Tag Archive for: visibility

Optional equipment for safety’s sake

Editor’s note: This is the fourth article in a series directed mostly toward beginners. The introductory article covered checking the bicycle for safety,  and each article links to the next. So far we’ve covered lights, rear-view mirrors, and bells. Lights are required by law at night. Mirrors, and in most places, bells, are optional equipment.

Optional Equipment: Policy and Good Sense

The American Bicycling Education Association requires that everyone wear a helmet in its on-bike sessions, but makes no policy statements about any legally-optional equipment. Such statements can do as much harm as good. Convenience (“just hop on the bike”) can be at odds with having to manage equipment and change in and out of special clothing. Expense may be a concern.

So: You decide what measures you will adopt to improve your comfort and safety, beyond what the law requires. Generally, longer rides merit more preparation, as comfort takes on more importance. The special clothing that recreational and racing cyclists wear isn’t just for show. But some options apply to any ride.

Bright & Tight

There’s no doubt that some colors show up better than others. Although bright-colored clothing is optional — and no substitute for lights at night — it can’t hurt. Retroreflective surfaces on your clothing or on accessories such as panniers are even more helpful to a driver whose headlights are shining on you.

Dorky, or super practical? You decide.

When I talk to kids about bike safety, I sometimes ask for a show of hands: “How many of you have ever gotten your shoelace caught in the chain?” There are always a few.

This is the meaning of “tight”: Make sure you don’t have any loose straps or clothing dangling, especially if your bicycle doesn’t have a chainguard. I like to take care of long shoelaces by tucking the extra length into the sides of my shoes.

You can roll up long pant legs, or secure them with rubber bands or straps, or tuck them into your socks. You must wear long socks to allow this. Some people think this is dorky, but it is super convenient, and only the socks ever get chain stains.

Many pedals lack retroreflectors. Reflectorized legbands not only substitute for these, but also are visible from the sides.

reflectorized legbands: optional equipment but can substitute for pedal reflectors

Reflectorized legbands: bright and tight.

Secure any hanging strings or straps from backpacks or panniers. Do not dangle baggage from the handlebar, where it risks getting caught in the spokes of the front wheel.

Those who wear dresses can tuck extra material under the saddle, or use this cool trick to make the skirt into faux pants with a penny and a rubber band. Some European-style bikes eliminate this issue with a full chainguard as well as a “skirt guard” over the rear wheel, but these are not common in North America.

Wear a helmet?

In the Five Layers bike safety model, a helmet is included in the last layer, “Injury Reduction.” Protective equipment helps only when all the previous safety layers have failed.

Your chances of needing a helmet are pretty low on any given trip, especially if you follow all the other safety advice. But the consequences can be dire if you hit your head without a helmet. Many cyclists have stories of crashes in which they feel their helmet saved their life. I have had less severe crashes, thankfully, but I have had a few solo falls in which my helmet tapped the ground. It happens.

In North America, most states require a helmet for children and younger teens, but it is optional for adults. Should you choose to wear a helmet, make sure that it’s certified by the U. S. Consumer Protection Safety Commission, CPSC. (If you want a deep dive into geekiness, here’s the CPSC’s technical document on the subject.) Replace your helmet every few years, when it has begun to deteriorate, and of course whenever it’s involved in a crash. There is little difference in effectiveness between the better inexpensive helmets and a $200 helmet with all the latest features — though weight, ventilation and appearance vary. For comparisons, check out the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute’s reviews.

Helmet fit and adjustment

A helmet needs to be snug on your head. It must be level on your forehead, not pushed back. The strap must be snug under your chin. The ear straps should come together just under your earlobes.

Two easy ways to remember helmet fit are the “two finger test”, and the “eyes, ears, and mouth” test.

