I am a cyclist and a driver. Unfortunately, I think the only way forward for cyclists is intense litigation against both cities and drivers around car collisions. The city will not prosecute cars for dangerous driving or violations, even if they hit drivers. Its crazy to me how getting caught going 15 miles over the speed limit will double your car insurance rates, but hitting a cyclists won't do anything because as a driver you can say "they darted into the lane" to any cop and won't be cited for anything. I was hit by a car once, had my bike totaled, and got a small settlement from the driver's insurance company. If I was hit again, I would immediately go to a lawyer and take the insurance company to the cleaners an donate all of the money to a bicycle advocacy org, and I advise everyone I know who gets hit to do the same thing. It sucks but it seems like personal injury law is the only avenue to make change here and introduce some form of penalty and feedback to hitting a cyclist with a car. There is no infrastructure to stop this because drivers don't care, they can hit cyclists without consequence.
I've been hit twice. Both times I was at a stop sign. The second time the guy just said "oh sorry, the sun was in my eyes." Meanwhile I thought I was going to be pushed into moving traffic and die by someone who in no way could have avoided me. Took me a full minute to catch my breath and gain enough composure to lay into the guy who hit me. He never got out of his car, never said sorry (real sorry), nothing. I've had cars chase me because they don't think I should be riding in the right most lane (no bike lane or construction).
One time a Pizza Hut driver almost killed me. I called his boss, they didn't care.
One time an UBER DRIVER almost hit me and then proceeded to chase me because I yelled and flipped him off. I sent a photo of the license place to Uber and the local PD, nothing. Not even an acknowledgement.
The fact is that people don't care. You go on HN or Reddit and people will complain and actively encourage hitting riders. It is always the rider's fault, even if the driver broke the law. And I'm tired of it. I don't care if the rider was in the wrong, you're a lot more squishy on a bike than in a plastic housing with a motor. There's this weird dichotomy of not caring about the life or safety of someone.
Legislation is one part of the correct answer, but not all of it. Here in the Netherlands there's "strict liability" [0], in which the driver is always liable for at least 50% of the damage, and usually 100% liable, but that is only a part of the solution. The law is worth very little without proper infrastructure. Infrastructure that provides clear and physical separation works, as demonstrated by Oslo's zero cyclist fatalaties [1].
You might be interested in the history of the "Stop Murdering Our Children" campaign. It had a massive impact on the development of the Netherlands. In the 60s, automobile-pedestrian deaths were higher per capita than in the usa. It wasn't always a bike mecca.
The legal infrastructure you suggest absolutely works to reduce accidents and increase driver responsibility. When I'm driving in the Netherlands I am critically more aware of cyclists there, due to the road layout but also because of assumed liability, I'd better be 100% sure I'm driving safely.
I’m a cyclist and driver too, and I always get annoyed when cyclists always blame the cars. Most cyclist don’t follow the laws and then yell at you for their fault. I stopped my bike at a stop sign, the dude behind me wasn’t prepared for it and hit me with his bike. He then yelled at me for stopping. Honestly, both drivers and cyclists are rude and selfish on the road.
That said, when I am driving, I have absolutely no issue with people on bicycles who ride predictably and follow the rules. It's those who don't that anger me. Specifically, I'm talking about things like riding through a crosswalk, riding the wrong way, and not signaling lane changes. There's a reason you're supposed to walk your bike through a crosswalk, and not signaling when you're a ~200 lb driver + rider combo facing down vehicles weighing more than 10x and capable of going much, much faster than you is just dumb.
That doesn't mean drivers aren't dumb, too. On top of the usual traffic BS we all deal with while driving, I also see a lot of instances of drivers not taking over a bike lane when turning. Usually, in this case, this just seems to lead to a lot of "go! no, you go! no you go!" business, but it's 100% a recipe for a crash.
