Originally Posted by
CliffordK
It is hard to say what transpired. That bike lane doesn't look like it is the standard width of a bike lane. Rather a simple road shoulder that had bike symbols painted on it. I don't see anything that would preclude the community from widening the road by say 4 feet to expand the two bike lanes to a more appropriate width. Perhaps widening it ever further because the vehicle traffic lanes may also be undersized.
Without more context, one can't determine whether or not the bus and bike actually made contact. I wonder if that was a panic crash instead.
One of the issues with close passes is that what is fine for a 5' wide passenger car becomes unacceptably close for a bus or truck that is 8'6" wide (plus a few feet of mirrors on both sides), and 30+ feet long. The road above looks straight, but truck and trailer rear wheels often don't track behind the front wheels on corners.
I was just passed yesterday on a narrow bridge by one of those 6' vehicles pulling an 8' trailer
, with an oncoming car pass. It was all over before I realized it, but I have to wonder if the driver forgot that he was pulling a trailer that was wider than his vehicle.
Agree about the bike lane being substandard width but that's beside the point. Even in standard width bike lanes cyclists often ride near the stripe due to less debris accumulating there, so how little or much space there is to the right of the cyclist is largely irrelevant.
The problem is that the stripe also defines the edge of the bus's lane and motorists are accustomed to operating anywhere within their lane, especially when it's otherwise empty, as this one was. Of course the bus driver
should take into account the presence of the cyclists on the other side of the stripe and adjust accordingly, but
it's naive to expect every driver to necessarily do so given that the desired behavior is contrary to normal expected usage of lanes.
The bottom-left frame in each of the photos, before and after the crash, shows how close the bus was to the stripe - and that it was even closer after the crash than before, suggesting it was close and moving closer as it passed. In any case the driver obviously made no adjustment away from the cyclists in response to their presence - he treated them like they weren't even there. I bet he was not even aware they were present. That's classic inattentional blindness - blocking out the irrelevant (that's the problem with bike lanes - for all intents and purposes they seem to make cyclists irrelevant to overtaking motorists).
It's possible that air turbulence was involved rather than the bus actually hitting the cyclist, but either way that's an illegal close pass because it clearly interfered with the safe operation of the bicycles, which were being legally and safely ridden.
The point is: Close passes are very dangerous, especially close passes by large vehicles. Most cyclists who frequently use the full lane seem to report experiencing close passes much more often (if not exclusively) when riding in bike lanes or edge riding than when using the full traffic lane.