How is vehicular cycling different from what has typically been taught about how one should ride a bike?
So far as I know, none of the authors of traditional American bike safety instruction ever explained a basis for their instruction. I suspect that they never felt the need to explain because they thought that their beliefs were the truth that everybody knew. But one can deduce what they believed from what they did.
The first belief was that bicycling is playing in the street with toys. The second was that bicyclists were persons incapable of exercising judgment about traffic. Therefore, they issued their instruction as a set of commands to be obeyed without thinking, but enforced by the fear of death. You are trespassing on the cars’ road; stay out of their way lest they hit you. Ride only on roads fit for playing in. Stop at stop signs. Make arm signals for turns. Obeying this limited set of instructions produces dangerous cycling.
In practically every discussion of bicycle transportation today, these commands surface in the minds of bicycle advocates as strong beliefs which should guide our system of bicycle transportation. The typical bicycle advocate has these beliefs, which I call cyclist-inferiority beliefs, and tries to graft onto these some way to travel to useful destinations while obeying them. The result is bike lanes and side-paths; they cannot make cyclist-inferiority cycling safer, of course.
Is vehicular cycling something that can only be managed by adults only?
It should not be limited to adults only. After all, since Effective Cycling makes cycling more enjoyable, all should participate. Vehicular operation is the only way in which vehicles can be operated safely and efficiently on the road system. That doesn’t mean that we might not invent better ways, as vehicular operation has been improved over the decades, but it is the best that we now know.
Cycling according to the bike-safety commands is not safe, and bike lanes or bike paths next to the road cannot make such cycling safe. That is because the bike-safety commands and the bikeways that embody them contradict the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles.
Any person who rides on the roads should have the skill of obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. Young persons might well restrict their cycling to the roads with easy traffic, say two-lane residential roads, until their skills develop fully, but even there they need all those skills that apply to two-lane roads.
The cyclist-inferiority view holds that cyclists are children who do not have the ability to exercise judgment about the speed and distance of other vehicles. The falsity of that claim has been demonstrated both by much experience and by experiment. Children of vehicular-cycling families have long been shown to have the ability to ride with cycling groups in the vehicular-cycling manner from the age of seven or so. With fifteen hours of on-the-road group instruction, children in grade three have passed driving tests on two-lane residential street systems; those in grade five pass driving tests on four-lane roads with slow or medium speed traffic; those in grade seven pass their tests on multi-lane roads with fast traffic; at each age, the child students earned far higher test scores than those of the adult cycling populations in the same area. It is obvious that children can be taught safe cycling at a reasonable cost, and it is probable that such training will make early motoring experiences easier and safer.
What is the biggest challenge facing the cyclist today?
I think that the biggest challenge facing the American cyclist today is developing the skill of riding properly in the vehicular manner, and the confidence that such behavior generates. I do not see society as a whole assisting in this task, but rather opposing it with society’s insistence on incompetent cycling on bikeways. The biggest challenge for groups of cyclists is developing a system for better disseminating the vehicular cycling skills; they are the only groups in our society with the required knowledge and the motivation to use it.