  1. Eyes: Your helmet should come down on your forehead about two fingers’ width above your eyebrows.
  2. Ears: Each ear strap should come together just under and slightly in front of your ear, as if you were making a letter V with your fingers under it.
  3. Mouth: The strap should be just tight enough to fit a finger (or two side-by- side) between the strap and your chin. When you open your mouth, you should feel the strap tighten.

A helmet may have a visor — helpful when the sun is low, and at night. Even without one, your helmet can help block glare if you tilt your head down. And as described in a previous article, a helmet is a convenient place to hang a rear-view mirror.

Footwear: So many options

Open-toed shoes can really mess up your toes in a crash. Insecure footwear like flip-flops can also impair your control of the bike, if they slip around or fall off while you’re riding.

Different shoes work best with different kinds of pedals:

  • Rubber soles are slippery when wet on pedals with smooth metal platforms, but fine on pedals with teeth that grip.
  • Leather and hard plastic soles slide around on anything other than rubber-block pedals.
  • Toeclips and straps work well with most athletic shoes, but can leave marks on the uppers — not good for your fancy shoes.
  • Clipless pedals need special shoes with cleats. Beginner cyclists do better to postpone foot retention. Learning how to safely use clipless pedals on roads and trails is a skill in itself.
Bicycling gloves: optional equipment but they can prevent injury

Fingerless cycling gloves are a wise option in warm weather.

Gloves

Gloves increase comfort and avoid injury if you break a fall with your hand — and not only injury to the hand. You’ll be more willing to put your palm down if you know that the pavement will not sandpaper it.

Gloves are not only last-resort passive safety equipment, either.  At night, a glove with a reflectorized back makes a super blinking turn signal for drivers behind you. Just stick out your arm and turn your wrist back and forth. Many gloves and mittens have reflectorized patches; few fingerless bicycling gloves do, though you can add reflective tape yourself.

Next…

In the next post in this series, we move on from equipment to riding technique.

Passing a City Bus Safely on a Bicycle

A savvy cyclist shot this video.

Little did he know that a yet-to-be savvy cyclist would play a starring role in it.

Here’s what the savvy cyclist did in the video.

  1. He sees the bus stopped ahead. Well in advance of reaching it, he looks over his shoulder to check whether there is a vehicle behind him.
  2. There is, so he makes a left-turn signal with his left arm, indicating the desire to merge left to pass the bus.
  3. He verifies that the driver behind him is yielding to let him move left before he does so.
  4. He passes the bus with safe clearance, ready to brake and fall back in case the bus starts to merge out from the curb.
  5. Once in the bus driver’s forward field of view, he signals to the bus driver the desire to merge back to the right.
  6. He positions himself so that he can see a pedestrian crossing the street right in front of the bus. He allows ample time to slow down or maneuver if  a pedestrian pops into view.
  7. After passing the bus, he adopts an appropriate lane position, preventing being overtaken by two lines of traffic at once and jammed against the curb.
Protected by SUV

The next driver behind has let the savvy cyclist into line.

The yet-to-be savvy cyclist:

  1. Keeps far right as long as possible before reaching the bus, and does not check for overtaking traffic.
  2. Does not signal to indicate the desire to change lane position.
  3. Swerves out shortly before reaching the bus, again without checking to see if there is any traffic behind.
  4. Rides close to the side of the bus! This puts the yet-to-be savvy cyclist in danger of being swept underneath if the bus merges out.
  5. Would not see a pedestrian crossing the street from in front of the bus until the last split second — and therefore would be likely to collide with that pedestrian.
  6. Merges to the right without signaling to the bus driver.
  7. Merges all the way over to the curb, inviting drivers of motor vehicles to “share” an un-sharable lane.
Swerve out

The other cyclist merges out just before passing the bus. What if a car, rather than another cyclist, had been following her?

I, the savvy cyclist

I’ll admit it, I was the savvy cyclist. What were my expectations?

