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/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngGary Cziko2020-12-01 11:55:292020-12-08 17:24:36Two CyclingSavvy Webinars for the Holiday Season
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, and this longer ride would also include backtracking on a poison-ivy-infested sidewalk.
On Monday, I checked out the route in a car, with a dashcam running:
OK, 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.
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:
Once I dropped Google Dude on the road, I spun the compass 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 route 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 or with rain 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/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngJohn Allen2020-08-14 11:55:362024-01-03 17:50:01Would 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/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngMiguel Cardo2020-08-07 11:55:282020-08-07 12:51:20The Madrid Model
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/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngJohn Schubert2020-06-02 12:55:222024-03-02 16:23:27Requiem for a Heavyweight-••-John-Forester-1929-2020
At CyclingSavvy we teach communication with other road users. But there’s a part of the course called “Train Your Bike.”
Cute catchphrase? Well, sort of. You are actually training yourself, but “training the bike” is how it feels. We want you to feel at one with your bike.
Many riders never learn to be one with their bike when they are starting and stopping.
It sounds so basic. Why spend time on it? How could people possibly screw up starting and stopping enough for that to be a problem?
Well, they can and it is.
Lowering the stress level
CyclingSavvy founder Keri Caffrey once had a student who was a super-experienced athlete. The student had completed a half-Ironman triathlon. But for her, starting and stopping were near-crashing events. She wobbled scarily at slow speed — and slow speed is part and parcel of every start and stop. Keri’s instruction lowered that student’s stress level enormously.
You don’t have to be a serious triathlete to need this instruction. Look around at other cyclists, and you’ll see:
People don’t stop at stop lights because their stop/start skills are so poor. (Double that when an unskilled rider gets a pedal-binding system.)
If someone does stop, it’s disturbing to watch, and so are the first 30 feet after restarting.
Just as you come to a stop sign, there is a gap in the cross traffic. Is it long enough? That might depend on your being ready for a quick restart.
Category IV (novice) mass-start road race starts are scary. People don’t accelerate smoothly away from the starting line.
The solution is right here!
This can be fixed. Easily. But you have to know how.
If you follow all the steps in sequence, every start is smooth. Every stop is smooth. None of these steps is difficult. None requires fancy bike-handling skill. But you have to know them and understand them.
This is exactly what we teach in Train Your Bike.
It looks so easy. Because when you start and stop the best way, it’s a non-event.
To start, you lift a pedal to the power position while straddling the bike, with your butt in front of the saddle. Stand on the one pedal, lift your butt up and slide it rearward. Put your other foot on the other pedal and continue pedaling.
To stop, use the brakes to stop the bike, slide your butt forward off the saddle and put your weight on one foot. Lean the bicycle toward the other foot — so it is outboard of the pedal. Put that foot on the ground just as the bike stops. You use that foot and your hands to hold the bike while it’s stopped. And you use the other foot to lift a pedal into the power position for your next start.
Putting a foot down for a landing
We love teaching starting and stopping — and other skills — because we love to see both novices and experienced riders discover entirely different and better ways to do things on their bikes.
Try practicing this skill. Watch the video a few times. Then follow up with practice, so the sequence unfolds smoothly. It takes practice, as the saying goes, to get to Carnegie Hall.
In 2019 Great Rivers Greenway contracted with American Bicycling Education Association to create this lunch & learn-style presentation for St. Louis-area law enforcement officers.
The contractual agreement includes allowing any CSI to adapt and present CS for LEOs in their markets. Download P...
…about bike lanes in Philadelphia, I showed how I rode on Spruce Street, a narrow one-way street in Center City with a bike lane.
When my safety required it, I merged out of the bike lane — for example, whenever I might be at risk from a right-turning motor vehicle. At those times, it was safest to be in line with motor vehicles, where the driver behind me could see me.
Such Assertiveness May Seem Strange and Forbidding
It’s indeed counterintuitive to practice “driver behavior,” and take your place in the queue with motor vehicles. Yes, they are big, and heavy, and they can go fast. But these vehicles also are controlled by drivers. You use head turns and hand signals to communicate with drivers, and move into line when one has made room for you. That driver’s vehicle is protecting you from all the other ones behind!
