California CyclingSavvy Instructor Gary Cziko will present. The Webinar will include live chat with three other instructors, and a Q&A session. If you can’t make it, ABEA will be posting a recording. We’ll announce where YouTube has placed it, once we know.
Bike club/organization members
Your club’s requested donation of $100 will give all club members free access to the Zoom Webinar for Bike Clubs and Group Rides, being held at the same time next Wednesday, December 16, 2020.
Club leaders, register here. Choose the Benefactor level. Include your organization’s name in the “Company” box. Note that your club is a Webinar Sponsor in the “Comments” box.
Donations will pay for work being developed exclusively for club and group cycling. Here’s a preview of the new online Group Ride Leader course currently in development:
Here are the sponsoring organizations as of December 8, 2020. Yours can still be on this list!
Gyms and pools are closed; countless people are staying and working at home. Many people are turning to cycling as a way to keep physically active, and to avoid exposure to the coronavirus in trains and buses. Cyclists are increasingly using e-bikes to cover longer distances in less time and with less effort.
Traffic-cycling education — to make cycling safer and more enjoyable — has never been more important. Regardless of your level of bicycling experience, you can benefit from one or both of this month’s CyclingSavvy Zoom Webinars.
Compelling Reasons To Attend
1. If you are a cyclist.
Even if you are just thinking of getting on a bike, register for the free one-hour “Introduction to CyclingSavvy” Webinar. It’s next Wednesday, December 9, at 6 PM Pacific / 7 PM Mountain / 8 PM Central / 9 PM Eastern Time. This Facebook event listing offers more details. Free required Zoom registration is here.
2. If you know others who cycle — or are interested in cycling — and care about maximizing their cycling safety and enjoyment.
Invite your family (friends, neighbors, (work associates . . . ) to this webinar by forwarding this article or its link to them. Start them on their way to being able to go anywhere by bike!
A requested donation of $100 will give all of your club members free access to the December 16 Zoom Webinar.
Choose the “Benefactor” level at CyclingSavvy.org/support-cyclingsavvy/. Include your organization’s name and state in the “Company” box and indicate “Webinar Sponsor” in the Comments box.
Donations will pay for work being developed exclusively for club and group cycling. Here’s a sneak preview of the new online Group Ride Leader course currently in development:
Donor organizations will receive recognition and the Zoom registration link to share with members. Contact Gary Czikoto discuss other possible club-sponsor options.
Who is running the CyclingSavvy Webinars?
Gary Cziko will host the two webinars from Los Angeles. Participating panelists from the East Coast will be CyclingSavvy Instructors Michael Burns and Nadine Ford.
For more information about the CyclingSavvy approach to make you a safer and more confident cyclist, visit CyclingSavvy.org. For a sample of what we will cover in the first Webinar, see this lesson from the free online Essentials Short Course.
Thank You
Here are the sponsoring organizations as of December 8, 2020. Yours belongs on this list!
Beach Cities Cycling Club (CA)
Bicycle Club of Irvine (CA)
Big Orange Cycling (CA)
Cincinnati Cycle Club (OH)
Coalition of Arizona Bicyclists (AZ)
GS Andiamo (CA)
Major Taylor Cycling Club Los Angeles (CA)
Riverside Bicycle Club (CA)
San Diego Bicycle Club (CA)
Velo Club La Grange (CA)
WeeklyRides.com (NC)
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Looking-back-Lincoln.jpg518920Gary Czikohttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngGary Cziko2020-12-01 11:55:292020-12-08 17:24:36Two CyclingSavvy Webinars for the Holiday Season
Several weeks ago I posted an article with dashcam video about roads with double yellow lines. I was driving the car, and slowed to follow a bicyclist at a blind curve on a two-lane rural highway. A large dump truck with a trailer appeared, coming from the opposite direction.
If I had held my speed and passed the bicyclist, I could not have merged left far enough to pass the bicyclist safely. Neither could the truck driver see me in time to make more room.
The location, in Lincoln, Massachusetts, USA
The bicyclist kept to the right as far as he could. He relied only on hope — and my good judgment — to avoid a close pass, or worse.
The video held a message for motorists: “What you don’t see can hurt you” — or hurt someone else (in this case, most likely the bicyclist).
Blind curves hold a message for bicyclists
To clarify this message, I later rode the same stretch on a bicycle with front and rear video cameras.
As this video shows, I mostly rode on the shoulder. Several cars and a pickup truck passed me — no problem. No oncoming traffic prevented safe passing clearance.
But as I approached the blind curve, the shoulder narrowed to almost nothing. A big truck or other large vehicle could be approaching ahead. Who knew? Who could know? Neither I nor the driver of the car approaching from behind me could see around that curve.
Here’s what I did — what I always do — to protect myself:
I checked in my rearview mirror and took a look over my shoulder. If vehicles had been closer behind, I would have have used a hand signal to negotiate my way into line.
This car was far enough back that I simply merged to lane-control position. Then I made a hand signal: “Slow.”
The driver slowed to follow me for a few seconds. Once I had rounded the curve and could see far enough ahead, I released to the right and give a friendly wave. The driver accelerated and passed me.
How control and release promotes safe passing
What did my actions achieve?
They indicated that I was aware of the driver’s vehicle behind me.
They indicated that I knew it was unsafe to pass. Maybe I knew something the driver didn’t know!
In case the driver was impatient, they made it clear that passing would have to wait until we could both see far enough ahead.
The car’s slowing confirmed to me that the driver was aware of me and acting safely.
And by releasing as soon as it was safe, I demonstrated courtesy. No motorist wants to be “stuck” behind a cyclist.
As it turned out, there was no large truck, or not even a small car, approaching from the front.
But that isn’t the point. One could have been.
Might the driver behind me have passed, unable to see far enough ahead, if I had hugged the right edge of the road? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter, because I took active control of my safety in a potentially dangerous situation.
When my safety is at stake, I choose not to rely on others to do the right thing. As we say in CyclingSavvy courses, drivers get smarter when we lead the dance.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/shadow.jpg392703John Allenhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngJohn Allen2020-11-27 11:55:092020-11-27 10:01:47“Control and Release” for safe passing
During COVID, I’ve already taught a couple of full courses in Charlotte, North Carolina. There’s a resurgence of interest in biking and there are new riders every day.
I taught my first course since COVID on July 10-12, with precautions to reduce exposure as much as possible.
Truth & Techniques of Traffic Cycling is delivered online. Participants have told me they like this better. They report it’s much easier to enjoy this material from the comfort of their own homes.
I limit outdoor sessions to 10 students. Masks are required, with social distancing when possible. In North Carolina, as of this writing, group sizes are currently limited to 25 people outside and 10 people inside. While we are outside, I limit the group to the smaller size to be on the safe side. The only other change is to ride single-file vs. riding double-file, to socially distance as much as possible.
We find that classroom sessions work best with two instructors: one to give the presentation, and the other to monitor the chat window and manage discussion.
Due to the small class size in my courses, everyone chimed in with questions and everyone was engaged. “Truth & Techniques of Traffic Cycling” as I taught it lasted three full hours, in one session.
Live From St. Louis: Savvy Cycling Now
Instructor Karen Karabell is teaching online from St. Louis, Missouri. As an experiment last June, she asked friends to attend four one-hour sessions over the course of the month.
“Truth & Techniques of Traffic Cycling” contains a lot of information and ideas. Karen thought these would be easier for people to digest in a series of one-hour sessions, spread over four weeks.
July 28, 2020: Anonymous poll of Savvy Cycling Now participants.
