Vehicular Cycling is Dead . . .
John Forrester is Dead: Cycling Advocacy and the Post-Urban Renaissance
If you believe cyclists belong on the roads, and only on the roads, and that any kind of sidewalk cycling, sharrow, or segregated lane system is a cop-out to the automobilists and bike haters of the world, then you probably ought to get to know a pioneer by the name of John Forrester. Lifelong curmudgeon, Godfather of Vehicular Cycling, and former League of American Wheelmen president, Forrester was almost single-handedly responsible for the in-street bike-lane oriented putsch in American cities from the late seventies until the turn of the century.
Forrester’s meticulous video recording and statistical analysis of tens of thousands of vehicular/bicycle/pedestrian interactions (in cities including Gainesville, Florida) led to the publication of Effective Cycling in 1984. The concept of “vehicular cycling” emerging from the study established the fundamentals of vehicle-speed cycling--use your lane, act like a car, don’t ride on the sidewalk, ride with traffic.
It was so ubiquitous that the L.A.W. adopted the title of the book as a kind of mantra, motto, and mission all wrapped in one. Forrester’s traffic engineering capabilities far out-weighed both his political diplomacy and his understanding of the demographic of potential cyclists. His radical “In-Street Only” approach to cycling fell out of favor with a League attempting to represent a greater diversity of riders beyond the capable vehicle-speed commuter. He even forced the L.A.W. (now League of American Bicyclists) to quit using “Effective Cycling” in its branding practices.
Fast-forward to the present. Take a look at almost every one of the major international cities renowned for bicycle commuting--Amsterdam being the foremost--and few of them look like Forrester’s crypto-utopian street-only paradise. We find a bedazzling combination of sharrows, segregated lanes, mixed-use trails, marked lanes, marked mix-use auto/bike lanes, and even open “contra-lanes” (where bikes ride openly against traffic in marked lanes, typically on one-way streets), roundabouts, and “open plans” (unmarked, unsignaled spaces where all are forced to think and share). Reading Forrester’s early work against our global cycling reality is like looking through a bar-end mirror darkly, where only the strong and fast survive, and only on a certain style of (American) street.
I can already hear the shouts from the vehicular cycling gallery. But we aren’t European and we certainly aren’t Amsterdam! Americans are idiots!
We aren’t Amsterdam. But our cycling cities look a lot more like Europe than you think, especially those 34-odd places that scored above Gainesville in Bicycling magazine’s admittedly subjective ranking. According to Jeff Mapes (Pedaling Revolution: How Cyclists are Changing American Cities), stereotypically anti-bike municipalities like New York, L.A., and Chicago are closing off major streets thoroughfares for Latin American-style ciclovias. Thousands of riders assemble for beer, play, cycling, and music on weekend days and even weekday nights. In L. A., arguably the nation’s most embarrassing example of the effects of automobility, tens of thousands of cyclists have rediscovered the nearly empty off-arterial streets that make for easy riding. New York’s famously conservative Mayor Bloomberg set off a wave of reforms in policing, lane building, and signage that has transformed our “Other Capital.”
Miami is adding 400 sharrows and dozens of miles of bike lanes in what Floridians know to be one of the worst cities for cycling on the road (they scored above us in the rankings at Bicycling--arggghh!!!). Cities like Davis, Colorado, while lagging in recent years’ devotion to bike-ability, are rediscovering the multi-faceted efforts of early advocates in places like Portland and Minneapolis that led to bicycle access. More interesting at a socioeconomic level, Southwestern cities are paying attention to the hundreds of thousands of working people, especially immigrants, who have no choice but to commute by bike. It seems those among us who can least afford to drive are cycling into the future. Most of these current successes and future plans are built around segregated and mixed-use paths on “European” models. Yes, people are still using the streets Forrester-style, but on their way to work and school and play they are most likely also cutting through parks, transition cycling on sidewalks, and generally “coloring outside the line” of Forrester’s binary vision.
Furthermore, the law of diminishing fatalities works for “stupid Americans” just like everywhere else in the world. This law is based on global research that shows the highest rate of fatalities occurs where the relatively fewest miles are commuted by bicycle. In helmet-less Amsterdam, with 30 - 50% ridership by bike, bicycle fatalities are virtually non-existent per mile traveled. In most U. S. cities, injury and fatality rates are epidemic compared to cycling cities across the globe. Our lack of critical mass means that cars just aren’t in the habit of looking out for us. Not surprisingly, the busiest U. S. cycling cities also have the fewest injuries and fatalities per mile traveled. We are also Amsterdam!
This is not the world Father Forrester imagined. He was openly hostile to the notion of sidewalk cycling and publicly railed segregated laning of any kind as a conspiracy by automobilists and anti-cycling advocates to kick us off of the road. And by “us” he meant those that were physically capable and psychologically angled towards high vehicular speeds, rapid acceleration, and constant vigil in the day-to-day world of vehicular cycling. Forrester didn’t really give a hoot about a soccer mom on a comfort bike towing a kid in a trailer at 5mph on the sidewalk. Being the libertarian that he was, Forrester’s radical vehicular cycling was undergirded by a kind of late nineteenth-century Social Darwinism. If you weren’t fit to survive on the road, you rode on the sidewalk (designed for walking and walking only). And if you rode on the sidewalk, you got hurt and died. And you deserved it.
The assumption made by Forrester has unfortunately permeated several generations of performance-oriented or athletic cyclists who also commute. If you have the ability to accelerate with traffic, negotiate left turns in six-lane roads, and pass busses to the left as they amble along at each stop, you will likely practice Forrester’s vehicle-speed form of commuting, or a combination of it and what I have previously called “transition” cycling, entering the sidewalk only where necessary and making the necessary adjustments in riding style and speed.