Putting “driver behavior” into practice on Spruce Street was easy, as traffic there is mostly slow. I had no trouble just falling into line with vehicles waiting at a traffic light.
A First-Timer’s Mistakes
If you think that CyclingSavvy Instructors always do everything right, watch today’s video. This was my first ride ever on Spruce Street. I wouldn’t do everything quite the same way a second time.
There were a couple of times when I didn’t move far enough OUT of the bike lane. I was in line with motor traffic, but I stayed in the right tire track — on the passenger side of cars — so that bicyclists in the bike lane would show in my video.
Right Tire Track Distracted Me From My Safety
That distracted me from an option which would have made my ride go better. As I reviewed raw footage, it dawned on me that most of the streets which cross Spruce Street are one-way. Some are one way right-to-left, others left-to-right.
I could take advantage of this!
Avoiding Unnecessary Delay at Intersections
Look at the incidents at one-way left-to-right cross streets. In one of these, a motorist ahead of me pulled over to the right curb just past the intersection. In the other, a motorist behind me turned right. Neither used turn signals. The driver who merged right delayed me, and I delayed the one who turned right.
Things would have gone more smoothly if I had been riding farther to the left. That is my usual practice where traffic can turn right, but it is even more emphatically correct where traffic can’t turn left.
I still won’t pull all the way over to the left, out of line with the motor traffic: even if a motorist is unlikely to turn the wrong way into a one-way street, one could still merge over to the left curb, like the one who merged over to the right curb in my video. It’s safest to wait in line.
Just For Fun
I’ve included a third incident where the mistake was made years earlier, in the design department of an automobile manufacturer halfway around the world.
In this segment, the driver did use a turn signal, but it was so far around on the other side of the car, I couldn’t see it.
This driver was yielding right-of-way to me when I should have yielded to him. To avoid a “no, you go first” situation, I went ahead. If I’d known that the driver wanted to turn right and would have to follow me, I would have been more assertively polite. Why would I want motorists behind me if they don’t have to be? I don’t!
The first two incidents illustrate why I never assume motorists will use their turn signals. The third incident brought home to me that I sometimes can’t assume that they are not using turn signals.
Savvy Cyclists Learn From Their Mistakes
While I kept safe, the encounters I’ve described could have gone more smoothly. Every ride can be a learning experience, and the next ride can go better.
More to Come
I have one more post about Spruce Street on the way. So far I’ve done my best to avoid discussing politics and religion.
But in my final Spruce Street post, churches are involved. In that post I’m going to let loose!
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Screen-Shot-2019-09-30-at-1.39.50-PM.jpeg744873John Allenhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngJohn Allen2019-10-04 09:00:202020-07-21 23:26:25A Philadelphia Bike Lane Learning Experience
I’m a “loner” cyclist. To me, cycling has always been an individual adventure. A block of time appears on my calendar… the weather cooperates… and suddenly I’m thinking, “Where can I go on my bike? What excuse do I have to roll around outside for an hour or more?”
Maybe I have an errand to run, and can do it on my bike. If not, I’ll pick a destination in range, or drive to a farther away spot, and plan a route.
Maybe I’ll take a picnic, ride across a bridge to an island then hike around the island.
Much of the day’s pleasure is in anticipating all the possibilities!
The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait until that other is ready, and it may be a long time before they get off.
Henry David Thoreau said this, and it’s a conscious reason why I rarely plan a bike trip with anyone else. Spontaneity rules my rides! I choose the destination, the route, the pace, and the intensity.
Another Choice: Lane Position
Before Cycling Savvy, I didn’t completely understand the option of choosing where to be in the traffic lane. I knew that in Maine I had the right as a cyclist to be given three feet of clearance by passing vehicles. But until taking CyclingSavvy, I didn’t think of my bike as a vehicle.
