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| [My personal copy which I did not pay money for.] |
TL;DR: it’s about damn time someone did in-depth analysis of John Forester's retrograde, toxic, and highly effective life’s work
Sometimes I take solace in the fact that Youtube urbanism is thriving (perhaps a bit too much given the inevitable deluge of slop). If you are the kind of person who likes watching video content, there’s a lot of great stuff to be found covering pretty much every topic you can imagine.
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| [Not Just Bikes = Jason Slaughter.] |
There’s one video that I’ve really appreciated, though. Snarky Youtuber Not Just Bikes, an urbanist named Jason based in the Netherlands, makes long-form sarcastic and didactic videos. One of them features an epic, long-overdue takedown of highly influential (and somewhat recently deceased) anti-bicycling advocate, John Forester.
I’ve written about John Forester on this blog before (Warning: 3,500 words!) as he was the inventor and chief proselyte of “vehicular cycling”, a wildly wrong approach to bicycle planning that embedded itself in public works departments across the country for decades. The first time I read Effective Cycling, Forester's most well-known book, my jaw hit my desk so many times I got a major toothache. I did so many double takes the world was increasing exponentially. It was and is the most condescending piece of text I’ve ever encountered, and it’s wild to me that people took it seriously for so long.
(The book is still in print, AFAIK, and was last “updated” in 2012, right around the time I was doing research on my dissertation on bicycle planning.)
The story of John Forester is a wild ride in and of itself, and is certainly captivating enough that his name isn’t a forgotten piece of history. That's why I wrote about him in my dissertation, and again on this blog when he died back in 2020.
Since then, scrutiny of Forester has waned along with his influence. People even seem to have become sympathetic. For example, over the last few years, I listened to two podcasts about vehicular cycling and Forester: one from the mainstream War On Cars crew and one from Well There’s Your Problem, a “dirtbag left” podcast loosely about engineering. Surprising to me, both podcasts ended up expressing quite a bit of empathy for JF's story than I think he deserves. I get the feeling that the authors there didn’t read closely enough JF’s actual books, which (to be fair) is an understandable thing given their inhuman combination of length and atrocious prose.
This is why the Not Just Bikes video it was a breath of fresh air. Again, if you’re the kind of person that can sit down for a 90 minute Youtube video rant, and likes bicycling, I highly recommend it. Slaughter make sit clear that John Forester was was a horrible person who profoundly damaged street safety in the US (and elsewhere), setting the United States (and much of the rest of the anglosphere) back one or two generations. He did so with a decided lack of empathy for others, and a privileged arrogance that’s really hard to describe unless you’ve read his work yourself.
By contrast with other looks back at vehicular cycling, the Not Just Bikes very long takedown of John Forester does him the favor of using his exact words over and over ahead, pulling the receipts and looking up the references from Forester's books.
Here are some choice excerpts:
It’s pretty easy to critique a John Forester book because all you have to do is quote it extensively, which is precisely what Slaughter does here. In addition to the ample research and epic deep digging into Forester's history, he bring a well-deserved level of scorn and opprobrium into the conversation.
Here's another example, probable the craziest one, explaining how bicyclists shoudl handle explicit conflict with drivers:
Importantly, John Forester also wrote amazingly condescending things about regular people that really have to be read to be believed. He not only infantilizes women, he also throws in the vast majority of men. The jaw-dropping offensiveness is not a simple generation gap or rhetorical disjuncture, but Forester believed he was smarter than everyone else, and thus treated most of the world like children. Also he never admitted he was wrong, or apologized for anything.
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| Forester's other terrible book. |
Not Just Bikes also takes the (significant) time to dive into the planning literature, patiently explaining how Forester's citations and research, the footnotes that propped up his unkillable Zombie claims, painstakingly pulling receipts to debunk Forester's bullshit. He walks systematically through the pseudo-scientific approach, focusing particularly on Forester's lesser-known engineering textbook (which I've never read) and describing why it's bad.
It's tempting go say that all of this is ancient history, but if you follow bicycle advocacy at all in the US, you probably know that the fight between traffic engineering and non motorized transportation is alive and well. These books stayed in print well into the 21st century, and I’d wager to say continue to shape engineering practices in many places around the country despite being absolutely nonsense.
As Slaughter rightly point out, a good deal of John Forester's beliefs are insane in the real world. He deserves very little sympathy and it’s about time someone said so. Anyway, check out the whole video if you can stomach it. I highly recommend it.