  • I believed I could communicate with the driver of the vehicle behind me using a hand signal and head turn.
  • I knew the driver behind me had to digest my request to merge into line, so I started my communication early.
  • I did not assume the motorist would cooperate and let me merge, so I checked — trust but verify. This is easy to do with a quick glance into a rear-view mirror.
  • I understood that passing a bus close to its side places me in deadly danger if the bus merges out, and also invites unsafe overtaking.
  • I knew the bus driver would have an easier time knowing my intentions if he or she could see me as I prepared to merge right.
  • I understood that I could safely allow only one line of traffic to overtake after passing the bus. I had to position myself to avoid unsafe passing by two lines of traffic at once.
  • I had a mental inventory of things to watch for: the bus pulls out abruptly, an overtaking motorist moves too soon, a pedestrian abruptly emerges in front of me. But I was ready, so none of these things would cause me a problem, or even require quick action on my part.

This sounds like a lot, but it’s not. It becomes second nature when practicing “driver behavior.

Too close to bus

I am passing the bus safely. The other cyclist couldn’t see a person crossing the street in front of the bus, and couldn’t avoid the bus if it merged out.

The cyclist in the video was practicing “edge” behavior

Her behavior indicated that she wanted to take up as little space as possible. She was an “edge rider,” naive about potential hazards in front of her, and fatalistic about those behind her. This made her moves unpredictable and turned potential hazards into real ones.

What behavior is truly easier for motorists?

I have long contended that having to slow and follow a bicyclist disturbs motorists much less than the following confusing situations:

The cyclist is inviting me to pass, but the available width looks iffy. The angel on one shoulder says that I should wait till there is more room. The devil on the other says: ‘It’ll be close, but I’ll make it.’

Or perhaps:

The cyclist can’t continue riding behind the bus. She is either going to stop behind it, or swerve out. The angel on one shoulder says: ‘Slow down so she can swerve out in front of me.’ The devil on the other shoulder says: ‘Damn bicyclists.’

How about if you’re the bus driver:

I lie awake at night worrying that I’ll crush a cyclist under my bus.

This has happened in my city.

How much better it is for the mental health of everybody concerned for a cyclist to act as a participant in traffic, rather than a nobody!

Correct lane position

The shared-lane marking properly indicates my line of travel. The bus changes lanes to pass me safely. The other cyclist’s wheel is visible in the corner of the picture.

Lower stress and more safety passing a bus

As for cyclists, it is infinitely more satisfying to interact as a full participant in  traffic, rather than be a wallflower!

For savvy cyclists, stress levels go way down, safety goes way up — and there’s even more: A rewarding sense of interaction with other people. Almost every motorist will cooperate with you, if you only help them know how to do that.

One more thought

The driver of the vehicle behind me, intentionally or not, was standing guard for me. I was protected from following vehicles. (The word “protected” has been used and misused in other ways related to bicycling, but that is a discussion for another post.)

On any typical ride, a cyclist interacts directly with tens or  hundreds of strangers, sometimes thousands. Cycling and motoring are the daily activities in which a person interacts directly with more strangers than in any others.

It’s a dance, and as we say in CyclingSavvy, the dance is yours to lead. I find it soundly rewarding to do that assertively yet cooperatively.

I shot this video in May 2017 on Boston’s Longwood Avenue — here, in case you would care to know. This neighborhood has a high concentration of health science and research facilities. I may well have been photographing a doctor or scientist. Brilliance in one field doesn’t help you understand safe behavior near a bus. That’s why we need to teach all people, no matter how smart, how to ride safely.

Update

I wish that I could offer a bright and sunny conclusion to this article: Longwood-area cyclists signed up for a CyclingSavvy course, discovered how easy it is to communicate with other road users and control safe space around themselves.

Not so. Since I shot the video, the shared-lane markings on Longwood Avenue have been replaced with bike lanes.

bike lane on longwood avenue boston

2019: Google street view of Longwood Avenue

These bike lanes direct cyclists to ride like the one in my video, and give motorists to understand that this is bicyclists’ proper place and conduct — as shown in the image above downloaded from a 2019 Google Street view.

