I am a Grade 10 student at Crescent School in Toronto. I have been tasked with an inquiry based project around a topic of my choice in my Civics course. I need to gather as many perspectives and information to help me have the best understanding of my topic so that I can speak effectively and succinctly. I am investigating bike lane protection in Canada, and in the course of my research, I found your name in this article and I hope you could answer a few questions for me.

1. What is your stance with Canada implementing protective bike lanes?

2. In your studies, does Canada have the infrastructure to support protective bike lanes?

I really appreciate your help with this,
Zack Erdman

Because, if you take the trouble to actually look at the photos accompanying the article, you will see that the cycle tracks in question are physically segregated from vehicle traffic by rows of posts, flower troughs at regular intervals or a continuous kerb. The question of whether or not drivers can see the cyclists is neither here nor there: even if they’re so massively blind and inattentive that they don’t see them, they’re physically unable to do them any harm except at the price of ploughing into a concrete flower trough or doing serious damage to their nearside front wheel by bashing against the kerb. The cyclists’ sense of safety on segregated tracks is not illusory: they know that while they’re on them nothing short of a runaway 40-tonne truck is going to be able to get at them.

Next one, then: what about the junctions? Well, that depends on how carefully the junctions are laid out. Segregated tracks that suddenly become un-segregated just where it’s most dangerous plainly aren’t a great deal of use: a bit like a toughened-steel chain with every twentieth link made from papier-maché to cut costs. But countries like the Netherlands and Denmark which have been doing segregated infrastructure for some four decades now have accumulated an impressive library of optimum layouts for every conceivable kind of junction – and will happily share this with anyone interested at very moderate cost.

“I’m still waiting for anyone to identify a single state where vehicular cycling was an official policy at any point in the past 30 years.”

I very much doubt whether you’d find a single US state these past thirty years which actually had anything as coherent as a cycling policy, whether Vehicular or not.

Certainly in Britain, the influence of Vehicular Cycling was not so much that the Departments of Transport or the Environment or any local highways authority ever adopted it as official policy, but rather that it sort-of became that by default: the utterly disastrous doctrine of “shared-use” or “dual-tier” cycling facilities which prevailed from the mid-1970s in official thinking – and which still largely prevails to this day: that the Real Cyclists will be perfectly happy to mix it with dense and fast-moving motor traffic, while painted-on strips and a few incoherent stretches of shared-use pavement would suffice for the kiddies, the timid and the old ladies of both sexes. For traffic planners who hadn’t been near a bike since childhood and for cash-strapped local authorities – essentially people who regarded cyclists as a pain in the arse and wished they’d go away – it was a seductive notion since it really involved their doing nothing: no expensive, brain-taxing and motorist-upsetting attempts at providing proper segregated cycling infrastructure “since apparently most cyclists don’t want it anyway” (…as indeed their most vocal spokesmen didn’t).

Why did the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and (lately) France set about building a coherent national cycling infrastructure as though they really meant it? Well, in part because they didn’t have the Prophet Forester and his disciples to contend with: in fact had probably never heard of him. Vehicular Cycling remains a cult peculiar to the English-speaking world.

We owe people like Forester and his UK disciple John Franklin a certain debt of gratitude in that they kept non-sport cycling alive at its nadir in the early 1970s when it might quite easily have disappeared altogether, the bicycle going the way of the horse as an everyday means of transport. But their influence since then has been entirely unhelpful. Like many resistance movements, they ended up being nearly as much of a bane as the occupying army they were fighting.

I’m still waiting for anyone to identify a single state where vehicular cycling was an official policy at any point in the past 30 years. That is, a state that repealed cyclist-specific far-right restrictions, where bicycles are legal vehicles, where motorists are not allowed to overtake within the same lane as a bicycle.

As far as I can tell, unicorns are at least as relevant to mode share as supposed official support for vehicular cycling.

U.S. policy for the past 30 years hasn’t been driven by vehicular cycling advocates, but by motorists and motor-oriented engineers doing the least they can to comply with checklist requirements for bicycle accommodation.

AASHTO, the American Association of State Highway & Transportation Officials, which publishes the national Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities, isn’t made up of cycling advocates of any sort. Its standards don’t follow vehicular cycling principles any more than they do Dutch or Danish principles. They follow the principle that cars are fast and bikes, if we have to allow them, should be kept out of the way of real traffic.

The problem is that when Forester wrote Effective Cycling, today’s LED lights did not exist. He wrote it then, not today. I read EC, I own a copy, and the stats in that report look nothing like what I got from reading EC. Sidewalk cycling — not that dangerous after all, and collisions from the rear are plenty dangerous, far more than Forester implies. Even salmoning is not that dangerous if you are looking at fatal accidents.