Originally Posted by
jralbert
Augh! See, I wanted to leave this alone when I saw alan's reply, but I just can't stand to see the argument made unopposed that the law somehow supports filtering or lane splitting. The Act in question was indeed written originally to describe motor vehicles; when roadway cycling became commonplace, the Legislature extended the Act with a section (183) to specifically describe variances for bicycles, which section begins with a clause asserting that "In addition to the duties imposed by this section, a person operating a cycle on a highway has the same rights and duties as a driver of a vehicle." Just to forestall further nitpicking, the term 'highway' is defined by the Act as "...every road, street, lane or right of way designed or intended for or used by the general public for the passage of vehicles".
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Glad to give you an opportunity to present your case
I wasn't intending to argue that the law somehow supported lane splitting but I can see how ambiguous it was. I differentiate between lane splitting vs lane sharing while riding FRAP. While the latter may technically be "lane splitting", and 158 prohibits passing on the right by drivers of vehicles, I don't see how that can be applied in practice to bicycles passing vehicles on the right side when riding FRAP. Otherwise there would be no lane sharing by bicycles, no? You wouldn't even be able to ride past a line of stopped cars with even 6 feet of clearance, unless there was a delineated lane there. So I'd suspect that in this particular case, drivers of vehicles would be construed as motor vehicles.
In other words, passing on the right with room on the roadway right edge is OK, passing on the right between lanes not OK. If that's true, then the statute has to be interpreted accordingly.