By Lorenz J. Finison
For CRW's 60th anniversary, WheelPeople and Club Historian Lorenz J. Finison are taking a look back through the club's history. This article is the second half of an article originally published in November 2016's issue of WheelPeople under the title "The Early Days of the Charles River Wheelmen: Part 3." The first half of the article can be found here.
Cyclists’ conflicts about cycleways trace to the late 1960s and early 1970s and were already on display at the Bicycles USA conference of 1973. While most of the presentations represented the bike-trails ideal, they were challenged forcefully by Bill Wilkinson, a young technician for the National Park Service, who had been assigned a presentation on ‘bicycle trails, their construction and use,’ but prefaced his remarks by stating that: “I strongly disagree with those who suggest that biking be limited to exclusive bike trails and bike lanes. So much more can be done for so many more bikers through the development of procedures for creating safe bike routes through urban streets. I think that trails should be provided under two conditions only: 1) as the only alternative for safe bicycling in an area either parallel to a major highway or connecting two or more major points; or, 2) to provide a unique recreational facility.”
The cycling opponents of bikeways were proponents of the “vehicular integration” of cycling, or, finally, “vehicular cycling,” and referred to cyclists as bicycle “drivers.” They represented a different slice of the cycling public: adult recreational and racing cyclists who were more suburban, and more concerned with bottlenecks that impeded easy transit into rural areas. They argued that it was not possible to take non-cyclists and make them cycling commuters. First, one must get people “hooked” on recreational cycling, and then let them find their own ways in the city streets. The best that cycling planners could do was to remove bottlenecks..
Bruce Epperson has summarized the 1970s history of vehicular cycling on the national stage: “Opposition to urban bicycle facilities was articulated as early as November 1972 by Fred DeLong in Bicycling, December 1972 by Jim Konski at the first MAUDEP conference (reprinted in June 1973 in Bicycling), in February 1973 by John Forester in Bike World, and in May 1973 by Bill Wilkinson at the Bicycles USA conference. In June 1974, Morgan Groves, LAW executive director, issued a policy statement in the LAW Bulletin stating that it was League policy to support paths “only where no public road exists, on bridges, to [bypass freeways], or in special recreation and park areas.”
In early 1977, Bicycling’s Darryl Skrabak wrote that “the urban bikeway movement was effectively dead.” But there was still a bit of life left. At a 1977 MAUDEP conference, CRW founder and Metropolitan Planning Council President George Bailey described the Massachusetts experience with bike facilities. He commented on the confluence of Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) air pollution regulation and funding and the existence of a bicycle “sub-committee of the Environment Committee of the Boston Bar Association”; and following that, new EPA regulations and incentives for bicycle commuting and political support from the state legislature. Bailey summarized the situation thus: “EPA’s Region I was cooperative. The planning agencies, directed by and in cooperation with the Department of Public Works, are now clearly set on a course likely to produce useful plans. The legislature hears a broad call from not only the citizenry, but Washington as well. It should be a downhill run from here on.”
Not so fast! At the same MAUDEP conference, Forester derided bikeways as of no benefit to “competent” cyclists, and asserted that their main purpose was to kick cyclists off the road. Secondly, the problem of the many new and “incompetent” cyclists for whom bikeways were ostensibly designed would be solved [he thought] because a natural plateau of new cyclists would be reached and all cyclists on the road would, with proper instruction, become competent. Thirdly, he accused the motoring interests and the Bicycle Manufacturers Association (BMA) of being in cahoots to remove cyclists from the roads. This would achieve the purported BMA strategy of appeal to parents regarding safety for their cycling children, to boost juvenile sales, and appeal to the motoring interests’ desire to clear the roadways of any interference.
Forester’s solution was to design roads with a 14- to 16-foot outside through lane width rather than 11 or 12 feet. Finally, “This facility provides long-term benefits that are dependent on the total traffic volume on the roadway, instead of exclusively upon the number of new cyclists and the political uproar they cause.”
Despite Bailey’s bikeways optimism, the advocates’ energy – at least temporarily – veered away from bike paths and towards bicycle safety education only. In May 1977, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission sponsored a Bike-Ed 77 conference with the purpose of offering workshops on and drafting “a national strategy for bicycle safety education” Ohio Representative Ralph Regula’s luncheon address asked all in attendance to become lobbyists for bike trails. Forester arose from his lunch to thunder opposition: “The idea that bike trails are for the purposes of safety is simply wrong; they are for fun and those who are willing to take the increased risk of riding on them.”
Within a year L.A.W. promulgated a new “League Bikeways Platform” recommended by its facilities committee, which included a cyclists’ rights plank: “The L.A.W. opposes any bikeway development, plan, or policy which would deny bicyclists the full use of a public street, road, or highway.” In April 1978 the Bicycle Institute of America’s Boom in Bikeways provoked a great furor when it editorialized in “Bikeways – The Right Way” against the L.A.W. position: “Society must reserve the right to regulate public activity to promote the common welfare. Local jurisdictions must have the right to decide that Avenue X is patently unsafe for a 14-year old youngster to ride a bike. If a handful of truly competent ‘professional’ cyclists are inconvenienced by this, that inconvenience is a small price to pay for the saving in human suffering.” A storm of protest greeted the editorial over the next months, featuring an equally strident defense of the LAW position of unfettered access to the roads by Hal Munn, the LAW Bicycle Facilities Chairman, titled: “Bikeways – The Wrong Way.”
