“Macho Bike Culture” and America’s Paucity of Bike Infrastructure

This morning Andrew Sullivan highlighted a story in the Australian journal The Conversation that explains how the "macho" bike culture of the 1970s contributed to low cycling rates in that country and the United States as well.

The Conversation's Steven Fleming points to recent studies showing that streets with protected bike infrastructure are safer than streets without it. People prefer to ride in protected bike lanes as well. As feminist bike activist Elly Blue told Streetsblog recently, having to ride with traffic means that your city’s bicyclists will range “from the most fit to the least fearful.” But if you want to broaden cycling’s appeal beyond “one percent of the population,” you’ll have to make it safer and more comfortable.

But for years, influential American cyclists, almost out of a sense of pride, resisted protected bike lanes, Fleming writes:

The "vehicular cycling" movement that Forester helped spawn in the United States is thankfully waning. But we're still dealing with some of the results of resisting bike infrastructure: much lower cycling rates and much higher traffic fatality rates than countries like Denmark and the Netherlands.