Originally Posted by
Leisesturm
I really hate to break it to you (and Andy) but both you and he are wrong. If you want to test the valitity of a hypothesis extrapolate out to the ridiculous extreme... would you... could you, access the pedestrian walk button riding a tandem? A touring bike with loaded front and rear panniers? Pulling a loaded trailer? You can't have it both ways. If you are already in the road, the best practice would be to stay there. And it would NEVER be permissible to salmon against traffic in the pedestrian crosswalk for the opposite side of the street. ???What? What possible benefit could there be to that? SMH. How these concepts manage to make sense to somebody and get adopted as a valid way to do things is really beyond my ken.
a. who mentioned anything about a tandem bike? And why would you do a commuter ride through busy traffic on a tandem, unless you were both highly skilled already?
b. I'm in Austin, not Portland like you. Going on and off sidewalks is a necessity for serious bike commutes in this town. So to say, "if you are already in the road" isn't valid - a lot of time there is NO road for bikes - zero shoulder and only narrow lanes of fast moving cars. I and most commuter bicyclists in this town spend a good deal of time on sidewalks, grass, and plowing through gravel.
c. No one is talking about "salmoning against traffic in a crosswalk", and I'm not about to diagram it out for you. But, safe to say, there is such a thing in this town as a "WALK" light at most major intersections, which normally does not try to walk pedestrian or bike traffic directly into oncoming cars.
