We know why this works, what it takes to make it work, and how practical it
is.
Why does society object so strongly to this principle?
In the field of cycling affairs, the scientific process has been corrupted. Very few people accept the scientific evidence that the vehicular-cycling technique and principle are correct. Even the supposedly responsible scientific and engineering organizations have refused to act in accordance with the scientific evidence. The responsible scientific committee has made many efforts, many forbidden by standard scientific procedures and many irrational, to squelch all recognition of the vehicular-cycling principle. Such actions require some very powerful psychological force that makes its actors believe that they are acting responsibly. This is the cyclist-inferiority superstition, complex, and phobia. The government has based its cycling policy on this cyclist-inferiority superstition, for reasons that favor motorists.
The characteristics of the psychological force that corrupts scientific, engineering, political judgement about cycling affairs meets all the characteristics of the definition of a phobia by the American Psychological Association, except one. The APA believes that all phobias are rare conditions, whereas the cyclist-inferiority phobia is nearly ubiquitous. Obviously, when everyone in a society except a small, disdained minority suffers from a phobia, the phobia is invisible and its effects are looked on as laws of nature.
Anti-motoring bicycle advocates inhabit a difficult psychological position. Anti-motoring itself is a field of unscientific, even aesthetic, opinions outside the scope of fact, but it requires bicycle transportation as a substitute for motoring. However, the anti-motoring bicycle advocates have chosen to base their strategy on a system invented by motorists to improve motoring, and made politically acceptable by defining cyclists as inferior to motorists. But that system is scientifically false. The anti-motoring bicycle advocate has to argue for two mutually opposed but equally unscientific programs while staving off the scientifically sound criticism from vehicular cyclists. Shall we say that the arguments are irrational?
In the Spring of 2007 a group of bicycle advocates started venting their criticism of my and my views, specifically using my name, in a public e-mail forum. Hearing of this activity, I joined the forum and participated in the debate. Most of the discussants opposed vehicular cycling and supported bikeways. Surprisingly, most of these admitted that they cycled in the vehicular manner because that was best, but advocated bikeways just the same, with the public pretense that bikeways made cycling safe without vehicular cycling. Typical of the convoluted psychology of bikeway advocacy. They presented all the standard arguments for bikeways and against a vehicular-cycling policy. I disproved all except that bikeways are popular, which I explained in different terms. After such losses they lost their temper and expelled me.
Fiction is a mirror held up to life. In cycling, fiction gives us a much more accurate picture of what people really thought about cycling than do the supposedly serious, but politically motivated, studies of cycling transportation. Not that the picture always accurately describes cycling; much of the literature exposes the general ignorance of cycling that passed for knowledge. Only in the great decade, 1890 to 1900, was cycling accurately described and accurately praised. There were fantasies also, but fantasies that accurately foresaw some of today's cycling experiences. Only one major English novelist wrote a cycling novel, in the middle of that great decade, a novel that most consider a potboiler but which describes the cyclists whom we still meet along the road. By Galsworthy's time, in The Forsyte Saga, cycling was disdained instead of praised. Cyclists were seen as lower class, even evil. And then, in 1972, from an otherwise unknown writer, came the greatest cycling novel of all, one that we who have raced know has been written by someone who's been there with us.
Since 1940, I have viewed American cycling in its social, legal, and engineering settings, from the viewpoint of one trained in the British cycling tradition. Since 1970 I have been one of the leading persons in the application of reliable knowledge to cycling affairs. This article is my account of American cycling history as I have seen and participated in it.
America managed to impose its bikeway system upon cyclists, despite the fact that the only supports for such a system are motorists' desire to kick cyclists off the roadways and anti-motorists' superstition that doing so will benefit America.
Because of the conflict between governmental cycling policy and scientific knowledge about good cycling, the League of American Bicyclists should be confronting the government and opposing its bicycle policy and programs. This explains the scientific basis for the conflict, and urges the League to start doing what it should have been doing from the beginning.
Improving cyclists' behavior and safety requires changing national attitudes. The American attitude encourages, practically requires, incompetent and dangerous behavior by cyclists and encourages dangerous behavior by motorists. The few American competent cyclists know and behave better. Cyclists in other nations behave in accordance with their national attitudes, and in some nations they behave competently and safely. If they can, why can't we?
Each nation has its own attitude toward cycling transportation. In part those attitudes reflect objective physical and historical conditions. In part they reflect subjective and manipulated psychological conditions. America needs a psychological and political attitude toward cycling transportation that reflects its objective conditions and the historical events that produced them. However, that is exactly what the government and society refuse to accept.
Publication of articles such as this in a respected and refereed journal by three supposed experts on bicycle transportation shows not only the sad state of bicycle transportation in the USA, but also the abysmally low level of our public understanding of the intellectual muddle that we have made of it.
Another publication that asserts, without any degree of proof or reason, that European bikeway systems create bicycling transportation and make it very safe and useful. This author has stated that he knew nothing at all about the literature of bicycling transportation engineering when he wrote this and the article reviewed above.
Bicycle transportation has a place in societies in which private motor transportation is commonly available. But this place is very different from that envisioned by the bicycle advocates.
This study claims that the behavior of child cyclists aged 10 to 12, when yielding to traffic at stop-signed intersections, show developmental deficiencies relative to adult cyclists. In fact, the small differences detected are much more likely caused by the ignorance of the investigators of the elementary laws of physics and of normal traffic-cycling behavior.
A paper claims that increasing the volume of bicycle transportation has been shown to make cycling safer. Analysis of the paper shows that the claim is nothing more than wishful thinking and that the claim is probably erroneous.
Sociology and Psychology page last changed: 20-Apr-08