Criticism
Forester's system of cycling has drawn criticism as being unsuitable for anyone but skilled, strong riders, with his assessment of skill being based upon speed. Forester's requirement of a sustained speed of 18 miles per hour (29 km/h) requires an energy output of 120 watts, a figure only achievable by 2-3% of the population.
The movement surrounding vehicular cycling has also been criticized for its effect on bicycle advocacy in general. In Pedaling Revolution, Jeff Mapes states that Forester "fought bike lanes, European-style cycletracks, and just about any form of traffic calming", and "saw nothing wrong with sprawl and an auto-dependent lifestyle." Zack Furness is highly critical of vehicular cyclists in One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility, arguing that their criticism of 'political' cyclists "totally ignores all the relevant socioeconomic, physical, material, and cultural factors that influence—and in most cases dictate—everyday transportation choices." Critical Mass co-founder Chris Carlsson describes vehicular cycling as a naive, polarizing "ideology" that "essentially advocates bicyclists should strive to behave like cars on the streets of America."
Read more about this topic: Vehicular Cycling
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“I hold with the old-fashioned criticism that Browning is not really a poet, that he has all the gifts but the one needful and the pearls without the string; rather one should say raw nuggets and rough diamonds.”
—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)