Usually this sort of thing is grassroots and ooorly funded - but just imagine what the enormous financial resources of the self-driving car industry could do - by increasing the costs and deadly perception of human car driving in every city that say Uber operates in,
the likelihood of those jurisdictions approving even stage 4 cars on the road will increase.
Just hire the same lawyers that the tobacco industry was paying.
I should send someone a memo
Having said this, (as a daily commute cyclist pre covid) the issue is lack of delegated infrastructure- and I think that applies not just for mixed human drivers and human cyclists but (as much as it disappoints) we will likely need separate roads for self driving cars and human (cars / bikes / pedestrians).
Self driving seems a really hard problem now we are past the "california highway" level. To be safe at night or in rain or in Italian backstreets or Mumbai rush hour seems behind reach.
So we can use infrastructure to reduce the need for better AI. But that gets expensive. We can probably avoid building a second road network - but we need compromises.
Separated bike lanes will help this - those great wide Dutch streets with pedestrian bike car and the tram lanes come to mind - main roads where the central lanes are for automated use only.
The cost will be enormous (and blows most business models out the water) but we may win elsewhere - reclaiming some of the streets back as living areas, migrating deliveries off trucks and into smaller slower delivery vehicles designed to trundle down thinner streets.
Either way i look forward to a future of slower vehicles a d bike paths
I don't disagree, but I do wish there was a more formalized way to educate both bikers and drivers on the laws. I just saw the Washington DC official bike map has the laws on it, but others do not. And what use are the laws if the drivers don't know them? Both bikers and drivers need to know them to be successful.
I've asked a good number of both bikers and drivers in my area and they don't know that the laws exist:
A driver must move over to the next lane if it is open and a biker is in the bike lane or the lane the driver is in.
A driver must not pass closer than 3 feet from a biker
A biker may take an entire lane and ride two wide
I think if drivers knew that the above rules, and it became a norm to take the entire lane when 3 feet was impossible based on the size of the lane, then biking would be safer.
To not leave this as a "this is bad" without proposing how to fix it... the education could be incorporated into gaining your drivers license, city sponsored advertisements, or having police actively spend a period of time enforcing the above laws (warnings would be fine, more for education than penalty)... or all 3.
> I think the only way forward for cyclists is intense litigation
In my (non-cycling-related) experience, this is never true. That is, litigation gets you little, if anything. If there is no public, political way forward (inside or outside the political establishment), then you're stuck, and had better work on that.
Ideas:
* Promote use of public mass-transit instead of private cars (e.g. via infrastructure and mass transit investiment)
* De-motivate use of private cars (e.g. through taxation on car purchases and/or on gasoline, stricter pollution regulation, more expensive parking)
* Change the law so that in all cyclist-car-driver accidents, the car driver is at fault unless he proves otherwise.
This all requires a lot of public pressure, which in turn requires public opinion work through local advocacy.
---
Alternatively, some people could go the vigilante way. I'm not advocating this, but in theory, acquaintance of the cyclist victim of an attack by a car driver can retaliate either immediately or ex-post-facto, not within the bounds of the law. That could mean something like a scratching a rebuke on the car's paint, or pasting a piece of material with a written message to the front window in a way which doesn't come off easily, or blocking the car from leaving its parking spot with some kind of inconvenience, together with a rebuke that is easy to remove (e.g. page of paper under windshield); etc.
This route does not require mass active support across a country or legislative district; it only requires passive local support for cycling and disdain for car drivers hitting cyclists - enough to create multiple potential suspects while making it very difficult for law enforcement to pin the actions on any one of them. i.e. if people in the same neighborhood don't rat them out.
I believe the solution is education. It's ridiculous that people are allowed to drive cars before being able to use the road. Airline pilots learn by building up hours in a small aircraft during the day. Then they learn at night. Then they move to larger aircraft.
