Senator Feinstein sent me a letter (25 June 97) saying that she believes that
"intelligent planning of bicycle paths can serve both transportation and
safety interests," and saying that she encouraged me to "share [my]
ideas with state and local planning authorities in order to assist in the
creation of safe, efficient routes for bicycle transportation."
I am sorry to read that the senator has been so poorly informed in this matter.
The Federal government is far behind some of the states in the subject of
bicycle transportation. Practically everything that I say herein about bicycle
transportation was developed in California with the knowledge of CALTRANS, and
through the governmental relations efforts of the California Association of
Bicycling Organizations. A comprehensive discussion of this science of bicycle
transportation engineering is in my book, Bicycle Transportation. (2nd ed, The
MIT Press, 1994)
It is commonly asserted, and some people even believe it, that the Federal
government has had a 25-year-long history of encouraging bicycle transportation.
This claim is false, as almost every action or event shows. The bicycling
program of the Federal government has not been devoted to encouraging bicycle
transportation but, in accordance with the wishes of the motoring organizations,
to preventing bicycle traffic from disturbing motor traffic. Thus, ironically,
when examined objectively, the Federal bicycling program has done more to
encourage motoring than to encourage cycling.
One would think that a contradiction of this magnitude would not have survived
so long. It has survived because the program is based on a very large lie, and
it is often easier to get away with very large lies than with small ones. The
very large lie is that same-direction motor traffic is the greatest danger to
cyclists, so that protecting cyclists against same-direction motor traffic is
the most urgent safety problem in cycling. I say openly that this is a very
large lie because same-direction motor traffic causes only 2% of car-bike
collisions in urban areas in daylight (the conditions under which we expect to
expand cycling transportation) and only 0.3% of accidents to cyclists, and,
furthermore, the Federal government has known this since 1977 on the basis of
its own study of car-bike collisions done for the National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration by Ken Cross. The analysis of Cross's data given above is
found in my Bicycle Transportation, Chap 5.
The public has been persuaded of the truth of this lie by decades of propaganda
by the motoring organizations. The motoring organizations disseminate this lie
because those measures taken because of it, frightening cyclists with fear of
death, restrictive traffic laws, building bike paths and bike lanes, are
precisely those that ensure that the roadways are kept clear of cyclists for the
convenience of motorists.
In pursuing this program, the Federal Highway Administration has contracted for
many studies whose scientific merits have been thoroughly disproved. After all,
when one is trying to prove the equivalent of the hypothesis that the Earth is
flat, the level of science will be ludicrous.
The first federal effort was to establish scientific federal designs for bike
lanes and bike paths, which resulted in a final report, Safety and Location
Criteria for Bicycle Facilities, Final Report, FHWA-RD-75-112. The science used
in this report was so thoroughly criticized that the accompanying design
standards were never used. Instead, the federal government adopted the AASHTO
Guide for Bicycle Facilities, which had started out as the California standard,
developed at least with the cognizance of cyclists, and made considerably safer
by their opposition.
For the next fifteen years the federal effort was largely a series of
demonstration bikeways, none of which supported the claim that bikeways made
cycling much safer. (I point out that some things done in addition to installing
the bike path or the bike-lane stripe, such as removing on-street parking of
automobiles, did reduce the accident rate while encouraging cycling, but the
effect cannot be attributed to the bikeway itself.)
In 1992, Congress authorized the FHWA to undertake a study of means to double
the amount of walking and cycling transportation while reducing the accident
rate. The FHWA let contracts for 24 studies. Even before the list of studies was
finalized, the bicycling study subjects were criticized strongly as not being
devoted to substantive improvements, such as reducing the accident rate or
making cycling transportation more efficient. Instead, these studies were based
on justifying the false claim that bikeways made cycling safe, like trying to
prove that the Earth is flat. Naturally, while the studies were produced, there
is practically nothing in them that describes the actions that would be
necessary to accomplish the stated objectives. No actions described in these
studies can reasonably be expected to reduce the cyclist accident rate. Almost
all of any increase in the volume of cycling transportation would be caused by
unethically using the public superstition about the safety of bikeways to
persuade people to cycle without decreasing the dangers to which they are
exposed or their ability to operate safely in that environment. Indeed, if the
program has any success in increasing the volume, the accident rate is likely to
increase disproportionally.
