05/14/2025
Did you know one man killed a generation of cycling in America?
What if I told you cycling on a bike path is 1,000 times more dangerous than riding in traffic?
Read the full story: https://open.substack.com/.../the-man-who-killed-us-cycling
Sounds absurd, right? Like most people, I feel much safer riding in a protected bike lane than mixing with speeding cars. But believe it or not, that was the conclusion John Forester drew in the 1970s.
Forester, a vocal cycling advocate and traffic engineer, claimed that off-street bike paths posed extreme dangers—far more than riding on the road with cars. How did he arrive at this conclusion? Through an “experiment” involving exactly one person: himself.
He rode at high speeds on a side path, then attempted to take a left turn from the right bike lane across traffic at high speed. From that anecdotal experience, he extrapolated a sweeping claim: that separated bike infrastructure was inherently unsafe, “about 1000 times more dangerous” in fact.
If one man had a weird take about bike safety, who cares? Unfortunately, Forester’s views helped define U.S. cycling policy for decades.
His theory—called vehicular cycling—argued that bikes should be treated like cars and that cyclists are safest when riding in traffic, not separated from it. This idea made its way into the engineering standards that shaped American roads. Manuals from groups like AASHTO effectively excluded bike lanes from recommended infrastructure.
The result? American cities largely stopped building bike infrastructure. For decades, there was no mainstream support for separated lanes, even as cities in Europe were transforming urban cycling with protected networks.
It wasn’t until the 2000s that cities like New York and Washington, D.C., began building modern bike lanes and updating engineering guidance. Over the last 15 years, study after study has shown what common sense already told most of us: protected bike lanes dramatically improve safety. And not just for cyclists, but for drivers and pedestrians too.
Today, many U.S. cities are finally expanding their cycling networks. But the U.S. is still decades behind where it could have been if Forester’s theories hadn’t dominated planning culture for so long.
Back in the 1960s, some American cities were already experimenting with bike lanes. But Forester’s flawed and influential theories helped stall that progress for a generation.
The good news? The tide has turned. With a growing body of evidence, a new generation of planners, and public demand for safer streets, we’re finally starting to undo the damage.
Now it’s up to us to push for the infrastructure we should’ve been building all along.