It should be mandatory to learn to use the road on bicycle before even applying for a car licence. The biggest problem I see is that people simply don't know what it's like to use the road outside of a car. Neither on foot nor on a bike. Dashboard perspective is a real thing. It makes you see other people as obstacles rather than people who are just trying to go to work or return to their family, like you.
Requiring bicycle training would dramatically increase the number of cyclists on the road, essentially taking it back from the tyranny of motorcars. It would also ensure that those who do decide to learn to drive have the experience necessary to be a good road user. Additionally, if they do end up causing an accident the licence can be revoked and they can get back on the bike.
Also sue cities. It's not always possible because of liability constraints for government entities, but sometimes victims of traffic violence can demonstrate negligence and get a foothold into a liability case. City officials often pay little more than lip service to constituents, but they pay attention to risk managers.
Even better, or worse, you have to make it into a lawyer industry where they start putting ads on billboards. Then you will really hyper charge it and insurance companies will start acting accordingly. Hell there might be changes to cars themselves to reduce their insurance costs in some vague future.
Call me crazy, but as a runner I’ve thought of getting one of those follow drones for documenting trails... but what about as a “dash cam” for cyclists? You would certainly be able to get evidence of the sort of thing you are describing.
In NL, world famous for its cyclist-friendly policies, whenever there is a car / bicycle collision, the car driver is ALWAYS responsible, even if the cyclist ignored a red light or whatever. The driver will always be safe, but they are operating heavy machinery, so it's up to them to keep safety of the more vulnerable road users in mind.
That said, around where I live, car / cyclist collisions are still pretty frequent; I live in an area with a lot of roundabouts where cyclists have right-of-way, but because of angles, darkness, rain etc, visibility of cyclists is often very low.
I believe bicycles are purposely devoid of rights by the automobile industry lobby to get people to go through all the pain of buying and owning a car. It's painful, and people hate it, but they do it because there's no other good way to get from point A to point B in America.
Some examples:
1) I suspect the "new car smell" that car buyers believe affects their judgment is purposely chosen glue (I think it's a glue) that dissipates into a gas that literally, psychiatrically impairs buyer's judgment. It's real. [edit: it's still relatively mild].
2) Stealing a person's main means of transport should be punished independently of how expensive that mode of transport is. So, the penalty for stealing a car should be based on the price of a car and the fact it was the main means of transport for that person. Same goes for bicycles, it could have been a $100 bike, but it's the main means of transport and that person is equally stranded as the driver without it. For this reason, being a bike thief stealing 10 bicycles could mean a decade in jail, if laws were different. Who would steal bikes then?
3) Enforce both car driving violations and bike driving violations, but based on lethality of the vehicle. Right now both driving a car drunk and riding a bike drunk are a DUI, which is ridiculous.
4) Legislation that privileges driving over biking harms children, because they can ride a bike starting age 8 or so, but can't drive until 16.
5) Driving is an extremely lethal activity, but AFAIK biking deaths are mostly attributable to automobiles. If you try to run someone over with a car you can be charged with (I forget the wording but more or less) "using a deadly weapon". Because that's what it is. A killing machine.
Cyclist as well - the group I ride with jokes (in a very dark way) about how if we ever wanted someone dead without getting in any real trouble we’d invite them on a bike ride and have someone we know run them over with a car. Easy!
> Unfortunately, I think the only way forward for cyclists is intense litigation against both cities and drivers around car collisions.
Do you want ANTI-bike laws that ban bikes from everywhere not permitted? To someone rich, the "solution" to having to deal with bike liability is to ban bikes.
The only solution is separate bicycle and car infrastructure. Period.
Yes, it sucks that San Francisco has backed off separate infrastructure due to budget. However, the solution is to go lobby SF and to make pro-bike infrastructure a single vote issue to make them put it back.
One thing I do not understand: why hasn't some rich millionaire/billionaire taken some second/third tier city and funded bike infrastructure into it? It seems like it would be a lot easier to get bikers to move to a city that has infrastructure rather than trying to jam infrastructure into city that is basically land-locked/water-locked.
