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jt2190 | on: Guerrilla bike lanes: San Francisco makes illicit infrastructure permanent (2016)
> A bike lane puts straight-through traffic to the right of turning cars, coming up from behind in your blind spot.

Bike lanes making riders less safe has been known for decades. John Forrester’s book “Effective Cycling” [1] catalogues a lot of these dangers and warns cyclists to not assume that bike lanes are safer.

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262516945/effective-cycling/

hamdingers | parent | next
John Forester is globally recognized as a clown who's conclusions have never been supported by real world evidence. He was employed by DOTs to tell them what they wanted to hear ("don't build infrastructure for bikes") and in doing so set US infrastructure back decades.

Vehicular cycling techniques can help in situations where there is no bicycle infrastructure, but they are not safer than good bicycle infrastructure.

jt2190 | root | parent | next
As I understand it, in those days cyclists in the U.S. were largely given two bad options:

Option A: A separate, safe bike lane through the park, not useful for actual transit but nice for leisure.

Option B: A line of white paint at the side of the travel lane that will guide you into the “door zone”, along the right side of cars turning right (and right into you), and other dangerous situations.

Note that there was hardly ever Option C, actual bike infrastructure that was both safe and useful for transit. So this idea that one single cyclist “killed” good bike infrastructure is ignoring that it was never an option to begin with.

hamdingers | root | parent
Modern on-street painted bike lanes were less than 10 years old in the US when Effective Cycling was published, only a handful of California cities had a few miles of them. The average US cyclist had never even seen one.

So the options at the time were riding on the sidewalk or in the street, and Effective Cycling became popular because it contained some genuinely good advice for cycling on a street with no infrastructure. Unfortunately Forester felt that this was the best and only way to safely cycle, which is why he immediately became popular with state and local DOTs who did not want to build bike lanes.

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cyberax | root | parent
So here's the thing. Seattle drank all the urbanistic Kool-Aid and started doing all the road sabotage with bike lanes, bulbouts, road diets, and so on with the goal to eliminate pedestrian and bike deaths.

What was the result?

A stunning INCREASE in pedestrian deaths and no significant effect on bike deaths: https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/as-...

Edit: my personal theory is that these "improvements" on average do nothing whatsoever. They "worked" in some places in Europe because they made traffic so shitty that more people were forced to use bikes. In turn, this provided driver education, by showing them how badly average drivers behave.

Manuel_D | root | parent | next
Why would cycling infrastructure reduce pedestrian incidents? They'd presumably decrease cyclist collisions. And since cycling has increased ~25% over the same time frame, steady rates of traffic incidents involving cyclists amounts to an increase in safety: https://www.kuow.org/health/2026-09-21/seattle-had-record-br...
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hamdingers | root | parent
Did they observe more crashes on roads that received upgrades? Doesn't sound like it, these are overall numbers. Maybe more people are walking/biking now, maybe just noise (10 and 18 ped deaths is really good for a major city already, in LA it's 160+).

Your personal theory is refuted by studies in the US, here's the classic lit review on this subject if you're interested: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2776010/

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occz | parent
John Forrester spewed completely disproven garbage and harmed cycling for decades by this influence on policy.