Originally Posted by
wsbob
snipped
" (snip) Consider what happens. The bike box provides an additional temptation for cyclists to overtake on the right-hand side of right-turning traffic, just so that they can get into the bike box. The obvious then happens: there are more right-hook car-bike collisions near those bike boxes.(snip) " John Forester #299
I don't think the city has come up with anything to suggest bike boxes are leading people on bikes to do this sort of thing. As I've said before, the boxes are just something the city has been experimenting with at certain intersections. They're not that great to use, because, for example, it's awkward to actually get into a box ahead of a motor vehicle that's already at an intersection waiting for a light to change. People riding bikes may not be using bike boxes much at all, for any reason. For bikes intent on through travel at an intersection, it's easier and better to either remain a car length back of the intersection, positioned in the bike lane if one is present and hazard free, or on approach to the intersection from a further distance back, transition from the bike lane to the main travel lane for travel through the intersection, a maneuver people biking in Oregon are effectively acknowledged by law to have the right to make.
Downtown, where I believe the boxes have primarily been located, are various intersections that tend to be relatively more problematic for motor vehicle-bike close calls and collisions. Personally, I believe it's greater numbers of people biking, and more of them not well skilled in riding in traffic, as well as the ever present hazard of various erratic people driving motor vehicles, that's resulted in an increase of collisions at certain intersections where bike boxes have been installed in Portland.
If you will note, Wsbob admits that it is safer at bike-box interections and bike-lane intersections, for the cyclist to move into the main through traffic lane than to use the bike lane, even when it leads to a bike box. This he says, is a movement that is allowed by Oregonian traffic law. Well, yes, and no, both. Wsbob uses this argument to demonstrate the legality of obeying the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles, when, in truth, the laws state, and the public believes, that cyclists do not have that right. This is all the standard American absurdity about traffic law for cyclists. First, cyclists have to be given the rights and duties of drivers of vehicles. If they did not have that, they would be trespassers on the roadways and limited to walking on sidewalks, and would not have the right to recovery from those who cause them injury. Then the specific laws for cyclists alone deny them the rights to use most of the roadway, sometimes prohibiting all use when there is a bike path alongside. Oh yes, these are the laws that the public remembers, because most of the public are motorists and these laws that discriminate against cyclists please motorists. Then, tagging along behind the big second set of laws is a third set of laws that attempt to give back to cyclists the rights to obey the normal traffic laws that have just been taken from them. That had to be done, because denying cyclists the right to obey the normal traffic laws, the laws for all drivers of vehicles, had turned out to be dangerous. The result is a confused mass of legal contradictions that nobody understands. The proper thing to do is to retain the law giving cyclists the rights and duties of drivers of vehicles, in the case where the state does not define bicycles as vehicles (which Oregon does, but then goes back on its word), and to repeal the confusing rest.