The FHWA was so afflicted by the criticism of its earlier scientific efforts
that it contracted for a survey of scientific work on bicycle transportation
done since the 1970s. This was Bicycle-Safety-Related Research Synthesis,
FHWA-RD-94-062, by Andy Clarke and Linda Tracy of the Bicycle Federation of
America. (It is important to note that the Bicycle Federation of America is not
a cycling organization. It is a consulting firm that depends on bike planning
work and on the bike-planning seminars that it holds, and its work is generally
despised among well-informed cyclists.) I enclose a copy of my critique of that
document, demonstrating that the research synthesis is ill-informed and biased.
However, the document contains one extremely significant admission. It admits
that bikeways do not make cycling significantly safer.
With this setback, the FHWA evidently decided that it was useless to try to base
its tactics on any demonstration of bikeway safety. However, it could still rely
on the public superstition that same-direction motor traffic is the greatest
danger to cyclists. Its bike-programming contractor, the Bicycle Federation of
America, invented a system for classifying American cyclists into classes A, B,
and C: experienced Adults, inexperienced Beginners, and pre-teen Children. This
was stated in Selecting Roadway Treatments for the Accommodation of Bicycles, by
W. C. Wilkinson III, A. Clarke, B. Epperson, R. Knoblauch; FHWA-RD-92073, Jan
1994. The catch about the classes of bicyclist is that these authors estimate
that only 5% of American cyclists will ever acquire experience and learn to obey
the traffic laws and qualify as A cyclists. Therefore, so they say, all places
which any significant number of the 95% of incompetent cyclists wish to reach
must be served by highways with bikeways.
The FHWA's classification is utterly absurd. The supposed goal of American
cycling policy is to produce a useful bicycle transportation system. That is the
justification given for spending money for bicycle transportation. If this goal
is achieved, there will be two consequences. The first is that, over most of the
system, the majority of users will be adults, defined as persons old enough to
drive a car. Children, pre-teens as defined by the FHWA, will be using only a
very small part of the system, that near schools and parks. The second
consequence is that then the great majority of the system's users at any one
time will be experienced users. To think otherwise, as the FHWA policy states,
is like supposing that a random sampling of married couples would produce a
great majority of virgins.
Furthermore, since most American adults are licensed to drive motor vehicles,
they are presumed to know how to obey the traffic laws, and in many states they
are tested to demonstrate their knowledge. Only if the American bicycle
transportation system were to be operated by the minority of Americans over
sixteen who do not know how to drive automobiles, would it be possible that a
large proportion of the bicycle users would not know how to obey the traffic
laws.
There may be some use in building special facilities for child cyclists in those
places where many children will ride. That is, provided that it is possible to
build facilities that are both safe for child cyclists who have no idea of
traffic operations, and provide transportational utility. Such locations must be
rare. However, such facilities will be useless for transportation by older
persons.
It is as absurd to build the rest of the bicycle transportation system to suit
beginners as it would be to build the rest of the highway system to suit people
who don't yet know how to drive.
The Federal government now has accepted what others have known for decades, that
bikeways cannot make cycling much safer for cyclists, competent or incompetent.