After 1979, the MAUDEP conferences were discontinued because there was so little interest among bicycle planners in bikeways development. Forester vaulted into the presidency of L.A.W., and the entire executive board turned over, amidst great dissension. The debate, at least in the pages of Boom in Bikeways, didn’t last much longer. The newsletter was discontinued in 1980. MAUDEP conferences were discontinued, too, because there was so little interest among bicycle planners in bikeways development.
Striking, after all of the work by CSB and UBDC, is how little Boston was represented on the national bike facilities scene. It fielded no presentation at the 1973 Bicycles U.S.A. conference held in Cambridge (except for its Mayor, Barbara Ackermann, who got the largely honorific role of introducing the panel on “Bicycle Laws, Ordinances, and Enforcement; Theft and Registration”). And Bostonians did not present at MAUDEP conferences between 1972 and 1977, except for Bailey and Eti Katoni who in 1977 repeated her paper from Cyclateral Thinking focused on the problems with the Martha's Vineyard bike paths. Massachusetts attendees did not present at the Bike-Ed 77 Conference.
CRW founder Ralph Galen, though, played a prominent role in national cycling circles and became a significant bike path skeptic, in line with the new national leadership of LAW. He was LAW president in 1969-1971 and Northeast/New England representative to the LAW board both before and after. Galen complained about bike paths in a 1976 interview with a Boston Globe reporter: “It’s impossible to ride around pedestrians, kids, baby carriages, and dogs,” Galen says. He and the Wheelmen are not opposed to the increase in bikepaths in state parks, or paralleling expressways and intersections of cities. They feel bikepaths are fine for the leisure cyclist, the noodler, the birdwatcher, but: “The bike is a vehicle and has a right to the road. We refuse to be legislated onto bikepaths,” says Galen staunchly. “As such a cyclist, a serious one, is bound to obey the same rules of the road as the motorist. He must obey the signals and ride right, or ride with the flow of traffic.”
Galen increased his bike path warnings in 1977, noting that he had used a bike path (instead of the road) just three times and each time was injured: once in a head-on collision with another cyclist, and another with three ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘hostile’ pedestrians who were walking three abreast and not getting out of the way fast enough, or not at all. Galen went on: “As a member of the Governor’s Highway Safety Committee, [part of Saltonstall’s legislation required the addition of a “recognized bicycle club” member to the Governor’s Safety Council. They got Ralph Galen.] and as an avid bicycle rider with few accidents to my record, I am of the opinion that bicycle paths should be restricted to bicycle riders, which is probably impossible, and should be wide enough to permit a median strip thus separating oncoming traffic which is probably also impossible to do. The alternative is unpleasantly obvious. Take your chances with the automobiles; bike on the roadway where it is safe.”
Galen repeated his message for national consumption in the January 1978 issue of the LAW Bulletin. This one was titled “Bicycle Paths Can Be Dangerous to Your Health,” and Galen stated that the Myles Standish Bike Path in Plymouth and the Cape Cod National Seashore Park might be alright on weekdays but “disastrous” on a busy weekend or holiday.
Erving Pfau, CRW president in 1977, promoted bicycle commuting to work, in response to former President Jimmy Carter’s proclamation of war on high energy consumption. He lamented the lack of secure bike lockups at workplaces and urged members to “write to your legislators to consider the bicycle in any new construction enabling or funding legislation to provide for the cyclo-commuter.” Pfau left aside the question of bikeways.
Given CRW’s increasing suburbanization and its withdrawal from a broad range of urban cyclists’ demands for bike facilities, who would? Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but close on the heels of Galen’s and LAW’s rejection of bike paths and lanes, a group of urban cyclists, including several CRW members, banded together to form the Boston Area Bicycle Coalition (BABC), a key advocacy group for new and commuting cyclists and a broad range of issues, including bike paths, safe bike parking, bikes on subways and trains, education, and enforcement. Founders included Jim White, Ed Gross, Lucy Bailey, Jonathon Fine, Cutler West, Susan Shepard, Cathy Buckley, John Hixson, and Anita Brewer, BABC’s first president. Several were CRW members and Pfau, CRW president, was a BABC incorporator. BABC had some rocky times, but in the early 1990s it re-formed as the Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition (MassBike), the statewide bicycle advocacy organization of today. It shares urban – and bikeways – advocacy with the new Boston Cyclists Union and multimodal organizations like Livable Streets. The bikeway, bike lane, and bike trails debates have continued beyond CRW’s first decade (1966-1977) up to the present day, but they have nevertheless been built – another story to be told.
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The article is based on Finison’s book: Boston’s Twentieth-Century Bicycling Renaissance: Cultural and Political Change on Two Wheels. University of Massachusetts Press, 2019. The book is a follow-up to Boston's Cycling Craze 1880-1900: A Story of Race, Sport, and Society. University of Massachusetts Press, 2014. Many of the source materials are in the Bicycle History Archives at UMass-Boston Archives. A footnoted version of the article is available at: Bostonscyclingcraze.blogspot.com
