That’s really something, 4200+ registrations in less than two hours.
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These days, obsessive weirdos like Forester are usually found in enthusiast forums, where they write long-winded rants about how a proper timepiece must be hand-assembled from start to finish, berating another user for daring to buy a pair of boots that use a fiberboard lasting board, or extolling the virtues of the RCA Type 44
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I’m not a vehicular cyclist or a Forester fan but it is kinda funny that after a big youtube video (that I haven’t watched) that people seem to think the state of US cycling infrastructure is all his fault. I don’t think there was any chance that we were going to get protected bike lanes in the 60s or 70s, if local governments cited him it was just because he told them what they wanted to hear.
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We actually were headed toward protected bike lanes in the 60s and 70s. I heard a presentation at the National Bike Summit by the head of AASHTO and engineering consultants who just did a major update to the AASHTO bicycle design guide. They started off tracing the history and pointed out that the precursor to the bicycle design guide was based on buffered bike lanes in Davis, CA. Then Forester came along…
Lemme see if I can find a recording of the presentation.
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Not the exact presentation, but this is one of the same presenters. He gets into it around 10 minutes:
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You know, as I was typing the above, I was thinking “Davis probably had bike infrastructure in the 60s” but figured it had been immediately dismissed as kookery by most planners and engineers
damn. did @Orloved snitch on us?
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I checked the byline for sure
i saw it wasn’t him and know he didn’t outright because he left there a long while ago (also raph, if you see this, congrats on all the other writing you do, was also following obscure car blogs back in the day before the whole shitstorm that consumed that media group)
If you want Forester types, go to Brianforums and visit, say, Touring. There are 2-3 people there that absolutely shit all over every thread they possibly can and make the site intolerable.
I think our hazing successfully kept those types away.
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I need to finish that not just bikes video – I clicked on it immediately thinking I knew the backstory on the guy but realized I was thinking of John Finley Scott, another Davis-centered bike crank. I’m a little skeptical that one roadie turned the tide on bike infrastructure alone as opposed to much larger institutional forces within DOTs to keep car speeds up, but you never know.
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Yeah I think it’s an exaggeration to say that it’s all his fault, since car dependency couldn’t possibly be the work of one man. With that said, the ethos he promoted and the explicit advocacy he engaged in did almost single-handedly set back bike infrastructure in California (and effectively a lot of the English-speaking world) by decades just by virtue of stomping out a whole fucking lot of bike infrastructure projects before they could really catch on. He wrapped “let’s do nothing” in a veneer of expertise that made doing nothing a very attractive option to city planners and traffic engineers who already wanted to do nothing. His book and his direct communication with CalTrans engineers got them to pretty much get rid of “bikeways” in their late 70’s plans and those ended up getting adopted by the rest of the country.
I was absolutely raised to be a vehicular cyclist because my dad learned that from other roadies in the 80’s and 90’s and that was the way everyone was taught “bikes” in the 90’s-00’s. Thankfully we both have functioning eyes and brains and could see, when presented with good bike infrastructure, that bike infrastructure is good, actually. But I remember hating it when they put in the first protected bike lanes in Golden Gate Park because it made it slightly harder to go very fast and I was a fit 24 year old who was mostly concerned with going fast and hadn’t yet developed very much empathy.
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Very much this, with the original video coming from a European where bikes have always been taken somewhat seriously as transportation, and not understanding US bike culture pre-Lemond pre-Lance. Forester was worried that bikeways would lead to bikes losing access to existing roads, because bikes weren’t taken seriously to begin with.
to be fair, this is a problem in places where bike infrastructure is good but not perfect and you have to exit a bike lane and enter a roadway or sidewalk to make a turn or connect to another bike path… other users are not happy about bikes being there, and the lack of clear wayfinding often means cyclists are unpredictable
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Well, NJB is originally from Canada and has lived in California, so he has some experience with North American culture and history.
And he’s right that infrastructure induces demand for bike riding. I also think he’s right that, when the inertia leans heavily towards “bikes are toys so do nothing to accommodate them,” it really can take just a tiny bit of opposition from the right person at the right time to quell any kind of change.
Davis is a total anomaly - a college town of mostly students surrounded by tomato fields, and already crunchy (see Village Homes, the Dome housing). And it’s flat as a pancake.
The place is so insufferable. It’s like being surrounded by fast group roadie riders at all times
are they all named brian?
The owner is IIRC.
“brianforums” really brings me back. idk if he was the owner but definitely the boss admin guy.
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