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John Forester (born 1929) is a California industrial engineer and a noted cycling activist who coined the term Effective Cycling. he was born on 7 October 1929 in East Dulwich, England, the oldest child of the writer and novelist Cecil Scott Forester (born Cecil Louis Troughton Smith) and his wife Kathleen. The family moved to Berkeley, California in February, 1940, and John attended the public schools there. Year 1929 (MCMXXIX) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ...
Effective Cycling is a trademarked cycling educational program designed by John Forester, which was promoted for a number of years by the League of American Wheelmen. ...
C.S. Forester and his wife separated in in December, 1944 and divorced a year later. In his last year of high school John attended St. George's academy in Rhode Island, then matriculated at the University of California at Berkeley as a physics major. In 1949 he dropped out of school and worked in Boston for almost a year, then returned and received a bachelor's degree in English in August, 1951. He entered the navy in December, 1951, but left on a medical discharge in August, 1952 after being hospitalized for several weeks.
He married Jean Nicholson in September, 1953. they had two children, a son Geoffrey, born in the mid-1950's, and a daughter Pamela, who died in 1962 at age four of natural causes. After working as an inspector in a metal fabrication factory and earning a certificate in industrial engineering from UC Berkeley, John received a Professional Engineer's (P.E.) license from the State of California in 1956.
In 1958 he and his family moved to Southern California. John worked at North American Aviation and attended California State College (now University) at night, earning a master's degree in industrial engineering in 1964. He worked as a teaching assistant and lecturer at Cal. State--Long Beach and Cal. State Fullerton, writing his first book, Statistical Selection of Business Strategies, in 1968.
In late 1965, C.S. Forester was severly disabled by a stroke, and he and his second wife Dorothy moved to the L.A. metro area to be nearer John's family. C.S. died in April, 1966. Out of estate worth over $750,000, John and his brother George were each left a mere $5,000; the rest was left to Dorothy, who soon left for England and cut off all ties to the Forester family. This was a traumatic experience for John, who had supported his father in the face of controversy, and as a result he wrote a scathing biography of his father that no publisher would accept. John eventually published a brief excerpt in the journal American Scholar in 1987 and self-published the entire biography under the title C.S. Forester: Novelist and Storyteller in 2000.
Periodically a cyclist for many years, Forester dedicated himself to racing and bevet touring after his father's death to the exclusion of most other professional and personal interests. In 1968 John divorced his wife and returned to the San Francisco Bay area. In 1972, he met Dorris L. Taylor, a visiting cyclist, national women's cycling champion, and biochemist from Minneapolis. He asked Taylor and her two children to move out to the bay area, and in 1973 Taylor agreed to financially assist him so he could dedicate himself to full time cycle advocacy.
John first involved himself locally, arguing against the installation of specialized bicycle facilities in the city of Palo Alto based on Netherlands designs adapted for American use and recommended to the California Department of Transportation by two researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles.
To be continued (September 12, 2007)
Quotes
On sharrows: "I offer the following two points. The first is that the concept of sharrows is theoretically impossible to properly implement. As I understand it, painting a sharrow on the roadway, say at milepost 1.53, designates the appropriate lateral position for any cyclist coming along the roadway and passing that milepost. That's absurd, contrafactual. The second point is that we have quite strict standards for bike lane markings, but despite those standards, in many places we have bike lane markings that magnify the danger, that are even praised for doing so. Required by ignorant politicians, designed by compliant or ignorant traffic engineers or bikeway planners, and painted by people who try to follow the design but often fail. The shared lane marking is an experimental roadway marking installed in limited locations in the United States. ...
I fail to see better results from sharrows, except it appears that they are less harmful than stripes."[1]
Bibliography - Bicycle Transportation (First edition, 1977; Second MIT edition, The MIT Press, 1994) ISBN 0-262-56079-8
- Effective Cycling (First edition, 1976; Sixth edition, The MIT Press, 1993) ISBN 0-262-56070-4
- Effective Cycling Program, Effective Cycling Instructor's Manual, the film Bicycling Safely On The Road (Iowa State University, 1978)
- Effective Cycling, The Movie, (Seidler Productions, 1992)
- Novelist & Storyteller, The Life of C. S. Forester, ISBN 0-940558-04-1 (biography of his father)
The cover of the 1974 paperback edition of one of Foresters non-fiction titles: Hunting The Bismarck Cecil Scott Forester was the pen name of Cecil Louis Troughton Smith (August 27, 1899 – April 2, 1966), an English novelist who rose to fame with tales of adventure with military themes. ...
References - ^ post to caboforum list at Topica.com
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