Thread: Mandatory bike lanes
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Old 02-25-05 | 04:48 PM
  #24  
Helmet-Head
Vehicular Cyclist
 
Joined: Aug 2004
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Originally Posted by Treespeed
As an aside on my ride to get coffee at lunch I saw two USC students one exiting a sidewalk onto a crosswalk, the other riding on the wrong side of the street plow into each other. No serious injuries, but each of course blaming the other for the accident. I guess they don't have any cyclist education on this campus.


Oh, believe me, my eyes are not closed to the exceptions in the law. I believe it is a brilliant piece of nuanced legislation, because it gives me all the outs I need. The problem with it is that the outs are nuanced. That is, only geeks like us bother to learn the law and how it applies to us, so that we can ride outside of the bike lane when necessary confident in the knowledge that what we are doing is legal. The problem is that most cyclists, who are not geeks, don't know this. Most motorists don't know it - these nuances are not explained in the driver's manual - that's for sure. And, sadly, most law enforcement officers don't know it. Luckily their lack of knowledge about cyclist rights doesn't affect us directly very much because they rarely enforce it, but it does affect us in other more insidious ways (see below). In other words, while your eyes and my eyes are not closed to the nuanced exceptions, the eyes of most people are. A quick informal poll in your place of work should convince you quickly enough. Just ask: when is a cyclist allowed by law to leave a bike lane? Can even one person come up with even half of the situations?

As to the insidious effects of law enforcement not understanding cyclist rights (because, in my view, they are stated too subtly in the law), I'll give you two examples:
  1. In a tragic collision about a year ago on a rural 2-lane highway where a pickup driver was passing some cars (driving in the oncoming lane) he hit and killed a cyclist. The officer at the scene declared the driver "did nothing wrong" and sent him home without a blood alcohol test and before the ME could arrive to examine the truck and driver. Months later the CHP reversed the finding of the officer, stating that the pickup driver broke the law when he crossed the center line into the oncoming lane because it had "traffic" in it (because legally, the cyclists - one of which he hit - constituted "traffic" - something the CHP officer did not recognize). But the DA apparently decided there was insufficient evidence to prosecute.
  2. One of the reasons the CHP and the AAA opposed AB 1408 last year, which at the time was rewriting these laws to be less subtle, was because they felt the changes "would allow cyclists to leave the right edge of the road (and the bike lane) more often than does current law". This opinion stemmed from either a misunderstanding of the current (nuanced) law, or from the understanding that the general misundertanding of the current law would be fixed, and what would "allow cyclists to leave the right edge more often" would not be a substantive change to the law (since ab1408 did not provide one), but would be the broader understanding by cyclists of what their rights are. Since this bill was essentially killed by the opposition of the CHP and AAA, it changed to be something completely different and I stopped tracking it. But you can still find it on the assembly website if you search for 1408 in the 2003-2004 year.
    http://www.assembly.ca.gov/acs/acsframeset2text.htm
    Look at the earlier versions.
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