a shot next year.
For now, it’s unlikely I’ll be getting much riding done until March.
Keep it up!
Very thorough and in depth but a bit long.
This kind of doomerism can fuck right off. The more of us there are on the roads the safer we’ll be. Stop making people think cycling is unsafe; that only keeps people from trying it.
The video is about a guy called John Forester, who was a road racing cyclist who vocally opposed all cycling infrastructure, arguing for what he called “vehicular cycling” where you ride on the road among cars following the same rules as cars, which, in his view, was safer than separate bicycle paths, which according to him were very unsafe. He was a vocal critic of cycling infrastructure and apparently quite influential in the US.
He wrote a 800-page
bookmanifesto titled Effective Cycling where he argues that any form of cycling except riding racing bicycles at high speed wearing lycra is a complete waste of time, fit only for children. It’s also full of more questionable traffic safety advice.I’m still baffled that anyone would argue that separate bike paths are more dangerous than mixing with cars. How did this guy not get laughed out of the room every time ye claimed that?
I’m all for making mixing with cars safer too (lower speeds, more training and awareness for drivers), but separate bike paths are so much better.
The faster you ride, the better you blend in with vehicular traffic. The trouble is, not everyone can ride that fast. Now that I’m old, I appreciate dedicated MUPs and bike lanes because they’re better suited to my current abilities than they were 30 to 40 or even 20 years ago.
Sure, but riding among cars will never be the safest option. Good, dedicated separated bike paths ought to be the most comfortable to exercise-oriented riders too, given that they have all the upsides of roads (and then some; no potholes!) with no cars.
No potholes?
*Laughs in Saskatoonish
But also, the faster you ride, the more tiring it is, the more stressful it is, and the more severe the consequences when anybody - especially nearby drivers - makes a serious error.
Cycling doesn’t have to be that way. No matter what Forester and other ableists say. If you remove most of the motorists, it can be fun! And proper fun, not the ‘I jousted with drivers and survived’ type.
Well, 40 years ago it wasn’t all that tiring because I was a very fit young bike racer, but I get what you mean.
Maybe, but still more tiring than being able to coast through on a more direct, comfortable and convenient cycleway instead of a motorway limited by sucky truck turning radii and visibility.
You probably need to actually watch the video, it sounds like you didn’t
Of course not. I have visual processing issues and video links without a text synopsis are one of my pet peeves. I’m not going to waste my time, energy, and mobile data watching a video that the submittor couldn’t even be arsed to write a summary for.
Yet somehow you determined that it was a good idea to waste your time and energy to write a wholly inaccurate comment.
It’s a terrible headline and I continue to have no tolerance for it.
It’s mostly talk anyway so you can just listen to it. That’s what I did.
See, that’s helpful information.
I haven’t yet watched it, but it is a Not Just Bikes video and therefore I expect it will be thorough, reasonable, and enlightened — and that you have completely mischaracterized it. Are you just guessing what it’s about from the title?
I am, because OP couldn’t be bothered to provide a text summary that would tell me more and/or let me know if the video was worth watching.
