#vehicular-cyclists

Those among you who actually read the titles1 may be wondering if I'm going crazy or if I'm a turncoat. After all, how can cyclists of any stripe be considered allies to the True Warriors for Automobile Transportation? Well, what if I told you about a group of people who believe that the vast majority of automobile-bicycle crashes are due to incompetence on the part of the biker? Who, for thirty years, have been advocating against setting aside any road space for bikers? Sounds like our kind of people, right? Well, that is exactly who "vehicular cyclists" are.

Vehicular cycling is the belief that bikes should behave like and be treated as identical to cars. How cyclists are supposed to travel 40 miles/hour down city streets just by hitting their gas pedal is beyond me, but I sure do like the policies vehicular cyclists advocate. They point out, correctly, that planners and activists who want to build bike lanes along our roadways often have an agenda beyond just giving bikes a place to ride. For instance, installing protected bike lanes is often part of a "road diet", with the intent to slow down traffic along the road. As much as we drivers love to go fast, vehicular cyclists seem to love it even more - they are the elite, cream-of-the-crop cyclists, and their greatest fear is apparently that they will need to slow down to accommodate less-skilled bikers who just want to get across town.

While the "complete streets" crowd is trying to encourage as many people as they can to get onto a bike in the belief that by clogging our streets with these ugly, slow, two-wheeled vehicles will somehow lead to joyous hand-holding amongst all road users reminiscent of the celebration in Whoville at the end of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the founder of Vehicular Cycling explicitly advises his readers in Effective Cycling not to encourage the popularity of cycling as a form of advocacy. That is advice we True Warriors can get behind! While we True Warriors think that bicycles will "begrime" our roads, vehicular cyclists appear to believe that a flood of new cyclists would begrime their philosophy of cycling and how bicycles and cars should interact.

Vehicular cyclists, like many of our allies in the War on Cars, can sometimes be difficult to tell apart from our enemies at a glance. After all, they may be found on bicycles. Here are some clues that the cyclists you see may be vehicular cyclists:

They are arguing for more lanes of of traffic on city roads, rather than fewer

They are quoting studies of country roads done in the 1970s to make their point about urban planning

When a biker gets hit by a car, they assume that the biker must have been doing something wrong

They draw lots of analogies between bikes and motorized vehicles, such as hybrid cars or motorcycles, implying that bikes are more similar to those vehicles than those vehicles are to SUVs

They assume that those who are unable or unwilling to ride intermixed with high-speed, 4000-pound cars whose drivers are surfing the web (like yours truly!) should have no considerations

It is hard to overstate the value of having biking fanatics on our side in the War on Cars. As this city continues slouching towards Copenhagen, imagine the value of someone in full neon-yellow spandex and cleated shoes, holding a $500 bike helmet while arguing that slowing down traffic and adding bike infrastructure will make the roads more dangerous for everyone!