Latest tweet from Copenhagenize - thoughts?
"If you could tally how many dead cyclists Forrester and Vehicular Cycylists have on their conscience I have 3 words: Class. Action. Lawsuit."
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
Vehicular Cyclists Kill...
(27 posts)-
Posted 13 years ago #
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Retweeting retweets again. I'll have to pop over for a read to work out what on earth For(r)ester Cycling is...
Also "Separated bicycle infrastructure pre-dates car culture" (citation needed) is interesting. What, pre-car-culture, were bicycles being separated from?
As with any other term for a particular type of (not necessarily overriding) behaviour or (not ubiquitous or even particularly prevalent) infrastructure which has been dubbed a 'philosophy', there's a lot of building-up of a THEM to spit at/tweet about. 'Vehicular cycling' (unless someone's copyrighted the term and legally defined it as described in the linked article) can simply mean as little as 'riding more than an inch out from the kerb in order to avoid being brought to a halt to get round parked cars'. Of course, where there are no parked cars, riding in a position to avoid them wouldn't be necessary.
Down my street it's quite possible to see people vehiculating cyclarily, where they have to cut in between parked cars in order to allow oncoming traffic to proceed without scraping off their wing mirrors against each other.
Posted 13 years ago # -
<sigh>
Without vehicular cycling, utility cycling would be unworkable in this country.
Should we simply stick to leisure cycling on the few segregated routes until the infrastructure arrives and the car culture changes?
<shakes head>
Robert
Posted 13 years ago # -
Thoughts are that certainly on first reading it seems to be a random group of words thrown together in a manner which appears to form a sentence without actually making any sense at all.
Or am I being dim?Posted 13 years ago # -
Jeez, who have I killed this time?
Posted 13 years ago # -
From Wikipedia:
Vehicular cycling (also known as integrated cycling, integrated traffic cycling, cooperative cycling, and bicycle driving) is the practice of riding bicycles on roads in a manner that is in accordance with the principles for driving in traffic.
The phrase vehicular cycling was coined by John Forester in the 1970s to characterize the style of cycling utilized in his native country, the United Kingdom, in contrast to the deferential-to-cars style of cycling and practices that he found to be typical in the United States.
In his book Effective Cycling, Forester contends that "Cyclists fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles".[1] Forester's book is generally considered the primary modern reference work about vehicular cycling, along with Cyclecraft by John Franklin, which is part of Bikeability, the UK's national standard for cycle training, and Bicycling Streetsmarts by John S. Allen, a compact tutorial also published in custom formats including as bicycle driving manuals for some states.
and
Forester first involved himself locally, arguing against the installation of segregated bicycle facilities in the city of Palo Alto, facilities that were based on Netherlands designs adapted for American use and had been recommended to the California Department of Transportation by two researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Oh dear. That last bit was a mistake, John.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Ok so his argument is that cyclist who ride in traffic are killers and/or responsible for road deaths? That is pretty weird reasoning, quite how the words "class, action, lawsuit" apply is really out there however. What's the proposal? Take the victims of smidsy's etc to court?
Time to lay off the blue smarties!!
Posted 13 years ago # -
So is he saying that people who advocate vehicular cycling, in opposition to segregated cycling, are murderers? Or is it that people who cycling with traffic, even in absence of segregated infrastructure, are, in practice, delaying the creation of such infrastructure? So, a bit like my lycra being responsible for people not cycling, my vehicularity is responsible for other cyclists' deaths.
Posted 13 years ago # -
The lawsuit would presumably be against Forrester and/or his publishers for promoting cycling in traffic? Quite a daft comment [ Also cycylists?? like cyclists but more so?]. Seems to be a pattern of what I would read as peculiar views. Of course entitled to have them but other people free to disagree with them, rather than see them as a coherent philosophy
Posted 13 years ago # -
It's interesting to think about. On the one hand, cycling on the road manifestly failed (compare the level of biking 50-60 years ago to now, and what happened to road planning - urban dual carriageways etc - during that period).
Yet, in order to qualify for the provision of a super parallel road network, loads of people have to cycle, and the ones who stick with it and get used to riding around in traffic then dislike schemes which take them off onto pavements-by-another-name with great loss of convenience and possibly even (real, not subjective) safety.
It's like a vicious circle, but more convoluted. Vicious Möbius?
Posted 13 years ago # -
@Dave
I don't see how the growth of motorised transport in the post-war period is manifest evidence of the failure of cycling. What went wrong with cycling?Posted 13 years ago # -
I think mountain biking revitalised all kinds of cycling in late 1980s /1990s. If that is right it took a boom in off road cycling to reinvigorate on road cycling?
