Why John Forester was wrong: Design streets for the humans you have, not the humans you wish you had.

John Forester, the longtime champion of vehicular cycling, passed away on April 14th at the age of 90. If you ride a bike on city streets and you like not being yelled at to "Get on the sidewalk!" (at least by law enforcement); or if you've ever been taught safety techniques such as "taking the lane," you probably have Forester at least in part to thank.

Unfortunately, Forester's stubborn commitment to his own theory of how streets ought to work, over the reality of how they do work for many vulnerable users, made him a staunch opponent for years of many widely accepted bike safety improvements such as bike lanes (especially protected bike lanes or separated cycletracks), and a thorn in the side of a younger generation of bike advocates. In the circles I travel, when I've encountered Forester's name and the phrase "vehicular cycling," it’s usually uttered with scorn or annoyance.

A key lesson we can take from John Forester's controversial activism is, I believe, that you have to design your streets for the real, flawed, nervous, sometimes erratic humans you have, not the humans you wish you had.

Why Vehicular Cycling Fails

Beginning in the 1970s, during a cycling boom in the U.S. set off by the oil crisis of that decade, Forester became a tireless advocate for the idea that the safest way for people on bicycles to share streets with cars is to follow the same rules as cars. His book Effective Cycling makes exactly this case, and has influenced how generations (of Americans in particular) are taught to ride bikes. It is still in print today. People on bikes, according to Forester, should be taught to ride in the traffic lane just like cars. They should obey all the same traffic laws as motor vehicles, and in doing so, demand that drivers treat them as equals.

In Forester’s world, this is enough. Educate cyclists on how to ride confidently down the center of the lane and control the space. Educate drivers on bicyclists’ rights and how to navigate around them safely and respectfully. Problem solved… right? Well, that depends whether you think it’s a problem that only a tiny, unrepresentative minority of people are sufficiently unafraid of being mowed down to get out and ride in these conditions.

John Forester’s cycling utopia? Demanding only the right to share the motor vehicle lane is setting the bar low. (Image via Flickr)

Forester's problem was that it turns out no amount of education with regard to rules is enough to prevent all drivers, all of the time, from behaving aggressively, or from simply making deadly mistakes. And as a result, the vehicular approach to cycling only works if you're a confident cyclist who is very physically fit and comfortable going somewhat close to the speed of traffic—15 miles per hour and up—so that you can respond quickly to any risks you detect.

Vehicular cycling fails for huge numbers of other people, including children; older and less fit adults; novice cyclists; and anyone just looking to ride at a casual pace and not break a sweat. Forester was consistently dismissive of this point: citing positive safety outcomes for those already out cycling in the absence of bike lanes, his blind spot was the much larger number of people who would like to cycle but are afraid to.

The people who aren't there at all are never going to show up in the statistics. To the extent you can argue a four lane death road with no bike facilities is "safe" because few bicyclists have been hit or killed on it, it's comparable to arguing an alligator-filled moat in which people don't dare swim is "safe" for swimming because no swimmers have been eaten this year.

Why would a cyclist oppose bike lanes?

John Forester opposed bike lanes because he felt that the special accommodation would result in bicyclists being treated as second-class road users. In a worst case scenario, would bikes eventually be banned from the primary traffic lane and restricted to only using the bike lane? (This fear is not totally unwarranted: if you've never seen Casey Neistat's legendary video mocking the NYPD's habit of ticketing bike riders for leaving the bike lane, then drop what you're doing and watch it.)

But for the most part, Forester was fighting a war that had already been won: the war to allow bicycles on city streets at all. It's absolutely been won by now. The proliferation of "share the road" signs you see today is testament to that. Bikes are allowed in the traffic lane just about everywhere short of freeways, in every U.S. state. This right does not seem in jeopardy at all, despite Forester's lifelong insistence.

How should we evaluate the need for bike infrastructure?

If we really want to understand what would make our streets safer, we need to humble ourselves to get out there, talk with our actual neighbors, and understand the struggles they’re experiencing navigating the city. The goal is to identify needs that people themselves may not have identified yet, so that we can identify solutions that we haven’t presupposed.

When you do this, with regard to biking, you consistently discover that the world of people who get around on bikes—which can be a tremendously cost-effective, healthy, and enjoyable means of transportation—is much, much larger than the world of “cyclists” (and, not coincidentally, much more diverse). And the world of people who might get around on a bike if our streets made them feel safe doing so is larger still.

The Dutch famously realized this beginning in the 1970s, when a massive “Stop the Child Murder” campaign arose in response to a growing number of deaths in Dutch cities at the hands of motorists. Over decades, they have produced a cycling network that is the envy of the world, and which feels, and is, dramatically safer than U.S. streets. They have done this largely by building separated cycletracks so that bikes do not share space with fast-moving cars, and tweaking intersections in order to give bikes priority where safety demands it.

Read Strong Towns’ 2018 interview with Chris and Melissa Bruntlett about the Dutch model for the cycling city.

This happened not because The Netherlands was exceptional in terms of its pre-existing cycling culture, or in its lack of car culture—plenty of Dutch own cars even today—or even in its traffic engineering approach in the early postwar era: at the time, the Dutch were making all the same mistakes that Americans were making in terms of stroads and car-centric design. The difference is that they started with a problem—people are dying on our streets—and worked from there to arrive at a more humane system through many incremental changes.

Forester has always claimed that the Dutch experience is inapplicable to America, as in this Streetsblog Chicago interview:

And as I’ve said, those cities grew up without motoring. The whole system that they have and the reasons for the system they have, the history of what happened, is also different. You can’t make comparisons between Dutch cycling and American cycling.

At the very least, it’s worth pointing out that the claim, “Those cities grew up without motoring,” is patently false.

Forester’s approach strikes me as having a lot in common with the engineering mindset we have criticized over and over again on this site for its unwillingness to ask fundamental questions about what our streets are for and who is served by their design standards. In this mindset, the system, and the standards, are what they are. If people would just follow the rules, everything would work well.

Until everything doesn’t, and somebody gets killed, because we predicated the design of the street on a fantasy version of humans: people (both drivers and cyclists) who are perfect rule-followers. Vehicular cycling ideology is a lot like what I’ve called the Cult of the Fantasy Pedestrian in this respect.

At Strong Towns, we’ve argued for a very different understanding of streets. It’s one that doesn’t start with the rules of the road and then teach people how to follow them (and hopefully avoid getting hurt), but one that starts with people’s real needs—for a prosperous community they can get around safely and access the things they want to access—and then designs the environment around those.

Cover photo via Flickr

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