Feedback from her friends was so gratifying that Karen asked our friend Serge Issakov to advertise a July series on two Facebook pages: Supporters of Full Lane Rights for Bicyclists and Bicyclists Belong in the Traffic Lane. Seventy-four people signed up! Fewer than half attended the sessions, though. (Research is clear that most people don’t value what they don’t pay for.)
This August ABEA has been beta testing Savvy Cycling Now. One hundred and forty-five people signed up for this month’s free series. However, between 50 and 75 have shown up to the three sessions held so far this month.
This class size definitely requires two instructors — which makes the sessions better. Successful traffic cycling is as much an art as a science. Discussions are robust. The varying perspectives make for a gripping session.
Here’s a video clip from the August 11 session of Savvy Cycling Now:
In-Person vs. Virtual Instruction
With online instruction, interaction among students and instructors is less fluid, but there are also advantages. Nobody has to travel. Students participate from the comfort of their own homes, with easy access to a restroom and snacks.
People can sign up from anywhere. The three-hour session can be split up into shorter parts. Both Karen and I keep hearing from participants how valuable this information has been for them. We’re grateful to share it!
My Bike is a Lifeline
Bicycling is essential for my health and well-being, even more so now. Bicycling has been my solace during this socially distanced and stressful time. It’s the one thing that is mostly the same. When people started asking when they could take the in-person course again, that’s why I started scheduling more of them.
Expect ABEA to roll out a Covid-adapted program soon. Students will be able to take the classroom session online, and socially-distanced outdoor sessions with any instructor.
Ride Awesome! — CyclingSavvy’s premium online course — is … awesome. There’s truly nothing like it. During the pandemic, lifetime access to Ride Awesome! is half price. This is the best fifty bucks you’ll ever spend.
With enough requests, we should be able to offer on-bike sessions within driving distance for most U.S. participants (currently, only the United States has CyclingSavvy Instructors). Let us know if you want to complete the course. Contact us!
If you’ve taken the CyclingSavvy course, you’ll recall the video of John Alexander’s bicycle ride across a huge highway interchange. At less than 10 miles per hour, on an Elektra Townie bicycle.
If you haven’t seen the video, watch it here, and relax. John’s bicycle ride was boring, not daring.
John — and Keri Caffrey, riding behind him with cameras to record it all — had the road almost entirely to themselves, through thoughtful choice of lane position, and by taking advantage of traffic-signal timing.
My own gnarly bicycle riding challenge
I face a similar situation later this month. I have two doctor’s appointments about a mile apart. By far the shortest route between the two doctors’ offices passes through a similar huge highway interchange. I could take a much longer way there, but this longer ride would include backtracking on a poison-ivy-infested sidewalk.
On Monday, I checked out the route in a car, with a dashcam running:
So here’s a challenge for you:
How would you ride this?
Would you ride it at all?
Have a look in Google maps
The image below shows my route, from right to left, in Google Maps. (When I drove, I went straight through on Route 9 rather than turning into William Street. That doesn’t change anything important.)
Google will let me share the location but not the route information. Here’s the location in Google Maps. You can play around with Google Street View and get a closer look.
Google Dude is the yellow fellow in the lower right corner of Google Maps
Not familiar with Street View? If you’re using a computer, click on Google Dude, the yellow fellow in the lower right corner of Google Maps. Drag the green fog under his feet to any street that lights up in blue, release the mouse button, and there you are.
You can move around using the the keyboard’s arrow buttons. The right and left buttons turn you around. The down button is your reverse gear, up button moves you forward. Or click on the image and drag with the mouse.
Once you’ve dropped your Dude, there’s a “compass” in the lower right corner that also makes it easy to turn around:
Compass in lower right corner (in Google maps but not in this screen shot) spins map to the view you want.
Once I dropped Google Dude on the road, I spun the compass in the lower right corner to point Dude in the direction I’ll be riding next week. I clicked on the street to move forward, and stand with Dude in the middle of any road.
The arrow in the black box at the upper left corner of the screen takes you back to the overhead view.
On a tablet or smartphone, you can tap and swipe the screen to access these same features.
This bicycle ride is possible!
I have discussed this ride with a few other people and found at least two, maybe, three different ways to manage it. I don’t consider the ride difficult even for a novice cyclist, but savvy strategies can make it much more convenient. (Hint: see my description of John Alexander’s ride above.)
Please post comments and suggestions. I’ll get back to you in a couple of weeks with video of my ride.
I love to ride my bicycle, but I have my limits. Arriving at the doctors’ offices drenched in sweat during a pandemic would exceed those limits! If necessary, I’ll ride the route on a different day to shoot the video.
Your turn now.
I’m eager to hear your thoughts on this ride.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Route-9-fallback.jpg395702John Allenhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngJohn Allen2020-08-14 11:55:362020-08-28 14:01:43Would You Ride A Bicycle Through Here?
Note from Editor John Allen: This post started with a request from Madrid Ciclista in Madrid, Spain, to publish a translation of an article on this blog into Spanish. We were happy to comply. A look at their website revealed that Madrid has been thinking outside the box about bicycling. Miguel Cardo of Madrid Ciclista wrote the post below describing the “Modelo Madrid” in 99.44% perfect English.
Fire up Google Maps.
Switch to satellite view and have a look at any large avenue in my city, Madrid:
Lanes marked with that symbol have a speed limit of 30 km/h (about 19 mph). The default of 50 km/h (about 31 mph) is allowed in the other lanes. The marking with the oversized sharrow means:
Bicyclists can use the lane;
They have to ride in the middle of the lane.
All this started in 2013.
The city government was still reeling from the excesses of a real-estate bubble. Debt had ballooned to 7.4 billion euros after a failed Olympic bid. [1] The city could not even dream of any significant infrastructure project. A giant fine from the European Commission was looming for the city’s failure to reduce its pollution levels. [2]
City officials had to come up with something. This time they just couldn’t buy their way out of trouble. So they tried something different: a plan to increase cycling modal share without any large infrastructure projects.
The first plan was modest.
City officials started with a timid plan of “ciclocarriles 30” along the avenues and boulevards surrounding the Old Town. “Ciclocarriles 30” means 30 km/h bike lanes. The plan also included a municipal bike-share scheme that would use electric bikes, because Madrid is notoriously hilly. [3]
Municipal bike-share bicycle about to pass over a CC30 marking. Photo by permission of @MadCycleCuqui
In the beginning, nobody thought much of the plan.
In a chaotic and aggressive environment, motorists would not welcome the new users on “their” roads. Madrid city police have a well-deserved reputation for not enforcing traffic laws. Most people thought of the plan as some low-cost desperate measure to postpone the EU fine for a while, at least until a different administration was in charge. I’m not even sure that the city officials who created the plan had much faith in it.
Onward to Modelo Madrid.
Fast forward five or six years. Madrid city police still turned a blind eye to speeding, but the unexpected happened.
Madrid’s undisciplined, chaotic, aggressive motorists can be seen moving slowly behind a cyclist, waiting for the right moment to overtake — changing lanes to pass in the lane to the left.
The true benefit of the 30 km/h (19 mph) speed limit is not that motorists comply with it, but that they drive at 15 km/h (9 mph) behind cyclists without even revving their engines. A new generation of cyclists — many of whom started riding on the new municipal white electric bikes — uses these roads with confidence.
Every road user is mandated to control his or her traffic lane.
A third measure sustaining this change was a city ordinance issued in 2010, which not only allowed but made mandatory riding on the center of the lane. [4]
In the video below, shot by the rider of a folding bicycle, nothing exciting happens, so don’t feel compelled to watch it all the way through.
