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In a conference call on April 28, 2003, LAB Executive Director Elissa Margolin indicated that the [education] committee [of the LAB Board] will look at review of the manual after a year. Comments by John Allen or John Schubert or Peter Flucke have yielded a result. Margolin will go back over this when it is time to update again. There is an opportunity to make improvements. These may not address everything on John Allen's list of concerns, but will have some effect.

See also Riley Geary's comments about my critique of the Bike-Ed manual.

• Failure of the Executive Director to manage the rewrite of the manual;

• Weaknesses of writing skill by League staff, and failure to delegate the writing to more qualified people (League volunteers and hired professionals).

• Rejection of advice from senior LCIs on the Education Committee, and their subsequent removal from the committee (John Schubert, 2001; Bill Hoffman, 2002);

• A "go along to get along" mentality, with abdication of responsibilities by the Education Committee and the Board;

I'll grant that the Manual does reflect a good working understanding of the principles of vehicular cycling, but that's not enough. Nearly every sentence in some parts of the Manual is confusing, or inaccurate, or grammatically incorrect. Often, the subject of a sentence does not agree with the verb, or the pronoun with antecedent noun. The Manual nonchalantly mixes the second person with the third, the singular with the plural, formal language with slang. The Manual's English is unprofessional, and it's embarrassing.

There are few illustrations, and most of them do not appear to be professionally drawn. This in a project with a $100,000 budget?

The problem is not only one of presentation. The Manual also suffers from serious organizational problems. The same typeface is used for different heading levels. Some material is repeated unnecessarily; other important material is left out. Former Education Committee members have told me that the revised Manual does not follow the outline provided by the Committee. For example, the Road II course was supposed to be shortened, but there is a large amount of new material on mechanical topics -- which were not in the outline and don't belong in a Road course.

Another serious problem is weakness in science. A knowledge of Newtonian physics is necessary to explain bicycle maneuvering correctly. A sound knowledge of the literature of traffic theory and crash research is also helpful. I'm not suggesting that detailed scientific explanations are appropriate in a manual for a hands-on course, but still, incorrect explanations can mislead students, and they damage credibility with students who already have a scientific background.

I don't think one person alone could do an adequate job of rewriting the Manual. Only a team of people with varying insights could generate the required product. The League must establish such a team and rewrite the Manual again.

If I am elected Regional Director, I will not let go of this issue until the problems are corrected.

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Contents ©  2002,. John S. Allen
May be reproduced, with attribution
Last revised 25 February 2003.