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points

by hamdingers17 hours ago |

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by jt219012 hours ago|

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As I understand it, in those days cyclists in the U.S. were largely given two bad options:

Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.

Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.

Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.

by hamdingers12 hours ago|

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Modern on-street painted bike lanes were less than 10 years old in the US when Effective Cycling was published, only a handful of California cities had a few miles of them. The average US cyclist had never even seen one.

So the options at the time were riding on the sidewalk or in the street, and Effective Cycling became popular because it contained some genuinely good advice for cycling on a street with no infrastructure. Unfortunately Forester felt that this was the best and only way to safely cycle, which is why he immediately became popular with state and local DOTs who did not want to build bike lanes.

by jt21908 hours ago|

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I guess I don’t buy the narrative that we’d have some kind of cycling paradise in the U.S. if it weren’t for this one guy.

by hamdingers8 hours ago|

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He wrote the CalTrans Bicycle Guide which later became the national AASHTO Bike Guide. These guides prohibited protected bike lanes and discouraged dedicated bike infrastructure until 2012.

It is not an exaggeration, he set national cycling infrastructure policy in the US that stood for decades.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Forester_(cyclist)#1978_C...

by sellmesoap7 hours ago|

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I think the real issue is where is the space for the truly seperated bike lanes? I've personally experienced the new segregated lanes as a distinct regular threat to my safety as a cyclist, I was safer before the lanes were put in (at great tax payer cost and local businesses griping about less parking space) I'm in a smaller city now and they're spending a lot of money they don't have making these segregated lanes, creating the same problem all over again and making the driving feel claustrophobic to boot! I understand making a road feel less safe, or too narrow is a strategy to calm traffic down, but the old roads were just short of two lanes wide and felt quite safe in comparison. The worst spots in Vancouver aside from the dunsmiur upgrade I was referring to above are also bike corridors, a round about may slow a car down but for a 2 wheeler it does not, it's still not safe for the bike as cars try to cross or turn onto the bike lane, it truly is an all or nothing, I felt safer biking in raw Broadway or grandville street traffic then the adjacent mixed traffic bike corridors.

by cyberax16 hours ago|

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So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.

What was the result?

A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...

Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.

by Manuel_D15 hours ago|

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Why would cycling infrastructure reduce pedestrian incidents? They'd presumably decrease cyclist collisions. And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame, steady rates of traffic incidents involving cyclists amounts to an increase in safety: https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-br...

by cyberax14 hours ago|

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The infrastructure sabotage was done as a part of the Zero Vision program, that included both pedestrian and bike safety. It achieved neither.

> And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame

The percentage of bike commutes in Seattle is in the noise, around 2-3% of the non-remote-work commutes. So the data is too noisy for any reasonable statistical significance.

For example, this year was deadly with 4 cyclist deaths (to date). In 2024 there were no cyclist deaths.

by hamdingers16 hours ago|

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Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades? Doesn't sound like it, these are overall numbers. Maybe more people are walking/biking now, maybe just noise (10 and 18 ped deaths is really good for a major city already, in LA it's 160+).

Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/

by cyberax15 hours ago|

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> Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades?

No statistically significant correlation.

From my personal observations, sabotage of arterials resulted in a lot of traffic shifting onto the side streets that are much less safe. But our local DoT doesn't have enough traffic data to confirm or disprove this, I tried to FOIA it.

> Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/

Look at the dates on these studies. Nearly all of them come from the period of the global crime drop, a result of the leaded gasoline phaseout.

I recently tried to replicate some of the studies of bike lane effects and quite often found the _opposite_ of the original studies. For example, in Seattle the business tax receipts declined more steeply on streets within 1 block of a protected bike lane compared to controls.

by hamdingers15 hours ago|

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I tried giving you the benefit of the doubt, but your word choices make it clear you're not approaching this topic in good faith. This means your anecdotes are even more worthless than normal.

Get your attempted study published and reviewed, then I'll take your observations seriously.

by cyberax14 hours ago|

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Do an experiment: try to find papers in pro-urbanist publications that look past 2016 in the US cities like SF or Seattle. 2016 is a good starting point, as it's the year when a lot of Vision Zero construction kicked off.

Go on, I'll wait.

Still waiting.

Oh, there are almost no publications? Wonder why. And the ones that do appear tend to be relegated to rarely cited journals. E.g.: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19427867.2022.2...

> We examined changes in counts and per capita rates of all, pedestrian, and bicyclist fatal motor vehicle collisions between 2007 and 2019 for 18 U.S. cities that took early Vision Zero pledges. Only 2 of the 18 cities have experienced statistically significant decreases in total fatalities since taking a Vision Zero pledge and only one city experienced a statistically significant decrease in pedestrian fatalities.