Vehicular Cycling

How Cyclists—Not Just Cars—Blocked Safer Bike Infrastructure

For decades, a philosophy known as vehicular cycling dominated American bike advocacy, shaping transportation policy in ways that actively discouraged the creation of protected bike lanes. The philosophy’s most famous proponent, John Forester, was well-intentioned, but his ideas were later weaponized by cities looking for an excuse not to build bike-friendly infrastructure.

You’d think the biggest obstacle to better bike infrastructure would be drivers, politicians, or budget shortfalls. But sometimes, it’s the people already on bikes. Because once you’ve learned to survive the chaos, you start to think everyone else should too. You see half-hearted attempts at infrastructure that create useless pathways you ignore anyhow.

Forester’s blind spot was that he thrived in a system built to exclude people. As a confident, risk-tolerant cyclist, he saw the dangers of change more clearly than the dangers of the status quo.

The Origins of Vehicular Cycling

John Forester was an engineer, a cyclist, and a man with a theory: bikes didn’t need special treatment—they just needed to be treated like cars. In Effective Cycling (1976), he made his case with conviction. It was bold, it was controversial, and like most ideas that try to rewrite the rules, it made some people furious and others evangelical.

At the time, Forester’s skepticism of bike lanes wasn’t entirely misplaced. In the 1970s, early American bike lanes were often afterthoughts—plopping cyclists into blind spots, door zones, and networks so fragmented that the lanes sometimes ended without warning, like a sentence someone forgot to finish.

Forester observed these issues in California and concluded that bike lanes gave cyclists a false sense of security while actually exposing them to more danger. He also believed that bike lanes didn’t significantly increase ridership but rather connected cycling to expensive, ineffective infrastructure.

And he wasn’t exactly wrong. The bike lanes that did exist were scattered, disconnected, and often more symbolic than safe—forcing cyclists to merge back into traffic again and again. So Forester’s solution was simple: if the system won’t protect you, ride like you’re part of it. Be a vehicle, start to finish.

Instead, cyclists should take the whole lane—even if it feels terrifying. Signal like a driver, follow the rules, and compete for space with cars, as if the road was built for you too. Because technically, it was.

It made sense. Cities weren’t going to sprout fully connected bike networks overnight. And maybe the most dangerous time of all is the in-between—when you have just enough infrastructure to feel safe, but not enough to actually be.

His ideas caught on. People found it appealing. And by 'people,' I mostly mean young to middle-aged men who weren’t particularly risk-averse and already riding their bikes—and city planners who were maybe a little too eager for a reason not to rethink anything.

The Problem With Forester’s Approach

Forester wasn’t entirely wrong. Plenty of cyclists don’t ride defensively, and knowing how to take the lane is genuinely useful—especially in places where bike infrastructure is more aspiration than reality.

But rather than advocating for better bike lanes, Forester dismissed them entirely. He saw Dutch-style bike infrastructure as “coddling” cyclists rather than empowering them. Instead of pushing for safer designs, he reinforced a car-centric status quo.

Never mind that every stretch of highway is basically a gallery of life-saving design for cars—and that even something as unremarkable as a semi-rigid guardrail hides a dozen engineered decisions, each quietly trying to keep us alive when things go wrong. It’s the cyclist needing 5 feet of space that’s coddled.

How Cities Weaponized Vehicular Cycling

This had lasting consequences, because if there’s one thing a cash-strapped city loves, it’s a reason not to spend money. Forester’s ideas didn’t just shape personal habits—they quietly became policy. Not because cities wanted to make cycling safer, but because 'vehicular cycling' was the perfect excuse not to build bike lanes at all.

🚦 Blame the cyclist, not the road. Cities adopted vehicular cycling principles to shift liability onto cyclists instead of addressing unsafe infrastructure. If a cyclist was hit, it was often framed as a failure of their riding skills rather than a failure of street design.

💰 Infrastructure budgets stayed with cars. If planners could argue that cyclists didn’t need dedicated lanes, there was no reason to divert funding away from highways and car infrastructure.

🚴‍♂️ Cycling became a niche activity for risk-takers. For decades, the only people who biked regularly were those comfortable riding in traffic—overwhelmingly fearless, aggressive, and highly skilled riders. This created a small, insular cycling culture, rather than one that welcomed families, commuters, and new riders.

Dallas—Forester’s own city—became a case study in how vehicular cycling fell short. It followed his principles, resisted protected lanes, and now ranks among the major U.S. cities with the lowest bike ridership. Meanwhile, places like New York, Minneapolis, and Portland took a different path—built real infrastructure—and watched ridership rise as injuries fell.

In NYC, added bike lanes resulted in fewer accidents even though ridership increased. What’s more, streets became safer for car riders as well. via:Streetsblog.

The Data Disproves Vehicular Cycling

Forester’s ideas were largely anecdotal. But actual research shows that safe, connected, and protected bike networks do increase ridership—especially among those who wouldn’t otherwise cycle:

• Protected bike lanes reduce injuries by 40–90%. (Source: National Association of City Transportation Officials)

• In New York City, installing protected bike lanes increased ridership by 57% while reducing injuries by 50%. (Source: NYC DOT)

• When Paris expanded its bike network, daily cycling trips increased by 54% in just two years. (Source: City of Paris)

• The Netherlands, which heavily invested in bike infrastructure, now sees 27% of trips made by bike. In the U.S., it’s just 1%.

Forester’s fundamental mistake was assuming that bike lanes should serve only the small percentage of people willing to ride like cars. In reality, cycling thrives when streets feel safe for everyone.

Do We Need Bike Lanes Everywhere?

One of the few places where Forester may have had a point is this: the best streets for cycling don’t always need bike lanes. But that’s not because cyclists should just act like cars—it’s because the street itself has been designed around the needs of people, not just vehicles.

In the cities that truly prioritize cycling, cars are either limited or removed altogether from key streets. Some of the most beloved bike routes in the world exist where cars don’t. And when streets are designed to slow cars down—to make it impossible for them to race ahead—then cyclists can ride comfortably without needing separation. In these places, the very shape of the street enforces safety.

And perhaps most importantly, bike networks in these cities actually make sense. They connect. They’re intuitive. They get you where you need to go without suddenly spitting you into traffic and wishing you luck.

Maybe someday, bike lanes won’t be as essential as they are now. But until cities stop designing every street like it’s trying to win a NASCAR race, we’ll need to protect the people who aren’t in two-ton steel boxes.

The goal of many city streets is for there to be no need for a bike lane. But in those situations, design has reduced the speed of vehicles to an appropriate speed.

The Legacy of Vehicular Cycling

John Forester still has followers today, though many of them don’t even know his name.

Post a video about a protected bike lane, a new rack, or just a curb cut that makes cycling slightly more humane, and like clockwork, the comments appear: Bike lanes are dangerous! They slow down traffic! Real cyclists don’t need them!

These aren’t trolls. Often, they’re older riders—experienced, tough, forged by decades of riding in traffic. They’ve survived a system that treated them as intruders, and now, new infrastructure feels less like progress and more like a critique. As if everything they learned to endure was wrong.

But here’s the thing: vehicular cycling only “worked” because cycling in America was already so dangerous and crashes reduced because there are less riders. And the irony is almost too perfect—because in places where cities actually prioritized bikes, places like the Netherlands, Denmark, even Paris—there’s no need to ride like a car.

You can just ride.