The extremists among the VC are probably the "Effective Cycling" proponents, fans of John Forester's essays and his training program for road cyclists. Some of the really hardcore EC Mullahs will tell you that only stupid, careless cyclists get killed; that our roads are perfectly safe; that all you have to do is stand up for yourself, pull yourself up by your own toeclips, and let those drivers know what's what and who's who. A positive attitude, knowledge of road law, and good lane position will stop a raging SUV in its tracks every time, and those who feel any fear are just wimps. Not only that, any cyclist who "gives in" to intimidation by cars is letting the side down. Friends don't let friends ride on sidepaths!
The strongest proponents of Facilities Wonkery are, unsurprisingly, professional "bike planners" who get paid to manage big-budget "bike projects" for civil authorities. The Wonks exist, so they say, to serve the cycling proletariat (as opposed to the VC elite) -- the masses of occasional or weekend cyclists who find riding on public roads a terrifying prospect. To be fair, there are many people who do feel like this. On the other hand, to be truthful as well, it is possible that many people feel like this mostly because the Wonks have been telling them for over 25 years that riding a bicycle on the streets is dreadfully dangerous.
The hardcore Facilities Wonks seem to feel that cyclists are some kind of small, fuzzy, helpless baby animals who should be kept in a petting zoo because they are obviously unfit to deal with the real world. It would be cruel and irresponsible to let them go out there and get eaten, poor dears. To these folks, cyclists and pedestrians are "different", like "special needs kids" -- a client population who need to be "taken care of for their own good." Cycling in particular is seen as inherently dangerous, an activity which should be undertaken only in a tailored, padded environment and under close governmental supervision.
Of course there's nothing new in this dichotomy. It's well attested wherever an empowered group (car-centered society in our case) deals with a relatively disempowered group. The Horatio Alger types say that "you can grow up and become just like us real people if you really want to, so stop your whining and get with the program." The Nanny types say, "you poor benighted heathen will clearly never be able to grow up and be like us real people, so we are obliged to establish a Protectorate and rule you for your own good." Needless to say, neither is very effective in getting real justice or parity for the people being exhorted, or as the case may be, managed.
The funny thing is that the Wonks and the Mullahs are not actually as opposite as they seem. Like the two schools of colonialist thought caricatured above, the two teams share one fundamental assumption which makes them more alike than different. That assumption is who the "real people" are.
What both teams have in common is a belief that the private automobile is normative: motorists are real or normal people, everyone else is "different". The Mullahs advise cyclists to envision themselves as just like cars. Cars are the standard, and we can be just like cars, so there's no problem -- unless we cause problems by not behaving enough like cars! In which case, we just need re-educating to teach us how to be more like cars. To the Wonks, cars are still the Real Thing; but we lowly non-motorized ones are not like cars and can never live up to such a high standard -- so we are still the problem. What we need is to be hustled out of the way of motor traffic (which of course, naturally, takes priority). We will be, er, "more comfortable with our own kind."
Both schools of thought call themselves "pro-bike" and often describe their position as "cycling advocacy". But ironically both schools may discourage some cyclists, and thus fail to promote cycling.
The Mullahs place a premium on skills, training, etc. Indeed some of the more extreme among them deliver the message that no one should cycle at all unless they take an approved class, become expert, etc. -- one feels that pretty soon they may be calling for "cycling licenses". Many people who just want to ride to the corner store and back could be put off by all this. Is cycling really so complicated that you have to take classes? Or is it so dangerous that only trained professionals should attempt it? Hard to say, but either interpretation could dampen the enthusiasm of the novice: even though the Mullahs deny that the roads are dangerous, they emphasize that "incompetent cycling" is very dangerous, and no one is considered competent until qualified by a genuine, certified EC instructor. So don't try this at home, kids.