The number of cyclists is still modest (2-3 percent in the central area, according to counts by Madrid Ciclista) but growing. [5]
Percentage of bicycles in central Madrid with respect to other vehicles, counts by Madrid Ciclista
The graph below, from the city’s lower, less accurate counts, shows the trend from year to year:
Yearly trends in bicycle use in central Madrid
When compared with other European cities, the number of crashes per million trips is encouragingly low. [6].
We can now say that slow lanes were the origin of the so-called Modelo Madrid. The Madrid Model recognizes urban cycling as a transportation mode equal to any other, not requiring special infrastructure but granting the same rights to cyclists as to other vehicle operators. [7]
No cyclists ride on the sidewalk. Cyclists grant the same respect to pedestrians as they demand from motorists. Modelo Madrid puts in practice many of the principles pioneered by John Forester and refined in the United States by CyclingSavvy.
Modelo Madrid: the way of the future?
As with any other aspect of public policy, we can’t “ride” on our laurels — to paraphrase the English idiom — and expect equal treatment for cyclists in Madrid forever.
Economic stimulus money spent on “sustainable” projects is always a threat for urban cyclists, especially in these COVID-19 times. Going back to the segregated model is still possible. Some very loud cycling activists and associations are always demanding narrow bike lanes in the door zone or on sidewalks, following the North European model.
Here’s an example from Seville:
Bikeway in Seville, Spain, 2018. Photo credit: Gary Cziko
On the other hand, more Spanish cities are introducing slow lanes, especially after the COVID-19 lockdown: Valladolid, Burgos, Leganés, Granada…
Photo by permission of @MadCycleCuqui
Additional thoughts from Editor John Allen:
Which way should US states go? Could there be slow lanes on multi-lane streets in the USA? Keep in mind that higher speeds are common now on e-bikes, which probably did not in exist when Seville bikeways were planned and constructed.
Consider that automated crash avoidance is becoming common on motor vehicles, and improving. A transition to autonomous vehicles will follow, in time.
Suppose that a hoped-for decrease in motor traffic occurs with autonomous vehicles. Consider also the dangers of edge riding, and the reduction in efficiency and safety when turning vehicles must cross the path of through-traveling ones, rather than merging before turning.
All of these factors suggest that an integrated model like the Modelo Madrid could become more compelling as time passes.
Does US practice support the Modelo Madrid?
There is no specific mention in the model US traffic law [8] of different lanes with different posted speed limits. Yet these are in wide use, established indirectly.
In several states, large trucks are held to a lower speed limit than other vehicles [9], and are prohibited from using the leftmost lanes on multi-lane highways [10]. Edge-of-the road “friction” with parked vehicles, walk-outs, drive-outs and parking decreases the safe speed in the rightmost lane on city streets.
The general rule is to pass on the left, in the “fast lane”. But faster vehicles may pass bicyclists on the right in a right-turn lane, and sometimes a bus lane.
In all of these cases, the basic speed limit applies: to drive no faster than is reasonable and prudent. That speed is established by the design of the street and by the users who are present. Here’s an example of a bike lane to the left of a bus lane on University Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin. [11]
Bike lane to left of bus lane, Madison, Wisconsin, 2001. Photo credit: John S. Allen
Footnotes
(Web links in the body of an article are more usual, but we prefer not to sidetrack readers into articles which need explanation, some in Spanish. So, these footnotes – Editor.)
[5] Madrid Ciclista’s article “en Madrid no hay bicis” (“There are no bicycles in Madrid”) describes and promotes bicycle counts by citizens, and asserts that the city government has been undercounting.
[11] The University Avenue installation serves a large student population. The buses, on their fixed route, stay in the bus lane. More details here.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/city_of_bikes1.jpg395702Miguel Cardohttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngMiguel Cardo2020-08-07 11:55:282020-08-07 12:51:20The Madrid Model
In Part One of this series, I discussed how most bikeway studies fail to address the key factors that lead to crashes, and I described the basic findings of Metroplan Orlando’s new bikeway study. Part Two went into deeper detail to show how cyclist direction, position and speed affect crash risk. In this final part, I’ll discuss how data from the study should inform attitudes and strategies to improve cyclist safety.
Jacobsen’s widely-cited study
In a 2003 paper in Injury Prevention [1], Peter Jacobsen found that higher bicycle use went with lower cyclist crash rates across geographies (European nations and California cities) and over time (United Kingdom and The Netherlands). As cycling (and walking) increased, it seemed that the overall crash risk dropped. In the discussion section of the paper, Jacobsen wrote:
“It seems unlikely that people walking or bicycling obey traffic laws more or defer to motorists more in societies or time periods with greater walking and bicycling.Indeed, it seems less likely, and hence unable to explain the observed results. Adaptation in motorist behavior seems more plausible and other discussions support that view.”
Though Jacobsen provided no behavioral data to support this explanation, it has become popular among bikeway proponents. When skeptics point out conflicts created by many bikeways, advocates have a handy response: “But there’s safety in numbers…” Others have questioned Jacobsen’s math [2].
Does Jacobsen’s conclusion hold water?
Our bikeway study shows whether that assumption holds water. Did rates for motorist-caused or bicyclist-caused crashes increase or decrease with larger numbers of bicyclists?
I divided the twenty streets into five groups of four each, ranked from lowest to highest bicyclist counts over 10 years. The table below shows enormous differences in the amount of bicyclist travel. There was 60 times as much bicycle use on the busiest streets as on the least busy.
Quintile Streets by Bicyclist Exposure
Lowest Quintile
2nd Quintile
3rd Quintile
4th Quintile
Top Quintile
Bicyclist Miles Traveled
819,000
5.344 M
9.674 M
13.341 M
49.218 M
Miles Between Motorist-Caused Crashes
19,000
46,000
39,000
49,000
45,000
Miles Between Bicyclist-Caused Crashes
13,000
73,000
125,000
205,000
198,000
I left the lowest 1/5 out of the analysis, because the bicyclist exposure and the numbers of crashes are tiny. Even from the second group to the top group, there’s a nine-fold increase in bike use:
The results? There is little difference in the risk of motorist-caused crashes. (Remember, a higher number — more miles between crashes — means lower crash risk.) But bicyclist-caused crashes were 170% to 180% lower for the top and fourth quintiles!
Better overall bicyclist behavior is responsible for the “safety in numbers” effect. [3]
It’s plausible that motorist behavior improved some small amount on the higher usage streets, but that would probably be masked by the reduced risk due to slower cyclists on the sidewalks.
Three of the four streets in the 4th quintile (with the lowest risk for cyclist-caused crashes) are two-lane streets with bike lanes. These are just the type of streets touted as “bike-friendly.” Bikeway advocates like to say that bikeways attract potential cyclists who are “interested but concerned.” [4] Wouldn’t “interested but concerned” cyclists generally be more cautious and less likely to cause crashes?
The streets in the top quintile are all high-speed, high-volume, four- and six-lane arterials. Their obvious risks should encourage cyclists to use extra care.
It’s possible that motorist behavior does improve with still higher bicycle use. On the busiest cycling streets in the Orlando bikeway study, a bicyclist would pass any given point about once every eight minutes. In some European cities, bicyclists are almost always in sight. Motorists’ expectations would be radically different there.
Study results: crash risks and numbers
Key to the three graphs below
In this bikeway study, ten times as many cyclists were using bike lanes on the bike lane streets as were using the travel lanes on the comparison streets. Almost all bicyclists on the comparison streets were riding on sidewalks. But there was only 28 percent more bicyclist travel overall on the bike-lane streets. Most of the increase in bike lane use was due to bicyclists switching from the sidewalk to the bike lane.
