Originally Posted by
Leisesturm
It's threads like this that make A&S legendary among the subforums as a place where angels fear to tread. Seriously, slithering between moving traffic and parked traffic at >10mph? In rain? In snow? At night? But, I wanna talk about bike lanes. I didn't see any in that video. Why is that do you think? I'd like to know just how many fatalities of cyclists riding in bike lanes there were last year? I'd like to know how long it would have taken to compile a similar video of bike lane fails? Some of you seem to have some sort of agenda to make the cycling public fear and eschew 'door zone' bike lanes. Not gonna happen I'm happy to say.
First thing, the vast majority of the cycling public don't lurk here and, second thing, the minute they actually get out there and realize that IN the (not so) deadly (door zone) bike lane that they are much better off than trying to maintain 25mph in the vehicle lane, or dealing with the fallout from not keeping up ... things mainly take care of themselves. How many posts in this thread gave the sage advice "don't ride in the door zone" but failed to suggest an alternative? Too many. I would suggest that the next poster to join the fray, in fact, do just that: suggest an alternative to riding in the 'door zone' that works as well, or better.
Even if you ignore the bike lane issue, you're still right. Any blanket rule of "never do x" is going to be poorly considered unless you can specify the better alternative. You can plan the best possible route ever to avoid door zones and all it takes is one car, with or without flashing blue lights, parked somewhere where you don't expect it and you could be faced with the alternative of the small risk of going through the door zone or the much larger risk of taking a lane on a high mph road.
I do a lot of "exploring" on my bikes, so I'm often riding places where I don't know what to expect in terms of parking patterns. If I'm in a situation where I can safely take the lane to get around parked cars, I'll do it, but if I'm not, I will follow my practice of going through the door zone slow enough that I can see which cars are occupied before I pass them and to minimize the damage if for some reason I actually hit a door (which still hasn't ever happened to me in 45+ years of riding, knock wood).