I used to worry about this, now I think autonomous vehicles will be here and solve the issue before we can have much meaningful change. So, one less thing to spend time hassling the legislature about. I’ve got a long list.
Alcohol users and car users (granted, a lot of overlap here) kill other people at a higher rate than gun users (ignoring suicide here, that’s something like 2/3 of the fire arm deaths).
Some cyclists are completely insane.
I had a cyclist race me for a gap between parked cars and a high curb one Saturday morning as if he had a right of way and almost got crushed because an agency gave him permission to " share the road".
His interpretation of that was to nearly die.
Fuck wit.
Buh? Surely the “inside” lane is the lane nearest the middle of the road (i.e. the passing lane)?
Though, yes, the previous post seems confusing to me either way, though I’ve rarely driven anywhere, and never in Ireland.
How about “vehicular manslaughter”?
I’m also a cyclist. I don’t know where you live, but where i do, people stopping for stop signs is very much the norm. There are occasional exceptions (very much so for cyclists, but certainly not for organized group rides) but its rarely annoying in the case of cyclists. Then again, Minneapols - St. Paul is regualrly rated one of the best cities in which to be a cyclist… hmm, wonder if there is a cause-effect reationship there…
I’m also a sporting motorcyclist and a regular car driver. People don’t see speeding as dangerous because its generally not - speed limits are often much lower than required for safe operation. This doesn’t apply in all cases, but it applies in so many that it becomes the expectation for them all. Get rid of highway speed limits and other pointless restrictions, and the ones that matter would stand out by contrast.
Doesn’t it concern you that you’re driving a vehicle in situations where you admittedly can’t see what’s in front you?
I file this complaint in the same folder as “but he was in my blind spot.” It’s the responsibility of everyone on the road, driver and cyclist alike, to be aware of their surroundings and in full control of their vehicle. The buck stops with you.
The existence of situations that impede your vision does not absolve you of the need to correct for them. Get better headlights, or don’t drive when it’s too dark for you to comfortably see.
Not in Ireland and Great Britain. Official terminology there makes the “outside lane” the “passing lane” or “overtaking lane”, while the “inside lane” is closest to the shoulder, also know as the verge.
They’re not called accidents. They are called “crashes.” I have a good friend, a cop, who worked “fatal crashes.” He spoke to me about how that wording was so important, that they weren’t accidents but crashes, and his job was to determine the fault in the crash, whether the driver was intending to commit suicide or not, whether the driver had committed vehicular manslaughter or not.
Pedophiles, pederasts, pedestrians, (the inevitable) pedants – kill 'em all, G-d will know his own.
Point taken. Thanks for the note.
Over 30,000 deaths per year in the USA and many times that in serious injuries, would give me pause when saying that the speed motor vehicles travel is not really a safety issue. If speed limits are too low, then people are clearly ignoring them. (Simple observation shows this be almost universally true).The higher the speed, the more likely a collision is too occur, and greater are the consequences. Speed may not be the sole cause of collisions but it is a hugely significant risk factor in terms of both frequency and consequence. It is certainly a necessary condition for collisions - stationary objects tend not to collide with each other. Faster is more dangerous. Is it too dangerous? Well, that depends on what fatality and injury rates you are prepared to accept.
You seem to be forgetting the bike lane, which is the whole point of the discussion you’re engaged in.
You said:
Cyclists come up on the right side of drivers who are turning right, and roll past them at speed, when they should stop and wait behind a turning vehicle.
@robertmckenna correctly replied
In Ireland if a car is turning left the car driver has to stop and wait for the traffic on the inside lane as it has right of way.
What you’re not seeing is that the bike lane is a lane of traffic. And that’s the case (at least, in many jurisdictions) even if there is no painted bike lane.
So a car that is turning right in the US ought to give way to cyclists that are coming up behind them on their right, just as they would if they were trying to make a right turn from two lanes over. In the latter circumstance, we’d all recognize that a driver that swerved in front of another car in order to make a right turn was a bad driver, but for some reason many drivers (including you, it seems, from your first post) believe that they get to make a right turn in front of cyclists who are behind them.
Here are some passages from Massachusetts laws
Chapter 85: the bicycle operator may keep to the right when passing a motor vehicle which is moving in the travel lane of the way
Chapter 90: No person operating a vehicle that overtakes and passes a bicyclist proceeding in the same direction shall make a right turn at an intersection or driveway unless the turn can be made at a safe distance from the bicyclist […] It shall not be a defense for a motorist causing an accident with a bicycle that the bicycle was to the right of vehicular traffic.
The basic rule is: bikes on the right must be treated as a lane of traffic, and crossing that lane should be done by giving the bicycles the exact same right of way you’d normally give to a lane full of cars.