Enough for now. The reasons bicyclists get set up for failure like this are a topic for another post.

Requiem for a Heavyweight-••-John-Forester-1929-2020

(Also in Spanish — este artículo está también disponible en español en la web de Madrid Ciclista.)

Back in my misspent youth, I dropped 60 cents on the then-new February 1973 issue of Bike World Magazine. In it was the first-ever article by a guy named John Forester.

John Forester photo with note of appreciation.Forester was steaming mad.

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

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

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.

That’s what John Forester did for people.

(You can read Damon’s entire 2013 essay at https://iamtraffic.org/equality/overcoming-ignorance-and-fear.)

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

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.

John Forester around 1980

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 wrote a second curriculum, called Effective Cycling at the Intermediate Level. He successfully taught it to middle-school students in Palo Alto for a time. He created an instructor’s manual. He scripted and directed Iowa State University’s 1979 film, Bicycling Safely on the Road. and was behind the 1992 Seidler Productions film Effective Cycling.

Cover of Bicycle Transportation, by John ForesterForester 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 1981 AASHTO Guidesubjunctive 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

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.

Passing safely with lots of clerance on shared-use patsh

Shared-Use Paths, Part 1: Etiquette

etiquette of passing on shared-use paths

Have you been out walking or riding on your local shared-use paths? Has use been a bit heavier than usual? It certainly has been where I live.

The Orlando metro area has over 100 miles of shared-use paths. I’m an avid user, both for walking and cycling. But with increasing use, it becomes apparent that a lot of users don’t have a good grasp on safety, or how their behavior affects others — more so as new users seek fresh air and sunshine during a pandemic.

This is part one of two posts about how to be safe and considerate on shared-use paths.

Path Etiquette: ensuring you and your fellow path users have an enjoyable time.

keep right on shared-use paths
On roads, pedestrians are required to walk facing traffic, so they can see cars coming and step aside. Stepping off the road is not always necessary, but pedestrians can easily do it when it is.

Pedestrians should never be expected to step off a shared-use path or a sidewalk to make way for another user, and so it doesn’t make sense for them to walk on the left.* Doing so causes both the pedestrian and an oncoming user to have to stop whenever passing isn’t possible due to opposite-side traffic. When all users keep right, faster users can simply slow and wait for the opportunity to pass. BTW, if you cannot keep your bike balanced at walking speed, you probably aren’t ready yet to be on the path (more on that below).
yield to oncoming traffic

Take it easy!

That brings me to my next point. When an obstruction is on your side of the path (or road, for that matter), YOU yield — whether it’s a fallen branch or a slower user. If there is oncoming traffic, wait until that traffic has passed.
don't thread the needle
Don’t thread the needle! This is disrespectful to both the person you are passing and the oncoming person. A crowded path isn’t the place to set speed records. If you have a need for speed, you should use the road instead.
move over to pass
When you do pass a slower user, move over! This is my chief complaint as a walker. I can’t tell you how many times a pathlete has blown past my elbow when there were eight feet of path to her left. Why would you do that? You know you hate it when motorists do that to you on the road.

It’s also nice to say something. I personally prefer to offer a gentle “good morning” vs screaming “ON YOUR LEFT.” Some people may react by moving left! Some are listening with earbuds and may not hear you. Startling them by yelling doesn’t necessarily help you pass safely.