The facilities school, on the other hand, supports its agenda by greatly exaggerating the dangers of our roads. It's easier to get funding for large separate-facilities projects, if you can convince people that their lives are in imminent danger if they dare to ride on their own public streets. Wonkspeak is marked by phrasing like "At last, the citizens of Averageville will have a safe and pleasant place to ride their bikes!" This all sounds very positive; but the underlying message is that it's very dangerous and nasty to ride a bike anyplace other than a special purpose-built recreational facility. This implicit "Warning Danger Will Robinson" can not only discourage adults from riding, but influence parents to forbid their children to ride. Cycling is simple enough, say the Wonks, but the streets are so perilous that you must not use them.
The Mullahs would like us to ignore and deny the real problems of unsafe driving, insufficient bike parking, bad road design, an excessive number of cars, and other things that make cycling less pleasant and more risky than it needs to be. No improvement is needed -- everything is fine, just fine, if you only know what you are doing.
The Wonks propose to segregate cyclists from "normal people", sidelining cycling into a recreational activity -- "keep 'em off the streets". They are eager to sink many millions of taxpayer dollars into mammoth "special facilities" projects, not all of which turn out to be useful in practice (Redways is one example that leaps to mind here). Meanwhile, it seems like "budgets are tight" is the answer street cyclists always get when we complain that pot holes go unfixed, broken glass never gets swept up, and our police fail to make drivers behave.
In neither rhetoric is there any room for real accountability; neither points the finger at the root cause of however much real-world risk pedestrians and cyclists do experience. No spotlight is turned on the people who choose to drive everywhere, or on the planners and bureaucrats and officials who spend their careers and our dollars encouraging and enabling that. The covert agenda (maintaining the private automobile as central and normative) defeats the overt agenda: the spotlight remains on the cyclist (or pedestrian) as "the problem". Either the cyclist is deficient in skills (bad cyclist!) or the cyclist doesn't belong on the public streets at all (bad cyclist!). What a dismal choice.
If you don't accept the private auto as normative, it can be very hard to find a place to stand in contemporary "bike safety" debates. Sure, I can agree with bits and pieces of both platforms. But no way can I accept the shared, tacit, fundamental assumption of the private automobile as normative.
Lee Nichols once said, "I've decided that bicyclists have two major safety threats: cars and themselves." I see his point.
But this aphorism is surely true of most of us, in every walk of life. People who get caught up in Ponzi schemes and other scams have two enemies: con men, and themselves. People who get suckered into unhealthy lifestyles under the barrage of advertising have two enemies: corporate wannabe mind-controllers, and themselves. Granted there are always some pure hapless victims, and some pure reckless fools; but most of us, if/when we do get into trouble, can honestly attribute it partly to a lapse of judgment and partly to inflicted danger -- in varying proportions. This seems temptingly like a universal law; if so, it ought to apply to cycling as much as (and no more than) anything else.
Many cyclists do take foolish risks, riding without regard for road law or even self-preservation. We've all seen wildcat left turns without even a backwards glance, desperate sprints across a red-turning signal, that sort of thing. The hardcore Mullahs would say that most cycling injuries and deaths are due to stupid, reckless or (more forgivingly) "untrained" riding; and if these bad habits were corrected then no cyclists would ever die on the road. It's your own silly fault if you get hurt, Bud.
Myself, I'm not able to blame even our unskilled or our wildcat cyclists whole-heartedly. Sure, their behaviour is rash (or clueless, as the case may be). But the consequences of rash or clueless behaviour are grossly amplified by the presence of so many heavy, fast-moving vehicles all around.
Suppose we imagine wildcat cycling on the main boulevard in a Chinese city circa 1978. The street is thronged with slowly pedalling people on those heavy old "Mao-bikes" . . . the wildcat cyclist careers through the crowd . . . an error of judgment results in a bike collision at 15mph max, with at most a half-dozen bikes getting tangled up. The odds on a fatality or major injury are low -- more likely a bruise and a scrape or two, a dented fender, some spilled cargo, plus some shouting, handwaving, and hard feelings.
Now if take the same young firebrand cyclist and drop him [sorry guys, but the odds are it's a young man rather than a young woman] into downtown SF (or even my own town of Santa Cruz, CA). The cyclist is effectively swimming in a river of large, heavy cars. An error of judgment can result in his slamming into a solid steel wall, or going under someone's wheels. The stakes have been arbitrarily raised, like going from level 1 to level 40 in Space Invaders. Unlike a natural river, this environment is artificially dangerous. This is not accidental, it didn't "just happen": we have made it that way with great investment of time, thought, and money. Our entire city is now a "special facility" for cars.
