Vehicular Cycling

Commuting is actually something that is kind of controversial amongst those people who are ardent practicers of this aspect of cycling.   It's the kind of controversy which comes from facing a hostile environment filled with 4000lb vehicles traveling at 30-70mph.  At the center of this controversy are two topics: vehicular cycling and bike lanes.

To an outsider, and here, an outsider might even be another cyclist but one who doesn't immerse themselves in the politics of commuting, the controversy is not an obvious one.  Vehicular cycling sounds like a clever way of coping with the stress of being surrounded by large, metal vehicles, and bike lanes seem like the obvious way of cordoning off an area of the road so cyclists and motor vehicles can travel side by side without interference.

The founder of the vehicular cycling movement, at least in its modern form, is a guy named John Forester.  His book, Effective Cycling, is the seminal work in this area.  It is a topic which I have thought long about, and I've been in some pretty good internet arguments over at bikeforums.net.  I call it a movement because, in advocacy circles, the name "vehicular cycling" evokes an ideology rather than just a mere cycling technique.  John Forester is the founder of the movement, because he was the first to make the term "vehicular cycling" political.

I came at vehicular cycling merely as an inexperienced cyclist who had to face some pretty hairy roads to get anywhere in the small city where I grew up.  I learned about turning left from the center turn lane, taking the lane to prevent cars from overtaking too closely, and protecting myself in general from cars by tending toward the center of the lane.  I still practice these techniques.

But somewhere along this, the concept of "cyclist fare best when they act and are treated as drivers of vehicles" (John Forester's slogan, of sorts), has been interpreted as a philosophy that goes far beyond a mere technique for cycling in traffic.  Bike lanes violate this precept in spades.  The claim is that bike lanes, because of the special status that both separates bike traffic from motorized traffic and the violation of "normal vehicular road rules" that come about at intersections that have motor vehicles turning across the bike lane, are diametrically opposed to vehicular cycling.

I have lots of ideas about vehicular cycling; I'll be revisiting this topic repeatedly.  I consider myself a vehicular cyclist, but a pragmatic one.  And I have theories about traffic flow that I think are novel and extend the continuum assumption of traffic flow to take into account the speed variation between cyclists and cars.  Hopefully I can explore some ways of getting around some of the deadlocks that poison debate on this topic.