So even if you say nothing at all, moving over as far as possible and passing at a reasonable speed is fine. In this pandemic time, social distance is about more than only common courtesy. (See our recent post about riding in the pandemic.)
single file to pass
Along those same lines, when you are riding side-by side with a companion (these days, a member of your household, I’d hope!), it is polite to single up in order to give a slower user more space when passing. Oftentimes two cyclists are so engrossed in their conversation that the left rider doesn’t even move left and the rider on the right brush-passes the pedestrian (me, yes, this happens a lot). Please be present.single up for oncoming traffic on shared-use paths for oncomingSimilarly, many older shared-use paths are not wide enough to remain side by side when there is oncoming traffic. Without a centerline, some users don’t recognize this. The additive closing speed of both users can be disconcerting.don't take up the whole path

Shared-use path courtesy when walking

When walking or jogging with family/friends, do not spread across the path requiring every other user to have to ask you to move in order to pass.
keep your dog on a short leash
I’ve walked many path miles with my dog. I trained her to walk on my right. She does this by default now, so I never have to worry about her wandering out in front of someone. A well-behaved dog makes everyone’s life easier on the path.
don't let the dog lurch
It’s very alarming for bicyclists to have a dog on a retractable leash run across in front of them or wander toward them while the owner appears distracted. Dogs can cause a crash! Some people have a fear of dogs due to having been attacked. Having a dog lurch toward them can cause panic.

Another point on retractable leashes: they can cause cuts and burns to both pets and people.

shared-use paths are not for unskilled riders

Brush up on skills

Though it may not seem to make sense, the path is NOT the place to learn bike handling. You need a set of simple skills before you ride on the path, especially a well-used path. To be safe around others, you need to be able to:

  • start and stop easily,
  • balance at very low speed,
  • ride in a straight line,
  • look over your shoulder while riding in a straight line (particularly if the path goes alongside a road, more in part 2).

This is true for kids as well. Please don’t bring your kids to the path to teach them basic skills. Children (and adults) tend to have target fixation when learning basic balance on a bike. A kid will literally ride straight into an oncoming bicyclist instead of steering away. A kid will also ride off the edge of the path and then fall, trying to steer back over the pavement lip.

Skills can be developed in a parking lot or quiet street. Or in a CyclingSavvy Train Your Bike class.

Using shared-use paths in the dark

Most shared-use paths are technically “closed” from dusk to dawn even though they are not physically closed. Many of us use them anyway, either for commuting or early morning exercise. And you know what, they were built with transportation funds, so… that’s a rant for another time.

Rule 1. Use lights! Head-on collisions between unlit users are a thing—they can be a deadly thing. Don’t count on well-lit cyclists to see and avoid you, either. It isn’t easy to detect an oncoming ninja outside the range of a headlight, and closing speed can make the range of a headlight too short to react. I’ve learned to look for the tiny glint of pedal reflectors, which is how I saw this guy coming:


The burden of care rests with faster users — bicyclists — but pedestrians also do well to carry a light and wear reflectorized items.  In a few places, this is required by law.

Rule 2. Aim bright lights down. I love that bright headlights have become so affordable. I’m old enough to remember when a 300 lumen bike light cost more than a bike. Now you can get 3x that for $30. But with great brightness comes great responsibility… to not blind your fellow users. The old “be seen” weak headlights needed to be aimed straight out at the horizon for maximum visibility. Today’s 900 lumen LED lights should be aimed toward the ground ahead of you. This is not only to keep you from blinding other people, it helps you see debris or pavement issues that could cause you to fall. The best bicycle headlights have a flat-top beam pattern to cast the beam farther without glaring into people’s eyes.

Rule 3. Don’t flash! When it’s dark out. that bright headlight should stay on steady mode. First of all, a flashing headlight is blinding and annoying. It keeps other users from being able to gauge your speed and location. And most importantly, it can cause an epileptic seizure in a vulnerable person. You could literally kill someone with that thing. 

If you want to have a blinkie to catch attention, there are lots of little low-powered lights you can pick up for a buck apiece and strap onto your helmet or bike. Here is some good advice on headlights.

Next: Safety

The next post will cover safety concerns. We’ll look at some path hazards, and discuss intersection safety.

Have fun out there!

* Yeah, there’s always some dumb law out there. This is no exception. Rhode Island requires pedestrians to walk on the left on shared use paths.