In my own town, I see on my average trip across town about as many moving violations committed by drivers, as I see incidents of "cowboy cycling". But the wildcat cyclist, on average, risks only his own neck. Not so the driver: quite the reverse in fact.
Our environment is not only artificially dangerous, but artificially inequitable. In our theoretical 70's Chinese boulevard almost everyone is on a bike. All errors of judgment are more or less equal in cost. This might be called "road democracy." In our 21st century American city, our cyclist is not only at amplified risk from his own errors of judgment; he is at risk from the errors of judgment committed by drivers. Those errors will cost the driver, personally, almost nothing. Forty years of high-tech vehicle engineering guarantee that the driver will not get hurt. We do not meet as equals in a democratic society, on streets where the automobile has been granted primacy. We meet as knights armed cap a pied (drivers) and peasant footsoldiers (everyone else) -- a flashback to our feudal past. This is not what democracy looks like.
Our theoretical Facilities Wonk says that this is just how streets are, this is is how streets are supposed to be, world without end, amen. Cars will be cars, and there's just nothing we can do about it. Furthermore, cyclists are not vehicle operators -- "they" are inherently ineducable and incompetent (whether wildcats or newbies), so let's not pretend they can be taught to ride less recklessly. Skill has nothing to do with it -- these are just rabbits caught in the headlights, opossums trying to cross the road.
No, the peasants need to be segregated from motor traffic completely. For their own good, of course -- but as a desirable side effect this will get them out of the way of drivers, many of whom resent the nuisance of slowing down or keeping a conscientious lookout for peds and bikes. Get the bikes and peds out of the way, restrict them to "a place of their own," and motor traffic can roll through even faster -- which is after all the holy grail of every traffic planner. I am not the first cyclist who finds this strategy uncomfortably reminiscent of certain other "separate but unequal" solutions to social inequity; the bantustan, the reservation.
The Facilities Wonks do propose beautiful reservations -- er, that is, scenic, car-free "trails" and paths. But alas, all the graded, paved real estate in town is already reserved for cars. So the new trails and sidepaths unfortunately go from nowhere to nowhere on bits of scrap land and swamp land, around lengthy detours; seldom do they approach any shopping centres, restaurants, medical facilities, cafes, bookshops, hardware stores, or any other destination that people actually need to get to on a daily basis. Sometimes the Wonks propose to tear up existing railbeds and replace them with 12-foot-wide paved "multi-use" pathways (for cyclists, skaters, skateboarders, joggers, dog-walkers, and everyone else not-in-a-car). This is enough to make a public transit advocate tear his or her hair in exasperation: shall we now place "cyclists" in conflict with the development and conservation of light rail and public transit? Shall we now spend millions of dollars destroying the rail infrastructure that we should, if we were in our right minds, be preserving and restoring?
The Wonks habitually focus on "special" (read "impractical") facilities for cyclists, rather than on making the roads we have less specialized, less dedicated to only one kind of traveller. In the process, they propose to pave over even more of our last remaining unpaved land. And if they do succeed in diverting a significant number of cyclists into this parallel and inferior roadway network, that leaves fewer bikes on the real street system; this means that these few (these plucky few, this band of stubborn road cyclists) are now contending with motorists who not only don't expect them to be there, but think cyclists "belong" on the nice trail system that the wise and good authorities have provided. No one who has been asked what the [blank] they think they are doing riding a [blanking] bike on the [blanking] road will be very keen on encouraging this attitude.
