This infamous tome is as much a political manifesto as a textbook and it has been received primarily as the former, for better or worse, by many younger members of the cycling community (most of whom only know Forester's point of view based on a lot of hearsay and slander or as they would say, "modern wisdom").
In this book you will find a great deal of common sense, experience-based advice, as well as evidence-based bike politics and recommendations for safe street design and bicycle operation. And most of this is derided as antiquated and even harmful now that a new generation of cyclists has been taught that everything good must be a cargo-cult mimicry of what some college-aged American perceived to be the case on their last vacation in Amsterdam, and that whatever does not follow this cargo-cult mimicry must be wrong and bad.
Forester's detractors (most of whom have never read Forester) would have us believe that his recommendation to develop good bike control skills is a kind of male chauvinism, and that cyclists who want the right to responsibly ride on well-designed city roadways (currently dominated by motor vehicles), are asking for something completely unreasonable. Instead they ask for segregation and a street design that totally disregards the possibility of using a bicycle to get around. The "modern view" rejects Forester's pragmatism and integrationism, and instead advocates for a much more restrictive system in which no cyclist can safely use public roadways, and all "legitimate" cycling is restricted to special segregated paths, far from any useful transport corridors.
It takes years of personal experience bicycling in American cities to gain the kinds of wisdom you will find in "Effective Cycling". You can learn the hard way, or you can read this book and benefit from wisdom that comes from riding on American public roads for years and years. Most cyclists these days would prefer to regurgitate poorly formed opinions based on some guy on the internet who went on vacation in the Netherlands for two weeks, while rejecting the knowledge of their seniors, and it shows in the kinds of things they advocate for.
The world would be a safer place if more cyclists (and motorists) picked up a copy of this book and informed themselves.
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