VC improves a cyclist's safety on any road and removes governments' need to build bike lanes and cyclists' need to limit travel to neighborhood streets. Cycling on important, busy roads is far too important to utilitarian cyclists for us to cede these roads to motorists. Major employment, shopping, and recreation centers have busy streets leading to them because many people go to those places. We cyclists want to go to those places, also, so we must be able to ride on those busy streets. We can't wait for governments to build bike lanes—we must learn to ride on the existing roads. We certainly can't accept a government ban of cyclists on those roads.
For many years I have used my bicycle as my primary vehicle. Therefore, I don't have the luxury of restricting my riding to low traffic roads. There is a reason those roads are litle traffic—they don't go anywhere useful to most people. I learned how to ride on the same busy roads the motorists use because the motorists and I are going to the same places—work, the store, the library, a restaurant, a movie.
In order to travel to any destination, I need legal and physical access to every road, with the possible exception of freeways that have acceptable parallel roads serving the same destinations. If some freeway has no such road, I need access to that freeway, too.
Not only do I need access to every road, but I also need public and governmental recognition of my right to drive my bicycle on any road. For that I need respect and courtesy from motorists, and I need to have bicycle driving taken seriously by traffic planners and engineers. Their decisions should be based on standard traffic principles and safety studies, not on superstition nor on popular opinion.
Most bicycle facilities are built contrary to standard traffic principles and without any valid safety justification. Traffic planners prefer providing a perception of safety to providing actual safety. They turn traffic law on its head when they build "bicycle facilities." Bicycle facilities allow and even promote nonstandard maneuvers such as right turns from left lanes and lanes criss crossing each other. Planners overlook a basic fact when they build bicycle facilities: