John S. Allen's Bicycle Blog

In the crude “it just sort of happened” narrative, the driver bears no responsibility, and in the cosmic New Age narrative, the driver bears no responsibility. Got it.

In a comment on a Facebook post (July 30, 2025 by Richard Freierman — sorry, post not individually addressable). Arthur Gaer writes:

I am currently in Amsterdam. The cyclists—human and electric powered—are insanely aggressive, blowing through crosswalks against the lights, riding on pedestrian only sidewalks the wrong way, cutting off cars and daring the cars and pedestrians to hit them, or vice versa. No noticeable lights (or helmets). I haven’t seen the video you mentioned but even if Dutch bike lanes are great—and there’s plenty of them—the cyclists definitely are NOT great.

I just came from Copenhagen. The city also has tons of bike lanes and tons of cyclists. The cyclists AND the cars all follow the rules of the road. They all stop at bike and car traffic lights and for all pedestrians. The drivers, car drivers, bus drivers, truck drivers and cyclists, all wait for EVERYONE to cross at crosswalks before turning, and don’t blow through red lights or lights that just turned green. All the people on wheels of any sort and on foot are non aggressive (other than obvious tourists).

Copenhagen feels incredibly relaxed and safe. Amsterdam feels incredibly aggressive and unsafe. They both have a strong cycling culture and many well built bike lanes. I would much rather we emulate Copenhagen than Amsterdam. On bikes, in cars, and on foot.

Wow. Thanks for the report. The tendency among advocates in the US is to lump Amsterdam and Copenhagen together as model cities. Now, I wonder, how does the difference play out in terms of travel times, crash, injury and fatality rates? How does the difference reflect general cultural norms?
I haven’t been to the Netherlands since 1965, and never to Denmark, but I carefully watch and review videos of cycling there. In particular, check out the one about how children are taught bicycling in Dutch public schools. Good that they have bicycling education in the schools but I’m not impressed with what I saw.

I discovered John Forester’s book Effective Cycling in 1978, before there was a League course. I had already cycled as an adult for 14 years, including 7 years in which I rode in Boston-area urban traffic and two years taking recreational rides and overnight tours. I was ready for the book’s instructions about bicyclists’ rights and lane positioning, I had to try these techniques only a few times to discover that they worked.

I began writing for bicycle magazines around the same time, first Bike World. I wrote only a couple of articles for this magazine, then Bicycling. My writing for Bicycling started with my commenting on technical errors which I recognized, with my engineering background. My first articles were on mechanical topics, but I also took up writing articles about riding skills. I worked from home in the Boston area, with occasional visits to the Bicycling offices in Emmaus, Pennsylvania, during which I stayed at the home of John Schubert. Work for Bicycling Magazine led to my being listed as a contributing editor on the magazine’s masthead. I also landed a contract to write a book to be published by Rodale Press, publisher of Bicycling Magazine: The Complete Book of Bicycle Commuting. This book covered what I had learned from Forester about riding skills, but with some additions. Notably, my book  also covered riding in circular intersections (traffic circles, rotaries — no modern roundabouts yet) and winter riding. I included chapters on topics of particular interest to utility cyclists which Forester had covered only lightly or omitted. The book was illustrated with photos mostly by my friend Sheldon Brown, and drawings by Rodale artist George Retseck.

During that same time, I became increasingly skilled as a bicycle mechanic. Many articles I wrote were on mechanical topics. I built up and maintained my own bicycles. Howard Sutherland invited me to work on his Handbook for Bicycle Mechanics, and on two occasions I spent a month in the San Francisco Bay area working for him.

I became an Effective Cycling instructor in 1982, working under my proctor, Richard Talbot. Reflecting the knowledge evident through my writing, I was able to be certified as an instructor following written and road tests, without having taken the course.

I became the main contributor to Bicycling’s In Traffic column, repeating and expanding on the material which I had written in my book.

In 1984, I jumped ship from Bicycling magazine along with several of its editors and took up writing for their new magazine, Bicycle Guide. It lasted for several years before it folded.

In 1985-86, Crown publishers had me prepare an updated version of Glenn’s Complete Bicycle Manual. This included much new material about equipment, particularly internal-gear hubs, and riding-skills information. Most of the new illustrations were photos that I took.

in 1986-87, Pat Brown at Rodale Press asked me to prepare a version of the traffic-skills section of The Complete Book of Bicycle Commuting for Rodale to offer as a premium booklet — Bicycling Street Smarts. And in the late 1990s, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation adopted this as the Pennsylvania Bicycle Driver’s Manual.

