In fact, this is how John believes cycling advocates can get more people on bikes. “The proper thing to have done was to have encouraged those people who they think might take up cycling to obey the rules of the road. Learn how traffic operates and therefore operate safely, and confidently and cheerfully,” he says.

While I don’t believe John's vision of safe cycling is an entirely un-problematic (more on that later), this particular piece of his legacy seems to me to be largely a good. Certainly the lessons I learned from the cycling merit badge have helped to keep me safe on roads that are full of speeding two-ton machines, occasionally piloted by people who actively dislike that I’m on the same street as them.

But John has a more problematic legacy, stemming from his dogmatic belief that all bike paths are part of a conspiracy to limit cyclists’ right to ride in the road. In 1974, an organization called AASHTO – drawing from experiments in bike infrastructure design carried out by University of California in Davis – wrote the nation’s first design guide for cycling infrastructure. That guide recommended separated, protected bike lanes in certain circumstances. This attracted John Forester’s attention, and in response he helped write a California guide that insisted that separate bike infrastructure is unsafe for cyclists. Next, when AASHTO re-wrote its guide in 1981, John submitted prolific public comments and AASHTO largely adopted the language from his guide and recommendations.

It wasn’t until 2012 that AASHTO finally conceded that some separate bike infrastructure might improve safety.

How important are these guidelines? “The AASHTO guidelines dictated what got built,” says Anne Lusk, a researcher with the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. She says conservative state highway engineers are wary to exceed what AASHTO recommends, driven by concerns that they’d be courting a lawsuit if someone was injured on infrastructure that doesn't follow the standards.

“So when you track the AASHTO guidelines back, for bicycle facilities, and you realize they were written by men sitting around a table deciding what worked for them as vehicular bicyclists, and then that would go to the states and the states would build, sitting around a table deciding what was working for them… what we ended up with was decades of bicycle facilities that essentially were designed by John Forester, because he wrote the first AASHTO guidelines.”

In other words, all of the new bike infrastructure that is being built in cities like New York and Portland and Minneapolis — infrastructure that has been found to be associated with more people riding bikes and a lower rate of crashes and injuries – might have started getting built back in the 70s and 80s.

The Trouble with John’s Philosophy

The trouble with John’s philosophy is there is little to no evidence suggesting that he’s right. John likes to cite a study that was conducted in 1974 by Ken Cross. This study found that overwhelmingly cycling accidents occurred at intersections, but only 7% occurred because of cars overtaking cyclists and hitting them from behind. In John’s mind, the conclusions to draw from this data is obvious. First, any cycling infrastructure that doesn’t address the danger cyclists face at intersections will not actually improve safety. Second, a barrier that ensures vehicles can’t cross into a bike lane won’t actually prevent many crashes.

What’s interesting here is that John might be right on both counts, but still be wrong to conclude that bike infrastructure shouldn’t be a priority. The reason for this is that it has long been observed that the more people who are out cycling the safer cycling becomes, because drivers become accustomed to dealing with bike traffic. There’s a safety in numbers effect, and that alone might be the most important safety improvement for all cyclists.

But John goes beyond simply arguing that bike lanes don’t make us safer, he actually believes that bike paths are less safe. Part of his evidence is a “test” that he himself conducted in which he rode his bike along a sidewalk as fast as he could, and counted how many times he had close calls with cars and pedestrians. (You should read his own account of this. It’s about halfway down, called “actual sidepath test.”) This is, of course, not how science is done. It would be like concluding that because one speeding motorist had an accident, that therefore any road that can't be driven on at 100 miles an hour is unsafe.

John does cite a handful of studies that he says prove his conclusion as well. But it's not a given that these studies stand up to scrutiny. For instance, Anne Lusk reanalyzed the data from one of the studies, and found that the higher crash rate was entirely attributable to cyclists traveling in the opposite direction as the cars, and otherwise riding on the sidewalk was just as safe as out in the road.