Though the bike lanes in this bikeway study presented a 53 percent lower crash risk per cyclist, four times as many motorist-caused crashes occurred in bike lanes on bike-lane streets as in travel lanes on the comparison streets. Almost all of the motorist-caused crashes on the comparison streets, and more than 3/4 of them on bike-lane streets, occurred on sidewalks and crosswalks.
The crash rate was higher for sidewalks on the bike-lane streets than on the comparison streets, and so the bike-lane streets had a higher overall crash rate, despite the 53 percent lower crash risk than with the travel lanes on comparison streets. (Recall that a longer bar in the graph below represents a longer mileage between crashes — lower crash risk.)
How to approach a Vision Zero goal
The stated goal of the Vision Zero Network is to eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all.[5]
In order to truly approach this goal, much more effective risk-reduction methods than bike lanes and sidepaths must be implemented. As I highlighted in Part 2:
Rather than bikes lanes or sidewalks improving the safety of bicyclists, bicyclists are improving the safety of bike lanes or sidewalks by riding slower.
Bikeway advocates point to separated bike lanes, special bicycle signals, and channelized (“protected”) intersections as improvements over sidewalks and ordinary striped (“basic”) bike lanes. Slowing bicyclists at the approaches of intersections is part of bikeway designers’ design strategy, and may reduce risk somewhat.
In our Metro Orlando data, though, only 28 percent of motorist-caused turning and crossing crashes (for cyclists riding with the flow) occurred at signalized intersections. Forty-two percent occurred at unsignalized intersections (mostly minor cross streets), and 30 percent at driveways.
Most turning-movement collisions do not occur at signalized intersections. It is not practical to install preventive measures everywhere a motorist may cross the path of a bicyclist.
Mitigating all conflicts would require channelization to slow bicyclists at every intersection and driveway. This would be very costly — if even possible — and would slow cyclists nearly to pedestrian speeds, making bicycling less useful. [6]
Cyclists who tried to maintain their preferred speed could be blamed for crashes in the bikeways, or harassed for using lane control in the travel lanes. Now with electric-assist bikes, novice cyclists can ride on bikeways at the speeds of fitter, experienced cyclists. This is not a good combination.
Final Thoughts
The real world is a very messy place. As with many of life’s other challenges and questions, prevention of bicyclist crashes doesn’t lend itself to simple, straightforward answers. Nor does the question of whether bikeways really improve cyclist safety.
Cyclist skill, direction, position, speed, predictability, and conspicuity are concerns in crash prevention. So are motorist attention, speed and turning movements, lighting conditions, sight lines, traffic controls, and many other lesser concerns.
Attempting to address all of these factors with street and bikeway design is bound to fail. Design can improve safety, but it won’t get us as far as we’d like.
“Prepare the child for the path, not the path for the child.”
This saying (perhaps Native American) has been replaced with a popular version, found on parenting websites, using the word “road” instead of “path.” [7] and [8]
Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child. Adults as well as children benefit from such a philosophy. Bicyclist training and education are not optional.
[2] The widely cited hyperbolic, descending curve which appears in every graph in Jacobsen’s report is an artifact of faulty math. Correct math gives varied results. See this for an explanation.
[3] Other research has also shown that bicyclist crash rates are lower on busy streets, notably a study by William Moritz from the 1990s. One factor: cyclists with more experience and greater skill are more likely to ride on busy streets. Also, more mentoring occurs where bicycling is more common. See discussion here.
Last week, in the first of a three-part series describing my research on bikeway crash risk, I gave relative estimated risks for three types of motorist-caused crashes when bicyclists rode with the flow…
Travel Lane Edge – 61,000 Miles Between Crashes (Highest Risk)
Bike Lane – 75,000 Miles
Sidewalk – 122,000 Miles (Lowest Risk)
… and asked:
Why would the risk be lowest for bicyclists riding on sidewalks?
All crashes occurred at intersections and driveways with no sort of “protection” for the bicyclist. Don’t experienced bicyclists avoid using sidewalks — and sometimes even bike lanes — because riding in the street is supposed to help them avoid such conflicts?
Stay with me while I show you where the data led me as I pondered this question.
There are two key possibilities why these risks are lower: (1) Motorists might be more likely to yield to bike lane and sidewalk cyclists for some reason, and (2) Bike lane and sidewalk cyclists might be better able to avoid a motorist-caused crash.
It’s often argued and assumed that striping a bicycle lane leads motorists to look for and yield to cyclists. But the sidewalk cyclists had lower risk for these motorist-caused crashes than even the bike lane users, though sidewalks are neither designated nor designed for use by cyclists.
When we split up the crashes further, we see that only the risk of drive-outs is higher for bike-lane and sidewalk cyclists. Right-hook and left-cross crashes are less likely:
Right Hook & Left Cross
Travel Lane Edge – 73,000 Miles (Highest Risk)
Bike Lane – 100,000 Miles
Sidewalk – 300,000 Miles (Lowest Risk)
Sidewalk cyclists have the highest risk of drive-out crashes:
Drive-Out
Travel Lane Edge – 367,000 Miles (Lowest Risk)
Bike Lane – 292,000 Miles
Sidewalk – 245,000 Miles (Highest Risk)
Would motorists be more likely to yield to bike lane and sidewalk cyclists during overtaking right turns and opposing left turns, but not during drive-outs? I think that this is not more likely.
People Make Mistakes
News Flash: Humans make mistakes, whether they’re walking, bicycling, or driving motor vehicles.
We expect slower automobile and motorcycle drivers to be better able to react more quickly than faster ones to avoid conflicts caused by other motorists.
Why would we assume differently for bicyclists? [1]
Recall the average speeds we found for cyclists using the three positions. A slower cyclist needs less perception and reaction time and less braking distance:
Bicyclist Position
Bicyclist Average (Mean) Speed
Bicyclist 85th Percentile Speed
Stopping Distance at 85th Percentile Speed
Travel Lane
14.5 MPH
18.4 MPH
104 Feet
Bike Lane
11.8 MPH
15.7 MPH
83 Feet
Sidewalk
9.3 MPH
12.4 MPH
60 Feet
Facing an impending motorist-caused crash, the bike-lane user riding at the 85th-percentile speed would need an additional 23 feet of stopping distance compared to the sidewalk rider — about the width of the typical two-lane street. The difference is about the same between the travel lane and the bike lane. The total difference between travel lane and sidewalk is about the width of four traffic lanes, or 44 feet.
85th Percentile Bicyclist Speed and Stopping Distance
With right-hook and left-cross crashes, the motorist is coming from the bicyclist’s left, so the farther right the bicyclist is, the longer it takes for the motorist to reach the bicyclist’s path. This means that the bike lane or sidewalk bicyclist gets more reaction time. With drive-out crashes, the travel lane cyclist gets the most reaction time.
Rather than bikes lanes or sidewalks improving the safety of bicyclists, bicyclists are improving the safety of bike lanes or sidewalks by riding slower.
The Takeaway
If you’re going to ride on the sidewalk, bike lane or edge of the travel lane, you must ride slower.
I can’t tell you how slow is slow enough. But if you’re having more close calls with turning and crossing vehicles than you’d like, you need to either slow down, or use lane control. [2]
Based on the data, each additional mile per hour of bicyclist’s speed increases the risk of a motorist-caused crash about 9 percent.