In 2003 I ran for Regional Director of the League of American Bicyclists, and was elected. I served on the League’s Board for 6 years and was a member of its Education Committee. One of my major efforts was in editing a book on bicycling skills.

I had taught a reduced 20-hour version of the Effective Cycling course in the 1980s — leaving out the material about bicycle maintenance, which most people were going to leave to a bike shop anyway. I taught the further reduced 10-hour version around 2010 but was seriously unhappy with the quality of the teaching materials. It was good (!) that the League’s PDFs weren’t locked against changes, because I had to move, rotate and resize images of bicycles and motor vehicles so their intereactions made sense.

I have looked through the League’s more recent materials and they are slicker, but they don’t cover traffic skills consistently and thoroughly enough to satisfy me.

I took the CyclingSavvy course in 2011 and the training to become an instructor in 2017. I learned:

• Greater assertiveness in lane positioning -most usually, leaving a bike lane entirely rather than riding along its left edge when that would encourage close passes;
• Making lane changes in one step rather than two;
• Group riding tactics: merging from the rear, riding in an orderly double file, communication within the group;
• Taking advantage of traffic-signal timing to turn to the right into a street when it would be empty, immediately entering the appropriate lane rather than having to negotiate with motorists and merge across.
• A better approach to teaching, with excellent instructional materials and a guided discussion method.

I teach CyclingSavvy courses a couple times per year, contribute to the Savvy Cyclist blog, and serve as Chair of the Program Committee of the American Bicycling Education Association, the parent organization of the CyclingSavvy program.

Aligning characteristics which do not necessarily go with one another is to create a preordained conclusion and a stereotype. Examples: red-headed and hot-tempered; male and sexist; dumb and blonde. A respectable study would not lump characteristics together, but rather, describe each characteristic precisely and then study correlations between them.

Portland, Oregon bicycle coordinator Roger Geller’s four categories of cyclists each conflate two characteristics in this way: Strong and Fearless, Enthused and Confident, Interested but Concerned, No How, No Way.

Below is  an illustration from the Web, showing Geller’s categories. There are actually 16 categories, as each of the characteristics could be either present or absent. Comments are below the illustration.

* Fearless is not necessarily strong. This category perpetuates the myth of bicyclists’ success on the road depending on speed, and the spandex-clad road warrior. I am old and so, slow, but fearless because I am skillful. People who train for fitness (often indoors) but lack bike handling and road skills are fast and fearful.

* Badvocacy’s driving force is people who are enthused but not confident. Counterexample: my son learned how to operate in traffic on the back of our tandem, but now as an adult doesn’t choose to ride a bicycle — he is confident but not enthused. What he learned, though, serves him very well as a motorist.

* Interested but concerned: Many people are concerned and uninterested. They don’t ride bicycles and worry about my safety as I am about to ride away. Others are interested but unconcerned. They ride bicycles or have friends and family who do, and are not consumed by worry.

* No how: literally, can’t ride a bicycle because of a physical, sensory or mental impediment (so much for the idea of “all ages and abilities”). No way: — can’t afford to keep a bicycle, it was stolen etc. The two terms recited together are slang term which refers to aversion, but the illustration is of a man with a cane, who has an impediment (no way).

A study was conducted based on these conflated categories, to reach preordained conclusions.

I like to demonstrate and teach  how cyclists can be confident, safe and fearless without necessarily being strong — that is my goal as a bicycling instructor.

Levels of traffic stress depend on skill level, not only on riding environment as indicated in the image below the four categories. And as been indicated elsewhere, comfort does not equate to safety with infrastructure that introduces hazards and creates a false sense of security. For example, width of bike lane is included in the list of factors in the illustration, but not dooring risk.

Patricia’s review is here.

She reports an increase in the number and rate of crashes on Summit Street in Columbus, Ohio following the installation of a two-way parking-separated bikeway on the right-hand side of this one way street.

A cyclist recorded a video of his own crash on this bikeway, the crash on 9/14/18 which Patricia reported. A motorist blocked the bikeway after having pulled out to look left past cars parked between the bikeway and travel lanes. The bicyclist was coming from the motorist’s right.

There is also a dooring hazard: too little space between the bikeway and parked vehicles.

Apologists:

An article in the Columbus Dispatch newspaper. This is now in an archive and requires a user login. It is also available through public libraries in the Columbus area.

Carless Columbus article is here.