Posted 13 years ago # -
Maybe I'm being pedantic. The decline in something is not, in itself, evidence of the failure of the thing. Failure I see as the thing not being fit for its intended purpose. The Apple Newton was a failure. The Zune was simply unsuccessful. Vinyl was superseded.
The bicycle, as a mass mode of transport fell out of favour as the motor car become affordable and the creation of car-based infrastructure further marginalised cycling. But the bike never failed. Given the proper infrastructure it can be enormously successful, even in modern European cities. Or have I misunderstood?
Posted 13 years ago # -
Cycling on the road didn't fail to get me to work and back today. The sections undertaken on the under-crags path and Leamington Walk can be disregarded as they were added to up my distance slightly.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Failure to sustain its popularity? Or decline. On the up again perhaps now
Posted 13 years ago # -
I was thinking in terms of a transportation mode being successful if a random member of the public (with no physical barriers and a journey that could be made straightforwardly) would consider doing so.
In that respect, cycling is not successful because even when there are many positive indicators for an individual (sedentary health issues, debt issues yet servicing an expensive car, a short and easily rideable distance, on objectively safe roads, showers provided at work, already own a bike - which applies to most of the population) only a tiny minority will do so.
We hear that a parallel road network segregated for bikes is needed to get these people to consider cycling, yet cycling is so unpopular that it can't be justified.
I have started obsessing over the widths of streets recently though and how easy it would be to build a parallel road network on many of them - Edinburgh has some incredibly wide streets!
Posted 13 years ago # -
Edinburgh has some wide streets which sometimes suddenly narrow when they hit a chunk of leftover mediaeval building-positioning.
Posted 13 years ago # -
At which point there could be a shared-space style zone...
I think basically I accidentally unfettered my mind and imagined what I would do if I could just rearchitect all the space between building facades, and saw that it was more than I always assumed.
It will never happen, but certainly there are a lot of streets which are going on for 2x the width of narrow streets, which really has to make you think.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I do think. Splitting cycles away from cars seems relatively easy - the cycles peel off to one side (not necessarily the left, though it's far more common) of a bollard/fence/strip of paint whilst the cars take the other option. Zipping segregated streams back together (either for junctions or where there's only space for one combined traffic column) requires more careful thought than that behind several current facilities seems to have had applied during their design and implementation.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I was walking along Queen Street yesterday thinking that you could easily carve out a central section, a bit like the tram lanes on Princes Street, and do the same on George Street to create a nice pair of east/west one-way cycling routes.
You'd have to remove the parking from both of them but, meh, they should do that anyway.
Posted 13 years ago # -
Well, in Paris for instance, they don't get re-attached in the way you'd think (i.e. in any way at all) traffic just turns across the bike lane freely, and when one ends, you just ride on into the traffic stream.
Strangely, there were no cyclist deaths in Paris last year, despite an infrastructure that seems like certain death - pointing to behavioural differences on behalf of drivers, I suppose.
Posted 13 years ago # -
The other thing Edinburgh has is a lot of parallel streets, which could be used imaginatively.
Take Clerk Street/Newington Road and Causewayside/Ratcliffe Terrace. Some vehicular access is required because of shops/homes on the street, but is there any reason why you couldn't make one carriageway one way for motorised traffic and segregate the other for peds and cyclists? The main N-S route for motorised traffic would remain the wider Clerk Street/Newington Road, and cars heading against the flow of the one-way system would just have to go one extra block on that street before turning back onto Causewayside/Ratcliffe Terrace.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I've just started a new thread (too busy to do earlier) -
Posted 13 years ago # -
"I was walking along Queen Street yesterday thinking that you could easily carve out a central section, "
I have often thought this. Would cut out the terror of having to reply on drivers not mowing over the top of you to turn left. You could have separate lights phases for car and cycle traffic.
Posted 13 years ago # -
I quite like riding Queen Street in an odd sort of way....
Posted 13 years ago # -
I quite like riding Queen Street in an odd sort of way....
Me too - I set my own personal non-wind-assisted road-in-town speed record there... But I think you've really got to be going flat out on a road bike to avoid the feeling of intimidation from the sheer weight and speed of the traffic.
Posted 13 years ago # -
"I quite like riding Queen Street in an odd sort of way...."
So would I if I wasn't dodging the potholes - even more than dodging the cars...
Posted 13 years ago #
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