A slide from “Truth & Techniques of Traffic Cycling.” Cyclists were classified as drivers before the rise of the automobile. More than 100 years later, cyclists are legally considered drivers in all 50 states
The course I took here in Portland last summer validated my core sense that I did have a right to travel safely on roadways. I learned about the door zone and reasons to ride clear of traffic lane debris, which is typically pushed to the edge of the road by motor vehicles. I now feel much more comfortable when controlling the lane when needed.
Controlling the traffic lane with authority, assurance and comfort is what Cycling Savvy preaches and teaches. I learned specific information on clothing choices for visibility, and motion and signal cues to alert drivers to my intentions.
In addition to this, I try to practice wisdom, patience, and trust balanced with caution while riding. The final element I now bring to my rides in city traffic is “largeness.” As a small person on a small bike, I consciously aim to enlarge my presence on the road by standing on my pedals, weaving slightly at times to give the impression that I really need the space I’m taking, and keeping my arms out farther from my body, just to be more “seen.”
Freedom
Analyzing the Congress Street feature of the CyclingSavvy Tour of Portland.
I’ve been a city cyclist for years, obedient to traffic lights and stop signs, and was delighted to learn in my Cycling Savvy class about how to pre-plan a passage through a complicated intersection with dedicated turn lanes. Our class observed the process of planning, then executing several of these in Portland, before we came to the most complex one of the day.
As soon as this particular passage was laid out for us, I asked the instructor’s okay to go for it. He later told me he wasn’t really thinking it through when he absent-mindedly said “yes.” The other instructor was supposed to go first to demonstrate! Before that could happen, I began pedaling away, as all the other students stood watching.
Almost immediately, a skeptical driver passed me on the right and loudly called out to me: “You’re in the left lane!” My reply — totally emboldened by my training — was, “I know!”
I sailed along to complete the upcoming left turn, easily and safely avoiding traffic merging in from the right.
Two students begin the Congress Street feature.
Sue Wall, smiling big in the center, at the end of the feature
Now, in addition to all the other choices I make when planning a ride, I’m aware of and grateful for my choice to ride freely wherever I need to in the traffic lane.
I choose an approach of appreciation for all my fellow travelers, and of freedom from fear and anxiety. Cycling Savvy training shows everyone how to make these choices!
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/cycling-susan-wall.jpeg400301Susan Wallhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngSusan Wall2018-05-23 11:30:252018-09-24 23:53:47Discovery and Choices
If you’re a savvy cyclist, you’re not shy about claiming your space on the road.
You know about all of the difficulties you can get into when you cling to the edge, and how much more practical bicycle transportation becomes when you use the technique of lane control.
Has anyone ever told you that you’re being unreasonable by controlling a lane?
Have they told you that it exposes you to dangerous motorist behavior?
Have they told you that you’re unnecessarily inconveniencing motorists?
I certainly hear those things. But it only takes a little bit of observation to see that motorist behavior around you is consistently safer and more cautious when you control the lane.
Here’s my video response to one such critic:
In the video, I ride the same stretch of road twice, once at the edge of the lane and once in the center of the lane. These rides are shown simultaneously in the video, with each pass highlighted.
In the center of the lane, all passes are safe. At the edge, about half of the passes are unsafe, because the motorist comes too close to me, too close to oncoming traffic, or both.
Don’t let anyone tell you that you’re being unreasonable by controlling the lane.
Show them this video, or make your own to show the benefits of lane control on your local roads. I’d be happy to share my filming and editing techniques with you. Just ask.
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/savvy-cyclist-eli.png223400Eli Damonhttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngEli Damon2018-05-16 11:30:502018-08-23 17:08:21Let’s Talk About Being “Reasonable”
How are you at backing up with a trailer on your car? If you’re like many people, you haven’t had reason to do so, and thus find the idea daunting.
It seems like a black art to many, based on the reactions I’ve gotten from people when I backed trailers into narrow spaces.
Decoding the black arts of trailers and savvy cycling.
