Originally Posted by
Bekologist
Recent study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg school for Public Health found that:
* Overall, bike lanes in Baltimore improve cyclist safety
* Without bike lanes, drivers had trouble sharing the road with cyclists
* One in six Baltimore drivers, or about 17 percent, violated the 3-foot law
* Researchers found a 20 percent increase in motorist adherence to the 3-foot law for bike lane streets compared to standard streets.
Summary at Streetsblog
3 foot passing compliance - bikelanes improve safe passing in Baltimore
and link to Johns Hopkins study
Is 3 foot law working in Baltimore?
This is just another in a long line of studies aimed at justifying motorists' prime concern when creating bike lanes, which is how well do bike-lane stripes keep cyclists out of motorists' way. Overtaking clearance has very little to do with cyclist safety, particularly for city cycling. Close overtaking crashes occur only for the far outliers of any overtaking clearance distribution, and, as any statistician ought to know, far outliers are extremely unpredictable and the means and deviations of the distribution are practically irrelevant to their occurrence.