IMO the answer is to have registration and insurance for bikes, which would create financial incentives to drive reporting and behavior.
In the limited experience that I have as a frequent pedestrian visitor with dedicated cycling lanes in NYC, they feel dangerous to pedestrians. Many cyclists don’t want to stop or yield to pedestrians, and left turn markings on avenues are still evolving and confuse a lot of drivers.
Unfortunately, many cyclists stake stupid risks which also cause accidents. I have seen stoped cycling between rows of parked cars and darting through a red light, or going full speed down a sidewalk past rows of parking garages etc. Without dash cams it’s nearly impossible to tell the root cause as reckless driver or a suicidal cyclist.
This is why both drivers and cyclists really should be recording things. It doesn’t prevent injuries, if it can make a huge difference afterwards.
Honestly, as a driver and pedestrian, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for bicyclists. In my city, at least, I’ve almost been hit by cyclists multiple times as a pedestrian. In one case, the cyclist was going the wrong way, blatantly ran the light, and screamed at me as he passed within maybe two-three feet of me at full speed while I was crossing the street.
In another case, a cyclist blew by my at full speed down a steep hill on the sidewalk, again coming stupidly close to an accident (for both of us) for no reason.
As a driver, I constantly see cyclists on the wrong side of the street, back and forth between the sidewalk and not, and not obeying stop signs or stop lights (let alone other rules). I’ve never even heard of one being ticketed.
I’m all for new bike lanes that are separated from traffic. But honestly before a city encourages more bike riders I really think they need to dramatically step up enforcement of traffic laws against them. If running a red light or stop sign is a $200 ticket in a car, it should be a $200 ticket on a bike. Otherwise it is just unsafe for everyone involved.
Being a cyclist and a driver, I see sharrows as a middle finger to cyclists. They are worse than nothing as they cause confusion, which then leads animosity between drivers and cyclists.
I’m all about incremental measures to test theories. This is not one of the situations that warrants that approach. If a city wants to test out increasing bicycle infrastructure, they unfortunately have to build bicycle infrastructure.
I’m going to call it as it is: sharrows are the answers from cities that simply don’t care about cyclists but want to “show they are doing something” to silence the complaints from what they think are niche groups.
My hometown (and where I work now) is in an LA suburb and it and two adjacent cities recently implemented their “master plan”, and what they ended up doing was making arterial roads with heavy auto traffic traveling at 45-50mph into Class III bike paths. How do you expect a cyclist to “share the road” with cars going 3-4x their speed, or encourage novice cyclists? I think they just added sharrows to the busiest roads in the city and called it a day.
The planners were clearly not cyclists, or more realistically with one of the cities I sent a complaint to, had their hands tied and couldn’t devise any other way to get cyclists safely from one side of the city to another due to the car-heavy infrastructure the city already had. “Bicycle boulevards” like I saw while living in Berkeley and Cupertino where there were literally roadblocks, bollards, and speed bumps installed would be laughed out here.
One city planner told me that city council just didn’t see it as a priority, and that the councilmen just thought cycling was a “recreational activity” and didn’t see it as a serious commuter activity even though the planner himself was a bike commuter. Meanwhile car traffic is getting progressively worse and traffic lights still aren’t timed properly.
In Norway we have this failed campaign for bicycle safety. On some roads there are big signs with "share the road" and the picture of a cyclist looking behind as he's overtaken by a car [0]. The intention was to "humanize" the cyclist and make cars behave, but instead the cars see the sign as "cyclists should look behind and let us pass!" or "he should cycle on the curb!" and instead increase the rage they feel when getting slowed down..
Agreed. In my experience bike commuting on a road with "sharrows" provoked a lot of anger from drivers. I don't fully avoid them because I'm a fairly aggressive city cyclist, but I don't prefer them and most of the people that I have ridden with avoid them completely.
