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Comment by jt2190 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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...

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.

Look up Robert Moses (NYC). Or Georges-Eugène Haussmann (Paris), or Ildefons Cerdá (Barcelona). These are general urban planners not strictly concerned with biking, but single individuals can have incredibly extensive effects on huge populations, that may last for centuries (for better or for worse).

In the US, not a single person, but the General Motors/Mack Truck/Firestone Tires/Standard Oil cabal exerted significant influence on shaping how our cities are built. Literally buying up streetcar companies across the nation to put them out of business, among other tactics.

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