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Yesterday I fell into a bit of a rabbit hole on how the US almost started building protected bike lanes following the Dutch model in the 1970s but they didn’t because it was heavily contested by a group of… bikers.
Well, not bikers, “cyclists”. Apparently there was an established group of white Lycra racing daddies thought that “vehicular cycling” (so, being in traffic with cars) is their birthright and racing bikes are the only real bikes, and riding in a protected bike lane is for ladies and wimps, and heavily fought against this change. A guy called John Forrester, who also happened to be an engineer, wrote two long ass books (and I mean like 800 pages) about how protected bike lanes are much more dangerous, misquoted data from scientific papers, and lobbied so hard for this cause that his wife left him.
According to him, if you don’t like the feel of a thin racing bike saddle digging into your ass, you don’t even deserve to be on a bike, protected bike lanes lead to 100000x more accidents (even if that’s the case, would you rather scrape your knee from a fall or be hit by a truck?) and if you have an accident while biking it’s because you’re inexperienced. And you don’t need to worry about cars because hitting bikers is illegal and they won’t risk the legal trouble. If a car bothers you, you should block its way, dismount and taunt the driver till they back off (I wonder if they didn’t have road rage shootings back then).
Now, John Forrester was an asshole. But that’s okay. People be like that sometimes. What is not okay is that, despite being in the minority, these Lycra daddies got their way and no protected bike lanes were built (even though he’s dead, there are still no bike lanes). You can [read about it in detail here.](https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/06/30/america-could-have-been-building-protected-bike-lanes-for-the-last-40-years) What does this teach us? Can one person or a small group of people really make a difference if they want? It is happening all the time I guess, but people whose opinions are worth listening are rarely as loud as these buffoons.
Where I live is better than many German cities (especially in the south) but there are still too few protected bike lanes. A line on the side of a road isn’t a bike lane. It would be okay if cars paid attention but people text while driving, they park on the side of the road, and they don’t check both directions before driving out. They also don’t leave enough space while overtaking.
So yeah. This whole thing made me want to buy a pink Dutch bicycle and ride it in a super girly way.