But, you say, that’s not fair, as a car can’t go into the bike lane, so may have to wait for many bikes to pass them on the right before it can turn right. The answer is that it depends on your jurisdiction. Generally, though, you must make a safe, legal merge into the bike lane before turning right. (Another link.) If a cyclist is too close behind and to the right of you to make a merge into their lane, you need to wait until they’ve passed you.
I’ll admit to not following what you are describing. You were driving a car into a gap between parked cars? There was a high curb near the parked cars and you were driving at it? The sentence is syntactically correct, but I feel it lacks the information for me to form an actual picture of what happened.
Do you see why-–as the lawyer upthread mentions––words like ‘collision’ are much less ambiguous? I think that’s really what’s at issue, this designation of ‘accident’ makes the difference between a fender bender and a vehicular homicide seem way too small.
When I’m on my bike, I treat motorists with the same caution I would if I were in a crowd of drunk or distracted people all swinging shotguns and axes who are unaware that they’re heavily armed. Law makers (cyclists and bikers who due stupid shit that results in more laws hostile to riders) astound me. You either have to have a death wish or just be profoundly dumb to endanger people who can kill you before they know they’ve done it.
Of course I much prefer group rides. Most motorists are not so much actively hostile as oblivious to anything smaller than a bus.
A lot of the time, that’s not because the bicyclist was in the motorist’s physical blind spot. They occupy a cognitive blind spot.
I was hit once years ago where a bike lane crossed a street, the street having a stop sign. A vehicle was stopped at the sign. It was broad daylight. I was going slowly enough to look in the driver’s eyes to make sure she saw me, and could have stopped without trouble if she had been looking away from me. She was looking directly at me - we had eye contact, it was great, both parties fully aware of the other, I proceeded into the intersection - and the driver pulled out and T-boned me. And of course, “she didn’t see me”.
There is no way that photons did not bounce off me and arrive at the back of her eyeballs. Like I say, her eyes were looking directly at me. But the impulses from her eyeballs didn’t make it to the right part of her brain. The blind spot I occupied was a cognitive one.
She might even unconsciously have been waiting for me to stop blocking her field of vision so she could see the street she was about to pull into, to assess it for risks. Of course when I stopped blocking her view, I did so by pulling out directly in front of her car.
It was a roadway around a bend with a high curb on the left of me and a row of parked cars on the other.
The high curb is a median between my lane and on- coming traffic. It’s a bad corner at best, and why the city allows parking there is beyond me.
Now that there is a “share available roadway” policy, cyclists in this area will now blindly pull out now and then in front of 60kph traffic expecting that drivers will be able to magically not be there.
The bloke in question gave me about 1/4 second to either slam on my brakes or speed up. I chose the latter and he shit himself.
I would say I missed him by less that a foot.
I had almost exactly the same thing happen some years ago.
I had to put a foot on her bumper and push or I would have been run over like my bike was.
When I told her husband how much the damage to my bike was he told me I shouldn’t be riding such an expensive bike…
I laughed.
Ah, thank you. I think I see what was happening now.
I’m not forgetting it - but I think we may be deep in jurisdictional differences. In Ontario, it’s the Highway Traffic Act (HTA).
First, in Ontario, it’s not a bike lane unless it is signed and painted (HTA 153(3)).
The other key distinction is that in my usual case, the bike lane ceases to exist before the intersection. In Toronto, the bike lanes I see (because I have not inventoried all of them!) end before major intersections. The hard white line first becomes dashed, and then goes away. Usually by about 30 feet from the corner, there is no marking, and hence no bike lane. Bikes are expected to merge into the traffic lane.
In general, they could pass on the right, but it is now their responsbility to make that maneuver safely. They no longer have a lane to themselves, and if I am turning right, I am doing it from the rightmost lane.
Some aggressively marked intersections actually redirect the marked bike lane to be on the left of the rightmost lane, so that bikes are between two lanes of cars. This is typically done where a large fraction of traffic is turning right.
I think the “bike lane fade” is there because there are concerns about right-turning driver workload. The driver needs to be aware of oncoming vehicles turning left into the same lane they plan to use, and they also need to give right-of-way to pedestrians crossing the street parallel to their current line of travel (using the same green light the driver faces). Adding a third concern in a completely different direction means that even a very conscientious driver may check his right-hand mirror, check oncoming traffic, check pedestrians, and then proceed into a right turn, only to end up in a collision with a cyclist coming up at speed on the right.
In places without bike lanes, bikes are usually riding on the right, close to the shoulder or curb, but they are considered to be in the rightmost lane along with the cars. There are a couple of very new (Sept 1st) special rules about overtaking bicycles in the same lane, requiring minimum space to be considered a safe overtake - but as I understand it, those are “straight stretch” rules, not aimed at resolving right turn issues.
So - yes, I do get to make a right turn without having to give way to cyclist who is truly “behind me” in the same lane. If they are actually in another lane, that would be different, but it wasn’t what I was thinking about in the original post.