Therefore, it has taken to relying on superstition instead of junk science to
promote its bikeway program. It has supported a series of supposed experiments
to determine the suitability of various designs of highway for cycling. While
these originally were intended to be systems for surveying the hazards along
roadways, and therefore of estimating the accident rate, they all decayed in use
into determining the degree of fear of same-direction motor traffic felt by
people on bicycles while ignoring all other factors. Naturally, when all other
factors are removed, most people feel more endangered with more, fast, close,
same-direction motor traffic than with less, slower, more distant,
same-direction motor traffic, and they feel more protected with a bike-lane
stripe than without. Although the measurements have almost no relevance to the
actual causes of accidents to cyclists, the FHWA touts these demonstrations as
showing that bike lanes are vital to a successful bicycle transportation system.
The most sophisticated of these studies is the Florida bike-lane study,
Evaluation of Share-Use Facilities for Bicycls and Motor Vehicles in Florida (Harkey,
David L., J.Richard Stewart, Eric A. Rodgman, University of North Carolina
Highway Safety Research Center, March 1966). This study describes itself as:
"The objective of this study was to evaluate the safety and utility of
shared-use facilities in order to provide engineers and planners comprehensive
results that can be used in planning and designing roadways to be shared by
motorists and bicyclists." The objective was also described as: "mimimizing
the risk of a conflict or crash."
The study did none of these things that it claimed to do. It ignored all the
significant conflict and collision situations. All that it did was to measure
the lateral positions on the roadway of motorists and cyclists under three
different conditions: what it called wide outside lanes, bike lanes, and paved
shoulders. It claimed three significant findings.
1: One wide-curb-lane streets cyclists rode closer to the edge of the roadway
2: On wide-curb-lane streets motorists moved further left when overtaking
cyclists
3: On wide-curb-lane streets motorists encroached more frequently on the lane to
their left.
These findings are touted as justifying bike lanes and paved shoulders instead
of wide curb lanes. Note that the study has decayed from its stated objectives
of "minimizing the risk of conflict or crash" into a mere study of
same-direction motor traffic, just like the others. Furthermore, the study was
manipulated so that the data came out as the motoring organizations want.
Certainly, motorists on the particular wide-curb-lane streets that were studied
encroached more frequently on their adjacent motor-vehicle lanes, raising the
fear of head-on crashes between motorists.
This propaganda item has several factual errors. The first is that no study of
collisions between motor vehicles has identified the overtaking of bicycles as a
significant cause. Motoring organizations, such as the California Highway
Patrol, have raised this spectre for twenty years, but they have never
discovered data to support it. The second is that the average is not the
important measure, because when there is traffic in the adjacent lane, motorists
don't move over so far. The third is that the experiment was manipulated to
produce the data that were desired.
Tthe data prove that the wide-curb-lane streets were the narrowest streets in
the study. The proof is easy. On wide-curb-lane streets the cyclists rode
nearest the curb, the motorists overtook the cyclists with the least clearance,
yet the most motorists were in the adjacent lane as they did so. (The ranges of
these variables were similar, with what little difference there was showing that
on wide-curb-lane streets motorists were more consistent than on other streets.)
Therefore, on the condition in which the motorists were closest to the curb they
also had the greatest proportion of those in the adjacent lane. This is possible
only if the roads so classified were the narrowest. Of course, as we all know,
cyclists cause more bother to motorists on narrow roads than on wide ones; we
didn't need a study to demonstrate that. However, to use that result to argue
for bike lanes is plain junk science.
The only fair test of bike lanes is to test streets with bike lanes against
substantially identical streets without bike lanes. The motoring establishment,
which has all the research monies that are available for such tests, has never
done this.
Whether or not the manipulation was deliberate is not known, but the cumulation
of errors that allow the authors to unwarrantably criticize wide curb lanes and
praise bike lanes is extremely suspicious. In the light of all the other junk
science projects that the FHWA has subsidized to try to justify getting cyclists
off the roadways, it is one more clear example demonstrating that that is the
FHWA's policy, and hence is the policy of the Federal government.
