NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #31/NN_1992_31.iso/spool/rec/bicycles/soc/1297

Internet Message Format | 1992-12-24 | 7.0 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!JForester
From: [e-mail] (John - Forester)
Newsgroups: rec.bicycles.soc
Subject: Cycling and Environmentalism
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: Thu, 24 Dec 92 10:31:19 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 120

   Many bicycle advocates suggest that bike paths are proper places
for people to learn cycling, either learning to stay up on a bicycle,
or learning how to handle traffic, or learning to commute by bicycle.
Daniel Woycke phrases the latter two as "I think it is appropriate to
start commuting by a bike trail until you feel confident and have the
abilities to commute on the road."

   People who are learning how to stay up and steer a bike need wide
spaces rather than paths, and we probably have sufficient of such
places; after all, you need learn only once in a lifetime and it
doesn't take long.

   People who do not know how to ride on roads may ride on paths, but
the question is how do they get to the paths if they don't actually
live alongside the path? Do they drive a car? If they can drive a car
they should be able to drive a bike; the skills are just about the
same. Do they persuade someone else to drive them to the path, as is
often done for children? Then that motor vehicle driver should be
able to teach them to drive a bicycle on the road. Do they walk their
bicycles to the path? Not bloody likely.

   If people who do not know how to ride on roads spend their time
riding on paths, how are they to learn how to ride on roads? It is
not as if cycling on the road demanded so great a degree of physical
fitness that that conditioning must be developed and maintained on
paths before any person can ride on roads. The proper place to learn
to ride on roads is on roads, starting with easiest conditions and
progressing to more difficult. We know of no other way to do this.
Most people live on roads that provide sufficiently easy conditions
for learning to cycle, or are close to roads that do. Some people
don't live on or near such roads, but people who live in such places
are also unlikely to have a path nearby, and even if they did a plain
path would not provide the proper experience.

   If people who know how to ride on roads (or think that they do)
want to learn how to commute, the skills they lack are not so much
riding on roads as carrying clothes, changing clothes, storing
bicycles, etc., matters that are indifferent to whether the cyclist
rides on a road or on a path. The other problem with advocating that
persons who are beginning to commute by bike should learn to commute
on paths is that commuting must be done between home and work,
neither of which is susceptible to change, particularly to short-term
change. It is unlikely that more than a small proportion of workers
will ever be in situations where bike paths provide good routes to
work; if bike paths are accepted as learning facilities the number
will be smaller still and the proportion of workers that can be
served by them will be correspondingly less. For by far the majority
of workers, the best, often the only reasonable, commuting route will
be by road. Therefore, advocating bike paths as places for learning
to commute is both incorrect, in that the paths won't teach what is
needed to be learned, and insufficient, in that paths can't do the
job.

   The hypothesis that society should supply special places for
people to learn how to ride in traffic, or to ride in before they
learn that skill, whether for recreation or for commuting, is based
on the superstition that learning how to ride properly is difficult,
dangerous, frightening, takes a long time, etc., and should be
avoided whenever possible. This is simply the cyclist-inferiority
superstition at work, because it is not true. Learning to ride
properly takes no more smarts, and really no different conditions,
than learning to drive a car.

********************

   Michael Smith says that he doesn't hate cars, just our over-
reliance on using them. He also questions the logic that connects the
hatred of cars, or of motoring, with misjudgments about what is good
for cyclists. He suggests that love of cars would equally create
misjudgments, and he awaits enlightenment.

   Well, love of cars, what I have previously described as the
militant motorist opinion, created the cyclist-inferiority
superstition and allowed it to take over public opinion. The areas in
the U.S. where hot rodding and stock car racing (symptoms of the love
of cars) are most popular are those areas where cyclists have the
lowest public status and are most maltreated by the motoring public.

   As for the connection between hating cars, more accurately phrased
as hating motoring, and misjudgment about cycling, I suggest that
Michael's own words are just one example of that connection. He
writes that denying the validity of the fear of traffic "denies the
existence of a significant social problem, namely our grotesque
overreliance on cars..." In his own mind and in one sentence he
combines fear of traffic and environmentalism, merely emphasizing by
a new example what I had long ago described as a common combination.
It is clear also that Michael and I disagree in many respects about
cycling, and naturally I think that my judgement is correct.

   There is no exact logic to the connection, only a psychological
logic, as I pointed out long ago, for example in my paper before the
ProBike NW 92 conference in Olympia. The psychological connection is
that people who tend to see motoring as endangering the planet also
tend to selectively emphasize the danger of motoring to themselves,
for example as cyclists; each part of the world-view supports and
amplifies the other. That is what psychologists call a cognitive
system, and the selective emphasis about the information available is
called the principle of cognitive dissonance (for rejecting
information that conflicts with the person's cognitive system) or of
cognitive consonance (for emphasis of information that agrees with
the person's cognitive system).

   I point out, again, that there should be no logical connection
between our view of the environmental dangers of motoring and our
recommendations about cycling. Whether we feel that motoring presents
a great and imminent danger, or are willing to accept motoring as the
method of choice for many people, our recommendations about cycling
should be those that are good for cyclists. We know that cyclists
fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles.
Therefore, we should recommend governmental programs that are based
on that principle. As it happens, the existing programs are based on
the contrary superstition, that cyclists should not be using the
roadways. Therefore we should oppose the existing programs and
advocate programs that are based on the vehicular-cycling principle.
This should be independent of our position on the environmental
status of motoring.

[e-mail]               John Forester
                                       726 Madrone Ave
408-734-9426                           Sunnyvale CA 94086 USA