With lane control, you give yourself much more reaction time for drive-out crashes, you eliminate the right hook crash, and you get more options for avoiding the left cross.
To put it in the simplest of terms: The faster you go, the more important it is for you to control your travel lane.
Sidepaths and Motorist-Caused Crash Risks
We performed the same type of analysis for five sidepaths which have been in place for over ten years. I was curious as to whether they would have better safety performance than a regular sidewalk. They did — about 68 percent better, on average — but it varied widely. Looking closer, I found that three of the paths had few intersections and commercial driveways — 4.6 per mile — while the other two had 11.6 per mile. Low-conflict paths had 64 percent lower motorist-caused crash rates compared to the other two paths; 51 percent lower than for ordinary sidewalks.
Low-Conflict Sidepaths
High-Conflict Sidepaths
Regular Sidewalks
Intersections and Commercial Driveways per Mile
4.6
11.6
10.5
Cyclist Miles Between Motorist-Caused Crashes
81,000 (Lowest Risk)
29,000 (Highest Risk)
40,000
Notice that high-conflict paths had 10 percent more intersections and driveways per mile than the sidewalks, but 38 percent higher motorist-caused crash risk, likely due to the higher bicyclist speeds on the paths (16.3 MPH versus 12.4 MPH for the sidewalks).
If we replace a sidewalk with a sidepath without somehow reducing the turning and crossing conflicts, the risk for the bicyclists will likely increase. This information helps you as a cyclist to decide when a sidepath might be reasonable to use — such as going with the flow on a low-conflict path — and when to avoid one — for example, when going against the flow, or going with the flow fast on a high-conflict path.
Bikeway designers can’t foresee every situation for you, so don’t expect them to.
Next time: Safety in numbers, Vision Zero, and “Preparing the Child.”
Footnotes
[1] The 1976 Bikecentennial study found that 38% of crashes occurred on downgrades, though the constituted only 15% of the route. This was for all types of crashes.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/85th-percentile-speeds-feature-1.png353349Mighk Wilsonhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngMighk Wilson2020-07-24 11:55:302020-08-21 22:19:15Bikeway Study Part Two: Your Speed, Your Choice
The city of Palo Alto, California, had decided it wanted bikeways. The city got them by putting up signage, requiring bicyclists to ride on the sidewalks. Forester tried them and found them dangerous at very ordinary cycling speeds of 10-12 mph, and so he chronicled the hazards in a two-page article.
Forester cited two fatal bike/pedestrian collisions to underscore the danger of mixing bicycles and pedestrians. He wrote about turning conflicts, poor sight distances at driveway intersections, and the impossibility of making a safe and sensible left turn. Forester wrote that he hoped to get arrested, so he could challenge the city’s sidewalk requirement.
That article sparked an epiphany for me. Until then, I’d dreamed of sidepaths along all my favorite roads. Three feet wide, and just for me! Wheeeeee!
The epiphany was, “Be careful what you wish for.” Because even a city as sophisticated as Palo Alto got it completely wrong.
I learned: Sometimes, a well-intentioned intervention is far worse than leaving well enough alone. And that is just the beginning of what I learned from John Forester.
Forester died on April 19, half a year shy of his 91st birthday. The cause of death was a lingering flu, not suspected to be Covid-19. Forester left behind nearly 50 years of immense contributions to the cycling community, in ways that weren’t even imaginable before he articulated them.
My own Forester-related epiphany pales in comparison to those of many thousands of others. I was already a bike rider. Forester made me a better bike rider. Others were liberated to use their bikes to go anywhere, when they previously couldn’t.
Independent mobility for a legally blind person
No one has expressed this better than Eli Damon, a resident of western Massachusetts whose eyesight is not good enough for him to get a driver’s license:
Socializing was especially difficult for me for many reasons, but an important one was that my mobility limitations hindered my ability to act spontaneously or to interact with others on an equal basis. . . . Asking for a ride . . . left me in a constantly dependent and inferior social position. I was lonely and isolated. . . .
. . . My principal social outlet [in 2005] was my weekly choir practice, which . . . was fifteen miles away (ten miles was my limit at the time) on unfamiliar, difficult, scary roads, so biking seemed impossible. I was too far out of the way for other members of the choir to pick me up. There were no buses that could take me.
And Damon had lost his ride to the choir practice.
He found a cycling book that had been given to him.
Eli Damon’s copy of Effective Cycling, 6th Edition
In desperation, I dug the book out and started reading it, hoping to find a clue to my mobility problem. The book was Effective Cycling, by John Forester.
As I read the book, I became very excited. It suggested that I should ride my bike according to the same rules drivers of motor vehicles use and that I should stay away from the edge of the road, sometimes riding in the center or even on the left side of a lane, thus occupying the entire lane. I knew that the designs of roads provided a simple and predictable environment for motorists to travel with ease and flexibility. If I could use the roads in the same manner on a bike, then I could go anywhere with the same ease and flexibility. This was a totally new concept to me, and I was somewhat skeptical of it, but I recognized its immense potential.
I quickly became comfortable riding assertively on small quiet roads. I advanced my testing to bigger, busier roads. And then even bigger, even busier roads. . . I was ready to take on the scariest road I knew of: Route 9 in Hadley, a major four-lane arterial.
. . .
Eli Damon rides Route 9 in Hadley, Massachusetts
It was as if I was no longer disabled. . . I was still [legally] blind, but ignorance, not blindness, had been my disability all along. I had been healed. I could go wherever I wanted, whenever I wanted. I could do all of the normal things that other people did. I could live a full, normal life. I could go to choir practice.
And yet, Forester made many enemies in bicycling, thanks to a famously abrasive temperament. Sadly, Forester’s detractors are mercilessly dancing on his grave.
For years, Forester’s detractors have shamelessly mischaracterized his opinions with demeaning distortions and outright falsehoods. Some have written hit pieces disguised as obituaries. One obit called Forester a “Dinosaur” in the headline.
John Forester’s contributions . . . far outweigh those of his detractors.
A man who gives legally blind people independent mobility deserves a better remembrance than that.
More like this:
“John’s contributions to bicycling — as transportation, recreation, sport, a vehicle for fitness, social interaction, and discovery — far outweigh those of his detractors, wrote Pete Van Nuys, executive director of the Orange County (California) Bicycle Coalition. “John stood for, and rode for, human dignity and equality. He advocated respect for law and common sense; he trusted civility over fearmongering; he promoted responsibility of the individual above government overreach.”
Yes, one had to look past Forester’s famously abrasive temperament to get the value he offered. But there was immense value.
Because what Forester did was far better than complaining about bad bicycle facilities. He gave us the vocabulary and the framing to understand good versus bad facilities, good versus bad riding, and the root causes of crashes. He gave us the revelation that we could control the behavior of other road users to make ourselves safer. We didn’t have to be passive victims. We could create our own success on the road. On almost any road. Today.
That vocabulary and framing didn’t exist before Forester. If I may exaggerate only slightly to make the point, how good a chemist could you be if you didn’t have the periodic table of the elements?
Before John Forester, we were all road sneaks.
Before Forester, almost every bicyclist rode in a style we call “road sneak,” hiding from other traffic, believing s/he didn’t belong, and even hoping to go unnoticed. Forester replaced all that with a concept well articulated by one of his best instructors, the late Steve Schmitt: “Visible plus predictable equals safe.”
Fred DeLong’s illustration of how to avoid a car door. Well-intentioned, but this exact behavior causes many collisions, some of them fatal. Forester liberated us from this thinking.
Before Forester, other famous bicycling writers pretty much endorsed the “road sneak” vision of a cyclist’s place (or lack thereof).