I’m torn, but I think I lean more towards agreeing with you that we just have to build the infrastructure.
I don’t think sharrows do nothing, that feels a bit hyperbolic. If a city were to build infrastructure for example, starting with sharrows seems fairly logical to get everyone used to the upcoming change.
> Being a cyclist and a driver, I see sharrows as a middle finger to cyclists.
Any kind of solution that involves signage only is a middle finger to cyclists. I live in a very cycling friendly city, bike friendly infrastructure is the only thing that makes a difference. Even here where cyclists are super common, there is a pretty big portion of the population who treat cyclists as little more than road debris.
I remember biking around San Francisco, and constantly being lured into the dooring zone by sharrows..
Most of all though, coming from Europe, I was shocked by how wide the street was, how wide the pavements was, and the enormous amount of space dedicated to inefficient street parking, even on major roads.
Somehow 400-500 years old city centers in Denmark manage to find room for cyclist in the very narrow streets. Often dedicating them to pedestrians and/or bikes. And adding bike lanes on major roads. But this is old cities without room for making bike lanes.
In SF, you could have bikelanes everywhere, give up street parking on one side of street... Or even just make the pavement less broad on broadway :)
It's a choice, Americans choose not to. To be fair their cities tend to be less dense involve greater distances.
Your last sentence is literally saying the same thing, the reason they are less dense (today) is because of preference for cars. Most city centers that developed before cars are much denser than the rest of the city. Routinely these parts were hallowed out for parking and often were where the poor (read black and immigrant) people lived.
The bottom line here is that there are essentially no repercussions when cars injure or kill cyclists. This needs to change, and hopefully we can also add proven separated bike lanes which make it safer and more efficient for cyclists as well as drivers.
In Denmark we have light blue lanes in many intersections to make it obvious where cars can expect bikes to cross and also guide the bicyclists.
Also more recently "bike boxes" have been drawn on the street effectively widening a bike lane to cover the entire lane right in front of the intersection to ensure that all bicyclist are in front of and not to the right of waiting cars.
Unfortunately bicyclists are getting injured or even killed by cars or trucks turning right without noticing the bicyclist and the blue lanes and the "bike boxes" are attempts to prevent this from happening.
(I emailed this to the author a few days ago.) I’m not saying these findings would hold up with better ridership data. But they were surprising findings, nonetheless. Plus, nobody wanted to hear it.
When I commute to work by bicycle I have to deal with a mile or so long stretch of sharrows. It is by far the worst and most dangerous part of my ride. They were put in place instead of the non-separated bike lane in the rest of downtown to preserve on-street parking.
On the majority of rides I am either dodging doors, dodging cars that are overtaking too close, or both. This entire stretch of road has a double yellow as well, which makes the overtaking even worse.
I got a Varia light/radar from Garmin so I can at least know when people are approaching from the rear. I feel a lot safer but that’s probably not actually true unfortunately. I highly recommend the light/radar combo because it is very helpful with overall awareness while riding.
I don’t know how this could be resolved because much of the street is residential with fairly small front yards and no driveways to speak of. So I’ll just have to do my best to stay safe and hope that drivers in my city get more accustomed to sharing the road.
I've been a cyclist in a major US city and I believe there needs to be a far more extreme approach for bike advocacy.
As a starting point: ban cars from city centers. That should be the opening point of negotiation from cyclists. From there, maybe we can negotiate down to fixed infrastructure with separate cycle lanes. But the Overton window needs to be shifted dramatically.
The paintings on the ground are abysmally useless from a safety standpoint, but at least SF in particular has bike markings that helped me find flatter roads and other cyclists to clump up with.
That being said, the one way sharrows can be less deadly is to make them borderline useless for other cars, such as Silver Street in Albuquerque. Silver street has medians in its major cross streets so that cars can't continue straight, but bikes can. This, along with the facts that its speed limit is 18 mph and it parallels larger streets the reasons it's not used much by cars, despite not having the excessive stop signs that most gridded neighborhood streets possess.