The laws of all states and the Uniform Vehicle Code give cyclists the rights and
duties of drivers of vehicles. (Not of drivers of motor vehicles. In most states
there is a distinct difference between vehicles and motor vehicles.) (UVC
11-1202) Those laws give cyclists the right to use the roadways of the highways
of the state, except for those roadways from which non-motorized traffic is
specifically prohibited (freeways). This right to use the roadways provides the
basic ability to travel that is the essence of cycling, it has existed from
before the invention of the automobile, and it has repeatedly been affirmed by
the courts.
The motoring organizations don't like cyclists to have this right; they want to
have cyclists off the roadways, where they won't delay and frighten motorists.
(Yes, motorists are frightened of cyclists; they fear that some magical force
will cause them to hit cyclists. The fact that this superstitious fear is used
to justify their dislike of being delayed is hardly coincidental.) The FHWA
sides with the motorists in denying that cyclists are legitimate users of the
nation's roadways. While the FHWA mouths all kinds of supposed support for
bicycle transportation, it contradicts itself by officially denying the most
basic right of cyclists, that of being legitimate roadway users.
A former Administrator of the FHWA, Dr. Tom Larson, stated (7 May, 1991) that
FHWA's policy is: "Bicyclists and pedestrians are legitimate users of the
transportation system," a statement for which he was praised in the bicycle
planning press and by others who knew no better. They thought that he was
conferring legitimacy upon a mode of travel that they unjustifiably feared was
not really legitimate. (Bicycle planners are not known for understanding what
they do. They earn their money by devising plans that discourage proper cycling
for the convenience of motorists. When one's career is based on an
anti-scientific paradigm, one has trouble understanding the science of the
field.)
What Larson really meant is that bicyclists, like pedestrians, are legitimate
users of sidewalks. At my request, Congressman Tom Campbell asked Dr. Larson to
clarify this policy, as to whether bicyclists are legitimate users of roadways.
Dr. Larson refused to do so (31 May, 1991, Larson to Campbell), emphasizing that
the FHWA's policy was that stated in his earlier words. In other words, in
response to a direct question by a Congressman, the FHWA refused to admit that
cyclists are legitimate users of roadways, as state traffic laws provide.
While the ISTEA gives local authorities the opportunity to spend funds on
matters other than motor transportation, the part of it that pertains to bicycle
transportation is not in accordance with scientific knowledge about that
subject. Instead, it follows the FHWA policy of denying that cyclists are
legitimate roadway users. ISTEA defines bicycle facilities as "lanes,
paths, or shoulders for the use of persons riding bicycles," none of which
are part of the normal roadway. All that the FHWA will allow in its policy is
that cyclists are legitimate users of "highways," facilities that
include paths, sidewalks, ditches, and plain dirt in addition to the roadways
that cyclists are not supposed to use.
The result of these contradictions between cyclists' rights, state laws, and
federal laws and policy is that the federal funds for bicycle transportation
tempt local authorities to spend them in ways that serve motorists' obsession
with clearing the roadways of bicycle traffic in an effort to cripple safe and
efficient bicycle transportation and the rights of bicyclists. It has become
extremely difficult to get federal funds spent on improving the roadways to make
them better for cycling, which is obviously the best policy.
Senator Feinstein stated her belief that "intelligent planning of bicycle
paths can serve both transportation and safety interests." This may be so,
but it is largely irrelevant to the bicycle transportation policy, because with
intelligent planning of bicycle paths there would be very few paths built. The
number of places where safe bicycle paths can serve a significant transportation
interest is very small, and they certainly cannot serve more than a minute
fraction of the cycling transportation needs of any urban area.
In existing urban areas, almost the only places in which paths can be put are
alongside existing streets. These are very dangerous because there is no safe
and efficient design for intersections between practical urban bike paths and
normal streets. These create intersections of great complexity. Because it is
impossible to provide for ground- level spatial separation between the
conflicting paths of bicycles and motor vehicles, the only solution that has
been invented, or is theoretically possible, is to have traffic signals that
provide time separation instead of spatial separation. This divides the
available time into smaller segments for each potential user, so that each class
of user gets less green time than in a normal intersection. The delays and
congestion produced by such systems are detrimental to both motorists and
cyclists.
