John Forester is dead

John Forester, "the father of vehicular cycling" died in 2020. 

Right now, his legacy is 'controversial'. I suspect in a generation his perspective will be more analogous to the miasma theory of disease. Research is pretty clear that many fields fail to move forward while their founding 'big man' continues to live, publish, and advocate. 

I understand where Forester came from -- I was a 3% 'confident and assured' cyclist playing chicken with cars basically up until the moment I started cycling with my wife. But 'vehicular cycling' functionally limited cycling participants to a tiny portion of the population, which limited its political support, which limited infrastructure development, which leads to our present mess. 

"You aren't a real cyclist unless you can ride in traffic" is bunk and always has been. "You aren't a real X unless you can do Y" is exclusionary gatekeeping. Vehicular cycling as a motorism--the idea that other modes can reach parity with cars by pretending to be cars.

Maybe vehicular cycling made sense when Forester was a teen, when the default car was the Morris Minor and there was a nationwide 30 mph speed limit. But in America, the most popular cars is a Ford F-150 with much higher mass, much better acceleration, and traveling at much higher speeds.