My wife, Jenn, was going on a road trip with my sister. One of several things they planned to accomplish involved moving some things that won’t fit in or on our car. Rather than rent a truck for the whole trip, renting a trailer made sense, since it could be picked up close to the first house and dropped off close to the second.
It made sense to me, but not to Jenn.
Jenn didn’t feel comfortable maneuvering a trailer in close quarters, and especially didn’t feel good about having to back up with a trailer, after an unpleasant experience she had a few years ago.
Why is this related to savvy cycling, you ask? Read on.
I’m pretty good with trailers, having done a LOT of backing up with them in various occupations (tow truck driver, airport tug driver, bicycle trailer user). I figured that with a couple of short sessions, Jenn would gain confidence in her ability to navigate in tighter quarters than she had thought herself able to manage before.
Since we’re both CyclingSavvy instructors, we know the value of parking lot drills. It’s important to have a quiet place to develop and practice a skill before venturing out on actual roads and using the skill “in the real world.”
With that in mind, we rented a trailer the same size as the one they’d be using for the trip, and headed to a mall parking lot to practice.
I started with basic rules:
Always turn wider than you think you need to turn, since the trailer tracks a different turn radius. There’s an interactive video in the CyclingSavvy web site about big trucks and how the trailer follows through a turn
Second: Plan your backing up for best visibility; plan for your blind spots. To get the trailer to change path relative to the car, turn the wheel opposite what you think you need to turn (THIS way instead of THAT way)
Lastly, it’s not a failure to pull forward to realign the trailer or start again
“How do you drive these things?”
Then I set up easy exercises: Back up guiding on a particular line in the parking lot, trying to keep things straight. Start to turn, and learn when you can and cannot straighten out without pulling forward to do so.
“Hey! That wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be!”
Then I had her back into a marked parking slot from the aisle, to simulate backing into a driveway from the street. After she did a couple of those, I had her pull into a parking slot, then back to the parking slot to the left of the one directly behind her, to gain confidence in directional control.
After a while, she was doing quite well. She had improved tremendously.
The next day we had family visits to do, so Jenn drove with the trailer. When we got to my folks’ house, she backed into the driveway, for practice and to prove to herself that she could. She did it easily! A little while later, she took the opportunity to practice in her parents’ driveway. She did even better, in a narrower driveway! And, yes, it was easy to see how much more confidence she had in her ability to back with a trailer, a thing that many people find a daunting task.
The analogy?
A lot of people find the idea of using bicycles instead of their cars daunting. With a few good pointers from experienced people (like CyclingSavvy instructors), and a little practice (CS Train Your Bike and Tour sessions), much of the mystery is solved.
CyclingSavvy helps people learn how traffic works, and how to participate in the existing system to get what we need through planning, courtesy, and mindfulness.
Jenn’s confidence in her ability to back up with a trailer attached to the car improved through a few brief exercises. She knows that she can go places using a trailer, which enables her to carry stuff with the car that she might not have been comfortable carrying before.
Similarly, you can become a safer, happier, more confident cyclist by attending a CyclingSavvy workshop and using what you learn. A little bit of focused experiential learning and a little bit of practice with new skills will help you realize why the tag line is Empowerment for Unlimited Travel.
And if you’re in my hometown of Louisville, look me up. I’ll be glad to show you how to do some real hauling with your bike.
Bill (not in this picture–Tom was using Andy’s trailer, so he’s there beside Tom, wearing his helmet) truly appreciated Tom hauling his sofa and several boxes of books, under plastic to protect from the rain
When I worked at a bike shop, I could haul more cardboard on my trailer than the store owner could in his minivan. This load weighed about four hundred pounds
These 55-gallon barrels won’t fit in my car, not at the same time
We had to dispose of an old mattress and box spring set. It was easier to haul it with my bicycle than with a car
Our basset hounds, Wilbur and Orville, always want to go with us, however we travel
https://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/instruction.png254400Tom Armstronghttps://cyclingsavvy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/CS-logo_xlong-header.pngTom Armstrong2018-03-14 11:30:202018-08-23 17:17:35A Little Instruction Really Changes Things