My big problem with sharrows is that they are typically placed on streets that are adjacent to the main road and cars frequently use as a means to get around the traffic of the main road. So they typically blow through stop signs and such. Now it's been quite some time that I've biked in the Bay but when I did I remember in Berkeley they solved this by putting blocks at intersections so cars had to stay on the main road.
But honestly where I feel safest, as both a driver and a cyclist, is in protected bike lanes. I'm much more scared of someone dooring me than I typically am of a car hitting me. I've adopted strategies to avoid moving vehicles but parked ones I'm typically forced to stay pretty close to and my avoidance options are usually 1) swerve into traffic and hope that the car next to me is paying attention and also avoids or 2) hope my brakes work super well and I can do a turn slide and hit the car door sideways. But natural reaction it to go with option 1 and 2 still sucks.
The issue is that cyclists aren't motor vehicles or pedestrians but we typically classify them as both (hell, one of the most recent Simpsons made this joke). If we're going to be encouraging cycling, and I think we should, we really need to rethink this classification conundrum.
I see sharrows as an excellent low cost solution. Not sure what these studies are that say motorists and cyclists are blind to them, by that logic why have any signage on the roads at all? I absolutely notice them as both a motorist and cyclist, and I’m sure many others do too. They work. Of course they don’t work as well as dedicated bike lanes, but to shit on something that is at least a step forward just because it didn’t take us all the way to the ideal solution is a great way to ensure progress is never made.
Edit: I suppose it’s also worth pointing out most of my bicycling experience comes out of San Francisco. A lot of the bicycle infrastructure here is newer than you would think, it was a noticeably more hostile place to be a cyclist 10 years ago when I moved here, but same could be said of any US city I assume haha
Edit: guess the downvote button means “I don’t agree with you” on hacker news now :/
Not an urban designer, but missing from this perspective: transit planning.
Lane markings could work if the whole area is designed for shared use: roads are made single-lane or one-way, speed limits lowered to safer levels (30km/h), roadside parking spots removed both for safety and visibility, buffer spaces around corners and intersections, raised crossings for cars... a lot of cycle paths in the Netherlands have no grade separation and while a little less comfortable, they are still pretty safe due to how the traffic is organized.
"Sharrows" are cynically known as "dead cyclists" in sections of the Australian bike community, with an analogy to the chalk body outlines one finds in crime dramas. They save the police having to draw the outline when a car runs over a cyclist in the shared lane.
I am not a cyclist. And it is because I think it is unsafe to do so on most all roads where there are cars.
Roads may not have originally been designed for cars, but that is what they are for now. You can make a philosophical debate that they shouldn’t be, and I would agree with you, but that is our shared reality.
The issue then is that cyclists are frustrated because they feel they have the same right to the road as cars do and drivers are frustrated because all but the most elite cyclists simply cannot keep up with posted speed limits.
The answer is full separate lanes either elevated or with a curb or barrier. We have them for pedestrians, we have them for cars, why not for cyclists where it makes sense?
It would be expensive, especially initially, but in cities it could help alleviate traffic congestion.
The sharrows on Sand Hill / 280 N are a complete mess. The dashed line (which indicates where cars are supposed to cross over the sharrows) are way too late. If you actually crossed at the marked location, you would barely have enough time to make the on-ramp. And that's under ideal circumstances — if the pavement is wet or you're in a top-heavy vehicle, it would be very unsafe to wait until the dashed lines appear.
I actually once saw someone cross at the dashed lines and then take the on-ramp, and my first reaction was "whoa, that guy just careened across traffic to make his exit". Then I realized that he had actually waited for the dashed lines to appear. But when you do this (locals don't), it makes you look like a lunatic.