Even the great Fred DeLong instructed people to ride in the door zone, with the absurd notion that you could swerve to avoid an opening car door and yet be safe. Writers Richard Ballantine and Eugene Sloane, whose books sold in the millions in the early 1970s, offered similarly hapless advice. Other authors of that era were also hapless. They were well-intentioned, but they didn’t know any better.
(In 2013, our colleague John S. Allen wrote a very good critique of the “dark ages” of bicycle safety advice before Forester. It’s at http://john-s-allen.com/blog/?page_id=5273.)
Five core principles guide our thinking
Forester’s framing began with articulating the core principles of traffic law, and telling bicyclists to follow the core principles. Today, they sound pretty mundane:
All vehicle operators keep to the right.
Yield to cross traffic according to pre-defined rules and traffic-control devices.
First-come, first-served (meaning that if someone wants to pass you, s/he must do so safely, and you still have the right to be on the road).
Destination positioning at intersections (Left-turn lanes and right-turn lanes are for everyone.)
Between intersections, you choose your position on the roadway based on your speed and on the usable width of the road.
Traffic collisions are caused by disobeying these core principles, and not by obeying them.
In 1982, Forester explained to me that these principles were not articulated in traffic engineering classes. He had ferreted them out by thinking and observing the unspoken common principles of all traffic, and seeing how they would be applicable to bicyclists.
Here’s what he said at the time (from a June 1982 article I wrote in Bicycling Magazine):
Highway people had training deficiencies because of the overwhelming success of motorization. They never had to teach any traffic engineers how to drive. They never had to teach the theory of traffic safety — the theory was implicit in everyone’s driving knowledge. Therefore, these people never questioned the principles of the ‘bike safety training’ they had received. They didn’t recognize that it conflicted with the theory behind vehicle safety.
The legislators put up money for very specific things — bikeways. So basically, society bribed the highway departments to do the wrong thing.
Forester around 1980, wired up to score students in a road test. A switch in his glove starts the cassette recorder in his backpack. Credit: IPMBA
So, Forester preached the principles of traffic law to any bicyclist who would listen.
Forester was also a keen student of the characteristics and limitations of bicycles and motor vehicles, bicyclists and motor vehicle operators. His early experience in Palo Alto made him a vigilant watchdog for unreasonable sight distances, curb radii, reaction times and intersection turning conflicts. Forester coined the term “rolling pedestrian,” and noted that even a slow bicyclist is several times as fast as a pedestrian, with very different ability to manage sharp turns and short stops. Forester observed that most bicycle facilities were designed with obliviousness to how a bad sight distance or a sharp turn could make a bicyclist crash.
(Even that observation got distorted by Forester’s opponents. Forester once wrote that a bicycle facility should be designed for a bicyclist going as fast as 30 mph, to accommodate all extremes of bicyclist behavior. His opponents turned that into, “Forester brags that he rides 30 mph.” And Forester’s advice to make traffic law work for you was twisted into “compete with the cars,” or “think you’re just like a car.” That level of distortion can best be described as mean-spirited.)
Without Forester’s innovative instruction, bicyclists of the 1970s, including those who considered themselves safety advocates, simply didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about how a bicyclist’s operating characteristics would interact with a given facility design, to produce a crash. They certainly had little notion that a bicyclist’s own behavior could make him safer.
Forester knew why bicyclists thought that way, and gave it an annoying, but accurate name: the “cyclist inferiority complex.” The cultural pull of the cyclist inferiority complex — the belief that we don’t have the full right to use the road — was, and is today, so strong that it subverts safe behavior.
We all thought we should stay out of the way of “real” traffic, hug the curb, and hope for the best.
Abrasive . . . but he wanted to sit next to me!
And with all the diplomacy of a professor dressing down an ill-prepared student, Forester told us all to think again.
So, let’s talk about his abrasiveness.
Many of us have been on the receiving end of it.
You could be in 98 percent agreement with Forester, and he’d come down on you like a ton of bricks. It sure happened to me plenty of times. I disagreed with Forester on technicalities of retro reflectivity and night time conspicuity; on developmental maturity and teaching children to ride in traffic; on an aspect of rider position during maximum-performance braking; on the political tactics of opposing or not opposing dangerous bicycle facilities; and a few other topics. I learned to ignore — and often not even read — his, uh, disagreements with me.
Still, he must have disagreed with me less often than he disagreed with many others. Because he always wanted to sit next to me in various national committee meetings.
And I watched him make an arse of himself in those meetings, grinding my teeth while it unfolded. If a well-intentioned mayor or traffic engineer used one wrong word, Forester would stand and attack. The vitriol made many of us wince, because we knew it undermined his persuasiveness.
I can’t defend the vitriol.
But in some instances I can explain it. Forester was using science and engineering to describe how bicyclist behavior and bicycle facilities could either help or hurt people. Forester took very seriously the immense responsibility of telling the public what was good for their own safety, and he expected others to gravitate to the facts he presented. When Forester’s opponents displayed obliviousness and/or defiance to the reasons why they were risking serious personal injury or death — not for themselves, but for others — Forester would attack.
It’s a shame so many people never saw past the vitriol, because there was much wisdom underneath it.
John Forester’s books, the curriculum, courses
So, let’s talk about that wisdom — and about how he promulgated it.
That first Bike World article gave birth in 1975 to the book Effective Cycling, which Forester self-published with his own printing press in his garage. It would go through many editions and get published by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Press; it is now in its 7th edition.
Forester also devised a 30-hour course, also named Effective Cycling. That course made novices into cyclists who were self-sufficient and proficient in every way. In keeping with the more self-reliant ethos of that era, Effective Cyclists were expected to be capable of doing their own repairs, sewing their own cycling clothing, and making various adapters and accessories for their bikes. And, of course, they could ride confidently and safely on big arterial streets just like my buddy Eli Damon.
Forester also saw the need for professional training, so that engineers would not design bad bicycle facilities. This led him to write the book Bicycle Transportation Engineering, later renamed Bicycle Transportation after MIT Press picked it up.
The book Effective Cycling has a defiant, angry tone. Forester believed that you couldn’t be a safe cyclist without being aware of public policy’s endorsement of the cyclist inferiority complex, and the book gives a lengthy dressing down of that policy. Forester offered his rants, expected the reader to take his side, and then showed the reader how good cycling works. It’s not the most welcoming sales pitch I’ve ever seen. But it created an aha moment for many thousands of people.
Forester reached an agreement with the League of American Wheelmen (which subsequently changed its name to the League of American Bicyclists) to train instructors nationwide.
Forester travels the country for policy advocacy
The man went to conferences everywhere, to offer his advice on designs, and on the bad assumptions behind bad designs. No one was paying him. He did it out of a passion for safety.
In the 1970s, many people were working with this newly popular concept of adults riding bicycles. Government agencies everywhere wondered what they should be doing about it. Palo Alto’s sidewalk bikeways were only one small piece of a nationwide let’s-try-this approach to bicycle facilities.
Forester was willing and able to tell them all how it should be done. Having written his books and taught his classes, he set his sights on government policy documents.
Forester was afraid, not without cause, that government policy for bicycle facility design would shunt bicyclists off to sidewalks, leading to turning-conflict collisions and other bad outcomes. Along with other stalwarts of that era (notably the late college professor John Finley Scott and traffic engineer Bob Shanteau), Forester worked hard to make sure that the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) policy would be good for safe cycling.