Having roasted the Wonks this thoroughly, it is only fair to devote a pass of the flamethrower to the Mullahs. "Cars are our friends," say some of the Mullahs. Roads are good. More roads are better. Wider roads are best of all. Cyclists should support the highway industry: we should stand on the sidelines and cheer as more millions of miles of American countryside are paved, as wildlife corridors are transected, as more permeable soil is sealed away from the water cycle, as more and more of our city is asphalted and concreted over. After all, nice wide straight smooth American-engineered roads are good for us; they're nice to ride on. More roads mean more nice places for us to ride, so no problem, roll on the concrete. Cyclists have no business siding with those commie greenies against Our Friends the auto and highway industries. Criticizing car culture is the mark of the wimp, the whiner, and the traitor to the EC cause. And those damn hippie Critical Massers should be firmly dealt with; they antagonize drivers (gasp!) and give cycling a bad name.
All this optimism and good cheer of course flies in the face of accumulating research -- research conducted independently of Facilities Wonkery -- about the negative impacts of automobile dependence and the futility of "increased capacity" road planning. Even the most doggedly auto-centred planning departments all over the world are finally admitting that "predict and provide" is, gee whillikers, a dead end; communities are counting up the costs of endless road widenings and "improvements" that never actually fix the gridlock problem; governments are adding up the billions of dollars of lost productivity caused simply by traffic congestion; health agencies are counting the dead, maimed, and sickly (not only road crash victims, but people who with lung ailments from breathing polluted air all their lives).
All over the globe, researchers and policy makers are reluctantly (and rather quietly, so far) admitting that the private automobile is a Problem; a Big Problem; maybe even one of The Big Problems of our time. The Union of Concerned Scientists went so far as to call it the second most imminent threat to human survival -- the first being nuclear proliferation. That's a heckuva silver medal, folks. It seems terminally naive at this point in history for the Mullahs to insist that Cars are our Friends, that roadway building should proceed just as it has for the last quarter-century, that it's politically stupid to challenge the automobile. Surely this is a very good moment for reflection and re-evaluation, and none too soon.
So, if cars are not our plastic friends who are fun to play with -- but if handing over our roads to the motorists while we run off to play in the sandbox is also not the answer -- then what is the answer? Is there an Answer to the Ultimate Question of Cycling Safety?
If we're not to end up with an answer as useless and mystifying as "forty-two", we obviously need to clarify the question. What's our goal? Is it just "to make people safer?" Surely it's not that simple. After all, we can always "make people safer" by locking them up in little boxes and never letting them out. In fact, you could say that this is where we have been heading for several decades, locking road users into little boxes called cars and calling them "unsafe" if they try to travel outside the box.
We now define as "unsafe" anything other than sitting strapped into a padded seat inside an armoured container! If your kid gets a skinned knee or a touch of road rash while stunting around the neighbourhood (injuries which I admit are hard to come by while strapped into a box), that just proves that bicycles are dreadfully dangerous and should not be allowed. What are we thinking? Where did we lose the common sense to admit that kids do get into scrapes -- always have, and always will unless we imprison them and strap them down? Do we really want to imprison people and strap them down to keep them "safe"?
Increasing safety is a worthy goal; but if we're reasonable I think we have to admit that it can't be called a success when we achieve a reduction in injuries or deaths only by further restrictions on people's freedom of movement and their life choices. I propose another (possibly conflicting) goal, which is to increase personal freedom. Specifically, I'd like to expand people's options for personal mobility and travel so that the private auto is no longer the only option: so that the 40 percent of our population people who cannot afford cars, or are not qualified to drive, or just don't want to drive, have full freedom of movement and feel like full citizens in their own country.
Another goal I personally endorse (repugnant though it may be to some of the Mullahs) is to get a lot of the 60 percent who do drive, out of their cars. For the sake of cleaner air; for the sake of eking out our reserves of oil a few more years and enabling a smoother transition to a non-petroleum-based economy; for the sake of a healthier public and a healthier public life; for any of these reasons and more, it would be excellent if we all drove less and biked, walked, and used transit more. Besides, people who bike and walk a lot are safer drivers when they do drive: they know what it's like to be the person outside the car.