I don’t know why the solution that cyclists should be on the same grade as the pavement (the sidewalk), so that the pavement was about the width of a car lane, so that people could walk and cycle safely away from cars, and have plenty of room to avoid each other too. Why do we always sacrifice cyclists (and peds too) for the sake of cars. The bike lane, where it exists, in my area of suburbia basically forces you into a gutter where you will invariably crash into a bin and probably get squashed by passing traffic.
Yup. They have them on the very few roads around here that are (fictionally) "bicycle-friendly."
I watch drivers drive over them all the time. They're worthless.
Long Island, NY (where I live) is probably one of the most dangerous areas in the country for bicyclists. We had a big ol' controversy, a couple years back, when some politician stated that people just plain shouldn't ride bikes on Long Island. That did not go over well.
I used to live in the DC suburbs, where they had real curb-separated bike lanes. They were much better.
What is the alternative? The article acknowledges that changes are the result of COVID related budget cut backs ("But the budget collapse caused by COVID-19 scaled back the project radically, and now we’re considering sharrows instead of separated bicycle lanes."), then spends the rest of the article talking about how both the current situation and new proposal are unacceptable, but neglects to propose any kind of solution given the budget constraints.
[+] [-] 0xB31B1B|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
One time a Pizza Hut driver almost killed me. I called his boss, they didn't care.
One time an UBER DRIVER almost hit me and then proceeded to chase me because I yelled and flipped him off. I sent a photo of the license place to Uber and the local PD, nothing. Not even an acknowledgement.
The fact is that people don't care. You go on HN or Reddit and people will complain and actively encourage hitting riders. It is always the rider's fault, even if the driver broke the law. And I'm tired of it. I don't care if the rider was in the wrong, you're a lot more squishy on a bike than in a plastic housing with a motor. There's this weird dichotomy of not caring about the life or safety of someone.
[+] [-] Etheryte|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-liabili...
[1] https://thecityfix.com/blog/how-oslo-achieved-zero-pedestria...
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|5 years ago|reply
https://www.dutchreach.org/car-child-murder-protests-safer-n...
[+] [-] telesilla|5 years ago|reply
https://www.bikecitizens.net/presumed-liability-shrinks-cycl...
[+] [-] callinOutLiars|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmiller2|5 years ago|reply
That said, when I am driving, I have absolutely no issue with people on bicycles who ride predictably and follow the rules. It's those who don't that anger me. Specifically, I'm talking about things like riding through a crosswalk, riding the wrong way, and not signaling lane changes. There's a reason you're supposed to walk your bike through a crosswalk, and not signaling when you're a ~200 lb driver + rider combo facing down vehicles weighing more than 10x and capable of going much, much faster than you is just dumb.
That doesn't mean drivers aren't dumb, too. On top of the usual traffic BS we all deal with while driving, I also see a lot of instances of drivers not taking over a bike lane when turning. Usually, in this case, this just seems to lead to a lot of "go! no, you go! no you go!" business, but it's 100% a recipe for a crash.
[+] [-] lifeisstillgood|5 years ago|reply
Just hire the same lawyers that the tobacco industry was paying.
I should send someone a memo
Having said this, (as a daily commute cyclist pre covid) the issue is lack of delegated infrastructure- and I think that applies not just for mixed human drivers and human cyclists but (as much as it disappoints) we will likely need separate roads for self driving cars and human (cars / bikes / pedestrians).
Self driving seems a really hard problem now we are past the "california highway" level. To be safe at night or in rain or in Italian backstreets or Mumbai rush hour seems behind reach.
So we can use infrastructure to reduce the need for better AI. But that gets expensive. We can probably avoid building a second road network - but we need compromises.
Separated bike lanes will help this - those great wide Dutch streets with pedestrian bike car and the tram lanes come to mind - main roads where the central lanes are for automated use only.
The cost will be enormous (and blows most business models out the water) but we may win elsewhere - reclaiming some of the streets back as living areas, migrating deliveries off trucks and into smaller slower delivery vehicles designed to trundle down thinner streets.