The CalTrans policy went national in 1981. Much of the language in the CalTrans policy was used in the 1981 edition of the American Association of State and Highway Transportation Officials’ Guide for the Development of New Bicycle Facilities (AASHTO Guidelines). “That AASHTO document explicitly states the detriments of bike lanes and mentions the alleged benefits in the subjunctive mode,” Forester said at the time. For once, he was actually pleased.
Forester advocated for competent, safe cycling.
But by necessity, that meant he spent most of his energy, and his audience’s attention, talking about things he was against — laws and societal customs that prohibited safe cycling. The big three such laws were laws requiring riders to ride far to the right, laws requiring bicyclists to ride in bike lanes, and laws requiring bicyclists to use sidepaths. Almost every conversation with Forester quickly turned to the bad consequences of these three.
Forester spent about $50,000 of his own money, and months of his time, in support of the California Association of Bicycle Organizations (CABO) for bicyclists’ rights in a well-known lawsuit, Prokop v. City of Los Angeles. The problem Forester was fighting was government immunity. Under certain circumstances, the government could build a bicycle facility and if the facility was dangerous, there would be no recourse for an injured cyclist. Sadly, Prokop lost that lawsuit. Forester again showed generosity to CABO when he had to give up bicycling. He donated his bikes, equipment and tools to CABO, and CABO sold them on eBay. (Not incidentally, Forester was the founder of CABO.)
Held up by Downward Pull. Yes, really!
And although Forester was known primarily for opining about traffic riding, he was a top-shelf expert in many other areas of cycling. I’ll mention my three favorites:
In August 1980, Forester published the provocatively titled “Held Up by Downward Pull” in the League of American Wheelmen magazine, explaining with great clarity the counterintuitive way a tension-spoked wheel supports the rider’s weight. (Writer Jobst Brandt is widely acclaimed for explaining this in his book The Bicycle Wheel, but Forester was a year ahead of Brandt.)
In April 1983, I had the pleasure of publishing in my very own magazine, Bike Tech, Forester’s eye-opening and ground-breaking “Physiology of Cyclist Power Production.” Forester deftly explained why measuring efficiency on an ergometer was misleading, and how the makeup of muscle tissue meant that a faster riding technique would score less efficiency in the lab.
In the 1971-1976 time period, Forester sued the then-new U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) on the grounds that many of its proposed regulations were technically incompetent. He had many spot-on arguments. Accordingly, the CPSC 1976 Bicycle Safety Standard — which remains federal law today — has many numbered paragraphs that simply say “[reserved]”. The court picked through Forester’s points and upheld some and rejected others.
Back in 1977, I spent some time in a Washington, DC courthouse studying the lawsuit documents, and I marveled that a non-lawyer could get to first base arguing on his own behalf in federal court. Forester would write incisive technical stuff, and the attorneys defending the CPSC would get it struck down because he’d used the wrong-size paper. Nevertheless, he persisted. (How does this affect you today? The bikes you buy today are not burdened with useless design constraints they would have had without Forester.)
These are only three examples. There are hundreds more.
Time does not permit a listing of all the unfair criticisms of Forester’s work. But one I’ve seen repeated endlessly was that he was “against all infrastructure.” He was certainly against unsafe infrastructure. But he had no objection to rail trails, and in certain circumstances (bridges and high-traffic-volume arterial streets) he was okay with well designed bike lanes. I never asked him about secure parking or bike stations, but I believe he would have supported them.
Forester was the son of C.S. Forester, the famous British author. There was a complicated father-son relationship, and Forester’s two-volume biography of his father (available for free download at JohnForester.com) will test your attention span. Forester was born in England, and his childhood years cycling there, sharing roads with motor vehicles, demonstrated to him that bicyclists could do so safely. He frequently cited his experience in England as informing his advocacy when he moved to the U.S.
Ballroom dancer, model boat racer, photographer
John Forester was an industrial engineer with two masters’ degrees and a couple decades of work experience before he quit engineering in 1972 to go full-time on bicyclist advocacy work. He once said, “If you can’t make it as a mechanical engineer, you become an industrial engineer. If you can’t make it as an industrial engineer, you become a traffic engineer.” He wasn’t particularly modest, but that was his way of saying he had insights that many traffic engineers didn’t, without sounding too imperious about it.
The man had a human side too. He was enormously talented in more ways than I’ll ever know.
John Forester was an avid photographer with his own darkroom, an accomplished ballroom dancer, an avid square dancer, a downhill skier and active swimmer.
Forester had interests you might expect of an engineer: a broad knowledge of train engines and aircraft. He built radio controlled model airplanes and ship models. He built and raced radio-controlled model boats. He had an aquarium and, of course, lots of papers and books.
His own cycling got slower as his years went on, and continued until about age 80. His last bike had five-cog half-step gearing, with a top gear of about 78 inches. That’s about right for an old man.
“I just got rear-ended.”
Once, I saw John Forester look a bit embarrassed. It was 1986, and I was interviewing him in his house, which at that point was in Sunnyvale. It was raining cats and dogs outside.
The front door burst open, and in stormed a teenage girl. It was Forester’s significant other’s daughter. Not only was she soaking wet. She was carrying the pieces of a broken bicycle, and she was mad as a wet hen.
“I just got rear-ended,” she shouted. “The Ken Cross study says that motorist overtaking collisions are only four percent of non-fatal car bike collisions, and I just had one.” Forester responded with . . . embarrassed silence. You could see his pride that the girl knew to cite the Cross study, his horror that she’d been hit, and his relief that she wasn’t hurt.
I smiled inside. It was a unique interaction between a teenager and a semi-parental unit.
Cyclists fare best when. . .
John Forester usually spoke and wrote in long paragraphs, but his best sound bite was 13 words:
“Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.”
As long as this remembrance is, it leaves out many, many things. There is so much I failed to mention. Forester’s work was very far-reaching, and his motives were always to help us be better bicyclists.
John Schubert during his transcontinental tour
Shortly after I first met John Forester, at a mini road course he taught in Washington DC in 1977, I launched on a spectacular solo 4,000-mile transcontinental tour. I was grateful for Forester’s wisdom to make myself a safer rider on that tour. My buddy Eli Damon is glad he could go to choir practice. Many thousands of others thank Forester too.
We’ve come a long way since 1977. The way we teach safe cycling behavior is far easier for a novice cyclist to learn and do. That’s the way of all improvement. Complexity starts. Simplicity follows. In future articles, John S. Allen will describe how Cycling Savvy was able to stand on Forester’s shoulders.
For that instruction to be improved on, it had to start. And it started with Forester.
Thanks, John.
With thanks to Jim Baross, Bill Hoffman, John S. Allen, Clint Sandusky, Robert Seidler, John Brooking, Eli Damon, Keri Caffrey and many others.
Countless other people had remembrances about Forester. Read some here.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/john-forester-feature.jpg499700John Schuberthttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngJohn Schubert2020-06-02 12:55:222021-01-04 12:23:32Requiem for a Heavyweight-••-John-Forester-1929-2020
Should bicyclists be riding now? Should bicyclists wear face masks now to avoid the risk of catching the COVID-19 disease?
Common sense suggests that masks help, but the US Centers for Disease Control until recently downplayed them. With masks in short supply, the highest priority has been to ensure first responders and medical professionals have protection.
Judgments like that are about the Greater Good. They aren’t just about saving you in particular. They are based on epidemiological risk assessments from one point of view or another.
Good Health and the Greater Good
I like to think that I advocate for the Greater Good, but I do better at that if I am in good health. I might take that idea farther than some people. By 1978, bicycle helmets were becoming common, and like many people I wore one. But I was unique in wearing an industrial respirator mask when riding in the city.