Naturally, most intersections cannot receive such protection. The result is that
most urban bike-path cyclists are in great danger at most intersections and
driveways, and, as you surely know, the great majority of car-bike collisions
are caused by turning and crossing traffic conflicts. Same-direction motor
traffic causes only very few (2% in urban areas in daylight) of car-bike
collisions. The intersection problem is alleviated only where there are no
path/road intersections, typically alongside non-industrial waterfronts, which
are very few and rarely placed to serve many transportational cyclists.
The other type of urban bikeway is the bike lane. To the ill-informed, the
bike-lane stripe protects cyclists from motorists by having cyclists to the
right of the bike-lane stripe and motorists to the left. However, this
protection is practically irrelevant, because this type of conflict causes only
very few, 2% in urban areas in daylight, of car-bike collisions, 0.3% of all
accidents to cyclists. Belief in the simple rule of cyclists to the right of the
stripe and motorists to the left, whenever these parties need to make turns,
causes motorists to turn right into cyclists, and cyclists to turn left into
motorists, and also to cause cyclists to overtake on the right of motorists,
thus putting themselves into jeopardy of the motorist right turn. These
movements are dangerous; they cause many more car-bike collisions than those
that the bike-lane stripe is intended to prevent.
The proper way to cycle and to drive where there are bike-lane stripes is to
ignore the bike-lane stripes entirely and do what the standard traffic laws
require. However, the stripe confuses both motorists and cyclists because it
tells people to do something different.
It is commonly argued that bike paths and bike lanes reduce the level of skill
that is required, enabling cyclists who do not know how to obey the traffic laws
to ride safely and efficiently. This is the presumption of the FHWA's
classification of adult cyclists into Adults and Beginners, with its requirement
that bikeways be provided everywhere to suit Beginning cyclists. However, this
idea is false. No study has ever demonstrated that typical urban trips can be
made safely in cities with bikeways without the need for using all the normal
skills of obeying the traffic laws. In fact, every analysis of skills that has
been made demonstrates that cycling on bikeways requires more and greater skills
than cycling on normal roadways.
This is particularly true for bike paths. The complexity of intersections that
involve bike paths exceeds the ability of traffic engineers to operate safely,
let alone the naive users.
As for bike lanes, the user has to learn how to operate properly, and then learn
when to disobey the bike-lane stripe and how to avoid making the mistakes that
the stripes encourage and to avoid the motorists who make their corresponding
mistakes. The best advice for cycling on streets with bike lanes is to ignore
the stripe completely and do exactly what the normal traffic laws require,
advice which requires that the user have so confident a knowledge of the traffic
laws that he recognizes when to disobey the stripe.
It is argued that bike lanes make space on the roadway for bicyclists. This is
an entirely false argument that is advanced by the motoring organizations and
the FHWA. The space on the roadway is created by one of two methods. By either
making the roadway sufficiently wide to start with, or by re-allocating space on
an existing roadway. Only once sufficient space has been created or allocated is
it possible to paint the bike-lane stripe that makes that space a bike lane. The
argument that the bike lane creates the space exists only because the motoring
organizations and the FHWA refuse to provide roadway space for bicycling unless
it is provided in the form of a bike lane to keep the normal roadway clear of
bicycles for the convenience of motorists. Creating the space in the form of a
wide outside lane answers all the needs of both motorists and cyclists without
creating the confusion about how to drive properly and about the legal status of
cyclists.
In addition to these dangerous operational defects, these two types of bikeway
tell the public, both motoring and cycling, that cyclists don't belong on the
normal roadway. Bikeways say that cyclists need the supposed protection that
bikeways supply. Therefore, the non-expert user thinks it is obvious that
cyclists should not use a normal roadway without a stripe or a path. Of course,
this is wrong, but that is what government production of bike-lane stripes and
bike paths tells the public. The other superstition is that paths and bike-lane
stripes reduce the level of skill that is required. This is false. Both
bike-lane stripes and bike paths complicate the interactions for turning and
crossing movements, as described above, between cyclists and motorists, making
it much harder to learn how to ride safely.