But how many potential cyclists have the physical capability, mental acuity, and psychological will to ride like this? I would say that those of us who are capable of practicing vehicular cycling probably already are doing it. The vast majority of potential commuters, however, need us to represent their interests outside of the confines of our own amazing abilities.
This may mean yielding some credentials to those single-speed hipsters, non-lycra-wearing slow commuters, soccer Moms (and Dads), campus commuters, cycling pub-goers, and sidewalk cyclists, who form the visible contours of an emerging new cadre of non-vehicular cyclists in our great cities. It may mean as well rethinking (as I do below) what I read as our club’s current single-mindedness about Critical Mass as an inevitably negative, anarchist, and bloated attempt at change. There are many ways to cook an omelette, and there are some tasty omelets indeed being cooked up in the most unlikely of places.
Let us be clear about the novelty of these new approaches--this isn’t just lobbying for bike lanes, sending letters to the editor, and admonishing our newbie brothers and sisters to wear helmets. In fact, many of the cyclists involved in the renaissance in American cities don’t really think they are being political at all. On the same note, a lot of the activists who have been doing politics for a long time (myself included) are becoming more and more in tune with the need for fun, revelry, and most of all to quit scolding people for not wearing helmets. The hip creatives and single-speed scenesters are discovering common ground with town hall suit-and-ties. It’s something that needs to happen here, and that will be a serious challenge for a club like ours that mostly lives away from campus, away from the city proper, and currently has little to do with the more colorful elements in our cycling universe.
Let us be clear about how novel the cycling universe can be. The ciclovias, closed-street parties, and novel lane concepts are not an extension of the “new urbanism“ that gave rise to “reformed” suburbs like Haile Plantation in Gainesville, Florida. In fact, “new urbanism” is now largely an urban legend, a failure, and perhaps in retrospect a cunning stand-in for truly intelligent green-infused mobility. Haile was supposed to be a walkable and ride-able exurban development with a central market place and “town center” for grocery shopping, entertainment, and services (dentistry, banking, etc . . . ). But the roads that the original Haile Developers agreed to build in return for their Alachua County zoning approval had no shoulders and are now crumbling into the use-able roadway. Even experienced vehicular cyclists avoid them like the plague--cutting off critical neighborhoods and shopping areas from one another in the heart of the County. The “multi-use path” built into Haile is actually an unwieldy and narrow exercise loop that forces cyclists and walkers to be even more vigilant than on the road. It serves 7000 citizens. It is a circular path to nowhere.
Given their frustrations with all forms of mobility in their own neighborhood, it is not surprising that a lot of Haile residents and businesses disapprove of extending what little mixed use sidewalks there are in the area. Being car-bound and without bike lanes or even a shoulder, it is hard to look ahead to the benefits such a sidewalk would bring to non-vehicular movement.
The cookie-cutter new urbanist approach to transportation mobility is a lot like radical vehicular cycling--it would work in a vacuum, and then only if executed with perfect vision of the future of a town or county. I feel more comfortable negotiating with young and inexperienced drivers on traffic-clogged 13th Street next to the University of Florida (without a bike lane or shoulder) than I do riding anywhere in Haile, and Haile is several miles from our real “town center.”
Far from traffic-based vehicular cycling or the stale two-dimensionality of new urbanism, the transformation in the last decade that has seized even the most dysfunctional cities like L. A. is actually something more intangible, something odd-shaped and more post-urban than any design concept before. It does not enhance our modernist concept of the grid-patterned and bike-laned transport of consistent pattern and protocol (which is really at the heart of Forrester’s vision). It certainly doesn’t embrace the concept of a town center (even L.A.W. platinum-starred Davis, CO is defined by suburban and exurban traffic far from its idealized bike-only campus). At times it fails to help us move from point A to point B more quickly (as when it shuts down streets for a party).
Rather, this is a more diversified approach that deconstructs the space of the city based on local political culture, traffic practices, advocate energy, and history. In some cities responsible riders have dismantled controversial and illegal parade formations like Critical Mass in favor of multiple, smaller, and more neighborhood or borough-focused rides. In other cities, Critical Mass has gained the attention of civil rights attorneys, movement activists, and the national media as a battleground for the future of our streets and communities. In others still, Critical Mass was overlooked for the ciclovia or street party. According to Mapes, all paths have yielded mostly success once communities figure out which one is best for them. Where cyclists are yielded to and respected, practice centralized actions and public politics. Where cycling is weaker, split up into smaller groups and work with police and friendly politicians.
Whatever recreational or political tactics are being used, vehicular cycling advocacy is but a portion. For good reason, that. What is clear from a retrospective on Forrester is that his engineer’s mind and his own personal cycling abilities and prejudices largely informed his research. Forrester is to be praised for establishing some of our fundamental knowledge about what happens, statistically, when two kinds of vehicles and one kind of pedestrian interact in a world defined by and built around vehicular speed.
But just as bike lanes are often “suggested” boundaries that may be crossed “if practable” (Florida Statutes), the world of the streets is a combination of sights, sounds, speeds, abilities, ambitions, and destinations that are as rich as the human tapestry they serve and entice. Transportation, exercise, recreation, political action, escapism, and discovery can define any cycling moment. Vehicular Cycling must contend and collude with sidewalk cycling, bus/bike commuting, recreational riding (to the pub, the park, and the pool), and even carnival cycling (the street party) if it is to truly let one thousand flowers bloom.
We are also (or can be) Amsterdam, L. A., Portland, Paris, New York, Davis . . . and even, well . . . Miami.