Originally Posted by
JoeyBike
Nope. Technically, lane splitting means...exactly what it says - splitting LANES. A sidewalk is not a lane. A median is not a lane. A double-yelow line is not a lane. You can only be "splitting lanes" if you are
between two lanes. It's all filtering, but it's not all lane splitting. We could argue samantics all day, but the words mean what they mean. Passing cars while riding in the gutter is not lane splitting. It is filtering, or riding in the gutter, or curb-hugging, or anything but lane-splitting. If you split an apple what do you have?
Two halves of an apple. If you split lanes there must be
two lanes being split. Split something and you get two relatively equal parts by
definition:
Verb
Break or cause to break forcibly into parts, esp.
into halves...
Noun
A tear, crack, or fissure in something, esp.
down the middle...
I'm not talking about riding on a sidewalk. A lane has two sides so if you go down the right side of a lane of cars, you are splitting the lane just as you'd be splitting it going down the left side of a line of cars.
Originally Posted by
JoeyBike
That is so easy I am surprised you asked. I do it five times a day. Say I am riding 15mph between two lanes of stopped cars and they all start moving. The line of cars are not hooked together like cars on a train, there are gaps between them. Just keep up your speed until you catch up to a gap and merge right into it. In 10,000 tries I have never failed to just merge in, often giving a hand signal that I am moving over but that is irrelevant as there is plenty of space - most drivers leave several car lenths ahead before they even start moving. And now that every A.H. behind the wheel is looking at their phone at a red lignt, the gaps are much larger than before smart phones with viewing screens were prevalent because no one is paying attention to the danged light going green anymore. (I started a thread on that topic - how smartphones have made traffic-jamming at rush hour so much easier for me named "
Why I love motorists on their phones").
Perhaps it's the gentility of New Orleans but a stunt like that here would be met with, at a minimum, honks and hand gestures. More likely with the car trying to make the bicyclist the baloney in a car sandwich, as you said earlier. People don't like the way that bicyclists ride around here anyway and your kind of antics would send them over the top. Lane splitting down the right, i.e. filtering, would be more acceptable to motorist around here then filtering down between two lines of cars. And I would consider it safer than being trapped between two lines of cars moving off a light.
Originally Posted by
JoeyBike
Obviously you have not split many lanes.
No, I haven't split lanes. I think it's a foolish practice.
Last edited by cyccommute; 02-26-13 at 09:53 AM.