Treespeed, buddy, give me a break, please!
why is it that .. you have to redefine it for the rest of us.
I defined "taking the lane" only after spang621 implicitly asked for a confirmation/clarification of his understanding what it means. Specifically, I was responding to this statement: "riding in the center (when i say slightly left of center i mean 6-12 inches left of exact center) is my understanding of what 'taking a lane' and VC is." While that is an example of "taking the lane", it's not what it is, not it's definition. I felt it might be helpful to clarify that.
how can you argue that there is never any reason to be left of center?
I can't, of course, and didn't. You're taking the discussion out of context. In this case he had someone behind him and no particular reason to be left of center. Why
not facilitate the motorist's passing by moving right?
In a narrow lane if one does not ride a bit left of center motorists most definitely squeeze by with the most minimal of clearances.
It seems to me that if a car can squeeze into the left half of the lane, then that lane is wide enough to safely share, and is thus not a narrow lane. But, I guess if it's a 14' lane in a door zone, and you're riding say just outside the door zone, (at 5' from the right edge), then motorists in small cars might still try to squeeze into the remaining 7ish feet, and, in that case, you might have to ride left of center to prevent it. But that's a pretty wide "narrow" lane. I don't find myself in that situation very often, but maybe it's more common in your area.
I think it is because this is a flaw in your VC bike lane assumptions, that with a WOL passing clearances are increased.
I worked this out in detail in the Mandatory Bike Lanes thread. Check it out.
http://www.bikeforums.net/showpost.p...&postcount=674
You set up your arguments with a set of initial conditions that only exist with a certain set of BL's or roadways, so for BL's that don't meet your initial conditions/ assumptions your arguments from logic and reason don't always follow.
Yes, it's fair to say that my argument about WOL cycling being safer than BL cycling does not apply to roadways with 22-25 WOLs with 12-15 demarcated as a BL.
As an aside I thought it was in incredibly poor taste to take credit for Gene and Dianes advocation ...
Yes, I've taken some flack for allegedly doing that. I guess I can understand how others might think I was taking credit for it, but that's certainly not what I was doing. I said it in the context of what I got out of participating in these forums, and used Gene and Diane as examples of others who seemed to get similar benefits (and the evidence of that was in changes about how they wrote about VC here). Here's how I originally worded it:
Originally Posted by Serge *******
But all this is helping me evolve my thinking about bike lanes and vehicular cycling, and how I present it. I'll tell you one thing, even a few weeks ago Diane and Gene were not preaching the virtues of VC the way they are now (whether they recognize that's what they're doing or not)...
I did not mean to attribute Gene's or Diane's way of riding or talking about it to
me! I did not even refer to how they rode (I know nothing about that). I only referred to how they were "preaching the virtues of VC", and how that has seemed to evolve (just like my own thinking has evolved). And I attributed all of that, for all of us, to participating in this forum. The only
person who deserves any credit for any change like this is the person going through the change.