The author riding with helmet and mask in 1978 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Anita Brewer-Siljeholm
Cities were smelly in 1978. Most cars did not have catalytic converters. Brake shoes were made of asbestos, and they shed asbestos fibers into the air. But my respirator worked great. Car exhaust had a heavy, oily smell back then, but it came through the mask odorless. Acrid diesel-bus exhaust exited the mask’s activated charcoal filters smelling like a fresh slice of whole-wheat toast.
If I hadn’t been wearing a respirator mask while cycling in the late 70s, the damage to my lungs and body would have been as significant as if I smoked cigarettes. Then, things got better. As pollution control on cars improved, I used the respirator less. It deteriorated in storage, and eventually I threw it away.
Now we have a different problem.
The pandemic has created a new and different problem. CyclingSavvy outdoor sessions have been postponed or canceled. Bicycle clubs have suspended their group ride programs. Should I ride at all? Wear a mask?
There is no absolute social distancing. The widely cited 6-foot rule reflects a balance of risk against what people will tolerate. The good news is that you don’t get infected by just one individual virus spore. Exhaustive research on the AIDS virus has established that there is a threshold level of contamination below which it does not take hold in a person. With the virus that causes COVID-19, the principle is the same, though the amount is not yet known. Individual susceptibility varies, and a higher dose appears to result in worse symptoms. Wearing a mask does lower the risk of catching the disease, or transmitting it.
Are Masks Practical?
I happen to have a few N95 masks left over from sanding and painting projects (opened box, not accepted for donation). I have shaved my beard — for the first time in 50 years — to make the masks work better.
My wife and I reserve the masks for shopping trips. We use them only once every several days, so they have time to decontaminate themselves. (Viruses die outside of the host animal’s body.) Three or four masks between us will probably hold out until supply improves. I wear eye-protection goggles over my eyeglasses. We also happen to have a couple of surgical masks.
My experience:
An N95 mask proved practical only for short bicycle trips, especially in cold weather, because I couldn’t lift it off my face to blow my nose.
A surgical mask is not practical for me when cycling in cool weather, because it doesn’t seal, and fogs my glasses. Lifting this mask is possible, though, without unbuckling the helmet.
There are too many kinds of improvised cloth masks for me to come to a single conclusion. A bandana that hangs down and can be lifted up is probably going to allow blowing the nose.
An industrial respirator mask is practical, though it could become uncomfortable on a long ride. The degree of protection it provides depends on the type of filters.
Any mask will somewhat impair breathing.
Should Bicyclists Wear Face Masks For Shopping Trips?
While I have access to a car, I prefer to shop by bicycle. The bicycle is more convenient when I am bringing home a small load. Cycling to the store alone generally carries far less risk of infection than riding public transportation. But when shopping, I have to interact with people, and sometimes go into a store.
Should bicyclists wear face masks for this kind of trip? Yes, at least when going into the store, but also if having to ride under crowded conditions.
For shopping trips, I wear gardening gloves with rubber fingers and palms. I carry a small bottle with disinfectant solution, and disinfectant wipes. I disinfect the shopping-cart handle before gripping it. I also disinfect my gloves, then my hands after I leave the store. When I get home I disinfect them again after removing the mask, goggles and helmet.
The reusable shopping bag in the picture below does not go into the store. Stores in Massachusetts don’t accept them any more, as they might carry infection. I use the bag after I’m done shopping, to increase the carrying capacity of my bicycle.
The author, April 2020, in full kit for a shopping trip. Photo by Jacob Allen
When I get home, I lay out items that I bought in the driveway to disinfect them, or pour food out into clean containers. Apartment dwellers have to disinfect indoors. There’s plenty of good information online about how to disinfect foods, and yourself after handling them. Here’s one example.
Should Bicyclists Wear Face Masks For Recreational Riding?
Should you wear a face mask while riding? Or not? Or just hang up the bicycle? Strategies are different if you’re riding solo or with someone else.
Each person’s circumstances are unique. In my case, it’s only a mile from my home to semi-rural outer suburbs. Traffic on roads there is very light now, and I’ll go on solo rides without wearing a mask.
Urban and suburban traffic is also light, though a friend — a high-mileage recreational road rider — has had to dodge many newbie wrong-way riders. (This is one more reason to stay away from riding on the edge of the road.)
Another friend who is a strong advocate for shared-use paths avoids them now, because they are crowded, largely with people who don’t know how to be safe on them.
In some places, notably New York State, masks are now required for everyone where social distancing is impossible. Spain and Italy have banned recreational cycling, allowing cycling only for some kinds of essential trips. That seems excessive to me, at least where I live, considering the low risk of contagion on lightly-used rural roads.
If You Ride With Another Person
The 6-foot rule doesn’t apply to bicyclists riding together, because bicyclists are moving, and the risk depends on which way the wind is blowing. One recommendation was to maintain 35-foot spacing, and greater at higher speeds. The front rider uses hand signals to indicate turns; the rear rider repeats them to confirm. Checking for confirmation is easier if the front rider uses a rear-view mirror.
Crash Risk
I do think about the risk of a crash that would require care in an already overburdened hospital. It could happen, but my last crash that required a doctor’s attention was in 1984, to no small extent because of the kind of skills that CyclingSavvy teaches. There is a balance to achieve.
April 2020: The author headed out on a recreational ride, no mask. Photo: Jacob Allen
I’ve been riding on the nearly empty semi-rural roads — without a mask, to stay in shape and avoid going stir-crazy. But you have to make up your own mind about this.
Even if you have hung the bicycle up for the duration, the time will come when you dust it off and ride again. This is a useful way to while away the time until then.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/john-allen-with-mask-2020-featured.jpg231248John Allenhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngJohn Allen2020-04-18 10:00:422020-04-19 23:23:43Should I Be Riding Now?
The full CyclingSavvy Course INCLUDES Truth & Techniques (classroom session), Train Your Bike (bike handling) session, and our signature on-road experience — Tour of Waltham.
Truth & Techniques (classroom session on Zoom or possibly in person) and Train Your Bike (bike handling, outdoor session) are included in this 3-part workshop. Completion of these two sessions is required before taking the Tour session, and you may sign up for individual sessions.
Truth & Techniques – Friday, May 14, 2020, 6:30-9:30 PM Zoom meeting online (Signup information to be provided). Earlier online sessions or the self-teaching Mastery Course may be substituted.
Train Your Bike – Saturday, May 15, 2020 at 9 AM – Noon at MacArthur School
…Lunch break…Pizzi Farms deli and ice-cream stand is just across the street.
Tour of Waltham – Saturday, May 15, 2020 at 1 PM – 4:30 PM from MacArthur School. You must have take the two other sessions to proceed to this session.
The Tour of Waltham is an experiential tour of our city’s roads. The course includes some of the most intimidating road features (intersections, interchanges, merges, etc.) a cyclist might find in his/her travels. The students travel as a group, stopping to survey and discuss each exercise location. After observing the feature, discussing the traffic dynamics and the best strategy for safe and easy passage, the students ride through individually and regroup at a nearby location.
Train Your Bike (bike handling) and Truth & Techniques (classroom session) are included in this 3-part workshop. Completion of these two sessions is required before taking the Tour session.
The ticket below gives the time for the (probably virtual) classroom session, but it is for the full three-part course, including the Tour of Waltham session.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/20170806_141756.jpg7201280John Allenhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/cs-xlong-header.pngJohn Allen2018-11-22 13:21:382020-11-03 18:15:40Three Part Course: Waltham MA, May 14-15 2021