Think of the unethical results of bike paths and bike-lane stripes. Although
they are more dangerous than the normal roadway, they attract the ill-informed
with false promises of safety. What happens when that false promise is not
fulfilled? What happens when it is recognized that the accidents that have
occurred were caused by serving the convenience of motorists? Who takes the
blame?
The proper attitude for cyclists and for society is that "Cyclists fare
best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles." Nothing else
works as well or as safely. No practical system of transportational bikeways
removes the safety need for cyclists to be able to operate according to the
traffic laws for drivers of vehicles. Given that that mode of operation is
required, it is utterly foolish to install a system of bikeways that complicates
or prevents proper operation, or that persuades people that proper operation is
not required.
This does not mean that no facility improvements are desirable. Adequate width
of the outside through lane allows motorists to overtake cyclists without delay
and without squeezing the cyclists. You can consider a wide outside through lane
to be the space for a bike lane (it does not require quite as much space) but
that is not delineated with a stripe. That wide outside through lane serves all
the purposes that are required, without setting up any misapprehensions about
cyclists not belonging on the roadway, or inducing people to disobey the traffic
laws, or producing a false sense of safety.
The populations of cyclists who are most likely to operate as drivers of
vehicles have an accident rate per mile only 20% of that of the general cycling
public. (Bicycle Transportation, Chap 5) Given this ratio, training the general
cycling public in proper cycling technique is probably the most effective
bicycle safety program available. This means not teaching the traffic laws as is
usually done, but teaching how to drive a bicycle in traffic in the same way
that beginning motorists are taught. The Effective Cycling Program of the League
of American Bicyclists teaches in this manner.
First, the right of cyclists to use the normal roadways, the rights given by all
the state laws, must be protected. All the state traffic laws include it, but
the federal government chooses to jeopardize it. That right must be specifically
affirmed in federal policy, with words similar to the following:
The federal government agrees with the state laws that give cyclists the rights
and duties of drivers of vehicles, and nothing in this act or in federal policy
shall be construed to reduce or qualify those rights and duties. Those rights
include the right to use the normal roadways, except on those roads from which
non-motorized traffic is specifically prohibited.
Second, the traffic laws of many states, and the Uniform Vehicle Code (UVC
11-1205(3)), say that when the outside lane is too narrow for motorists and
cyclists to share, then cyclists are entitled to use the entire width of the
outside lane and motorists must use the next lane over to overtake. Therefore,
the federal act should support this principle in words similar to those
following:
When any road is being constructed or reconstructed, consideration shall be
given to the accommodation provided for bicycle traffic. If either motoring or
bicycling traffic volumes warrant, that accommodation shall be provided by an
outside lane that is sufficiently wide for motorists and cyclists to share. When
such accommodation is not provided, then cyclists shall be entitled to use the
entire width of the outside lane.
Third, the effect of all the state laws is to require government to provide
reasonably safe accommodation for bicycle traffic. This includes smooth
pavement, bicycle-safe drain grates, traffic signal detectors that respond to
bicycle traffic, adequate clearance time between opposing green phases of
signals, etc. The federal government ought to include these items as proper
accommodations for bicycle traffic.
Since the most likely way to reduce the cyclist accident rate per mile is to
teach cyclists how to operate as drivers of vehicles, and since no bikeway
program can substitute for such skill, and since highway system safety requires
that cyclists operate in this manner, programs that teach such technique should
be an integral part of federal highway accommodations for bicycling
transportation.
Fourth, it is a legitimate expenditure of federal highway funds to provide the
accommodations for bicycle traffic that are described above.