If we want to pursue these twin goals -- increasing freedom and decreasing car use -- we have to abandon the traditional safety authorities' strategy of "size, weight, and armour plate". You just can't load down pedestrians and cyclists with air bags, steel containers, and all the rest. Today we play a weird compensation game. First we establish a law-of-the-jungle, might-makes-right road culture; then we try to armour all travellers sufficiently to render them immune to the anarchy and mayhem out there. This won't do. If we really want safety, we need to reduce the anarchy, slow down the traffic, encourage people to drive (if they must) and ride their bikes (which we hope they will) with caution and courtesy.
But above all, if we're to increase freedom, we need to whittle away at the absolute hegemony of automobile travel everywhere: in our cities, towns, and rural areas. The primacy of the automobile and the domination of our public space by motor traffic has been for decades steadily, slowly diminishing the freedom of all the people who can't or don't drive. In many of our cities, the average pedestrian trying to cross the street feels uncomfortably like Wang Wei Lin.
Maritime law -- some of the oldest law there is -- traditionally says that steam gives way to sail: on our streets, cars should give way to bikes, bikes to pedestrians, and pedestrians to the slower or less able among them. It's courtesy, it's tradition, and it's plain common sense. Today, we have it all ass-backwards: the fastest and heaviest vehicles rule the road by right of weight. Today, we force the pedestrians to scurry across the road like scared chickens; our pedestrian light timing has been shortened so that the motorists won't have to wait "too long." We instruct cyclists that they must ride "as far to the right as possible" so that they do not for a moment impede the progress of the more rapid motor vehicle. Motorists in rural Pennsylvania complain that Amish buggies are "unsafe" and should be banned. We even cut down shade trees along our roadways, because the trees "cause" accidents (i.e. irresponsible people sometimes drive too fast, lose control of the vehicle, and run into a tree).
If we really want to increase both safety and freedom, we have to change all this, and rule our roads by right of way. This of course would be a major change, actually a social justice movement, a sustained effort with far-reaching consequences: exactly what neither team in our endless World Cup match wants to undertake. Neither team is willing to curb the disproportionate privilege of motorists by one inch; neither is willing to take specific political and legal steps to reduce the number of cars on the road or their speed. One wants to "educate" the cyclists, the other to whisk us "safely" out of the way of the cars. Neither is willing to tell the (driving) public what it doesn't want to hear: it's the motorists' behaviour, the motorists' habits, the motorists' complete dominion over the public streets that have to change.
Of course this isn't going to be a popular message -- the messenger is likely to get shot, and it's hard to blame anyone too harshly for shirking the task. Nevertheless, it's disappointing to see the Mullahs and the Wonks doggedly going at it hammer and tongs, year after year, battling it out on their chosen playing field: a small space as it were, in the middle of a vast and growing parking lot. In the end, this show protects the interests of the automobile and motoring lobby by keeping us all distracted from the real problem. The Mullahs and the Wonks have been kicking the ball of bike safety around for 30 years now, making some spectacular goals (and own-goals for that matter), but no matter which of them finally wins the title, the only real winner will be the motorist.
Suppose we did for one instant in human history focus our attention and our political will on the real problem: overuse of cars, too many cars, a skewed and warped transportation system. Consider the possibilities! We could reduce risk for everyone -- pedestrians and cyclists, but motorists as well; we could restore the life and atmosphere of town centres, reduce noise, reduce pollution, reduce consumer debt, reduce the automotive burden on our tax revenues, enhance our public health... if we could just stop focussing narrowly on what is wrong with cyclists and pedestrians, and what needs to be done about them and how best to fix them. To rephrase the old saw: cyclists and pedestrians ain't broke, so don't fix 'em.
We have been walking quite successfully for over 20,000 years, and we have been cycling pretty successfully for over 150 years. Only in the last 75 years has the automobile taken over our world and made it hard to do either of these things efficiently or pleasantly any more.
What's broken is our whole approach to transportation, city planning, urban design. It is our cities and towns that are broken -- not the people who are trying to live and move about in them without depending on cars. Those folks don't need any kind of "special" facilities: all they need is justice and courtesy. We have, I repeat, made our whole world a "special facility" -- for motorists and their cars. That is the problem we need to fix. It's not going to get fixed while we all stand around mesmerized by the umpteenth return match of the Wonks vs the Mullahs.