Either way i look forward to a future of slower vehicles a d bike paths
[+] [-] Diesel555|5 years ago|reply
I've asked a good number of both bikers and drivers in my area and they don't know that the laws exist:
A driver must move over to the next lane if it is open and a biker is in the bike lane or the lane the driver is in.
A driver must not pass closer than 3 feet from a biker
A biker may take an entire lane and ride two wide
I think if drivers knew that the above rules, and it became a norm to take the entire lane when 3 feet was impossible based on the size of the lane, then biking would be safer.
To not leave this as a "this is bad" without proposing how to fix it... the education could be incorporated into gaining your drivers license, city sponsored advertisements, or having police actively spend a period of time enforcing the above laws (warnings would be fine, more for education than penalty)... or all 3.
[+] [-] einpoklum|5 years ago|reply
In my (non-cycling-related) experience, this is never true. That is, litigation gets you little, if anything. If there is no public, political way forward (inside or outside the political establishment), then you're stuck, and had better work on that.
Ideas:
* Promote use of public mass-transit instead of private cars (e.g. via infrastructure and mass transit investiment)
* De-motivate use of private cars (e.g. through taxation on car purchases and/or on gasoline, stricter pollution regulation, more expensive parking)
* Change the law so that in all cyclist-car-driver accidents, the car driver is at fault unless he proves otherwise.
This all requires a lot of public pressure, which in turn requires public opinion work through local advocacy.
---
Alternatively, some people could go the vigilante way. I'm not advocating this, but in theory, acquaintance of the cyclist victim of an attack by a car driver can retaliate either immediately or ex-post-facto, not within the bounds of the law. That could mean something like a scratching a rebuke on the car's paint, or pasting a piece of material with a written message to the front window in a way which doesn't come off easily, or blocking the car from leaving its parking spot with some kind of inconvenience, together with a rebuke that is easy to remove (e.g. page of paper under windshield); etc.
This route does not require mass active support across a country or legislative district; it only requires passive local support for cycling and disdain for car drivers hitting cyclists - enough to create multiple potential suspects while making it very difficult for law enforcement to pin the actions on any one of them. i.e. if people in the same neighborhood don't rat them out.
[+] [-] globular-toast|5 years ago|reply
It should be mandatory to learn to use the road on bicycle before even applying for a car licence. The biggest problem I see is that people simply don't know what it's like to use the road outside of a car. Neither on foot nor on a bike. Dashboard perspective is a real thing. It makes you see other people as obstacles rather than people who are just trying to go to work or return to their family, like you.
Requiring bicycle training would dramatically increase the number of cyclists on the road, essentially taking it back from the tyranny of motorcars. It would also ensure that those who do decide to learn to drive have the experience necessary to be a good road user. Additionally, if they do end up causing an accident the licence can be revoked and they can get back on the bike.
[+] [-] obelos|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] novok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ErikAugust|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|5 years ago|reply
That said, around where I live, car / cyclist collisions are still pretty frequent; I live in an area with a lot of roundabouts where cyclists have right-of-way, but because of angles, darkness, rain etc, visibility of cyclists is often very low.
[+] [-] CalRobert|5 years ago|reply
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-t...
[+] [-] daniel-cussen|5 years ago|reply
Some examples:
1) I suspect the "new car smell" that car buyers believe affects their judgment is purposely chosen glue (I think it's a glue) that dissipates into a gas that literally, psychiatrically impairs buyer's judgment. It's real. [edit: it's still relatively mild].
2) Stealing a person's main means of transport should be punished independently of how expensive that mode of transport is. So, the penalty for stealing a car should be based on the price of a car and the fact it was the main means of transport for that person. Same goes for bicycles, it could have been a $100 bike, but it's the main means of transport and that person is equally stranded as the driver without it. For this reason, being a bike thief stealing 10 bicycles could mean a decade in jail, if laws were different. Who would steal bikes then?
3) Enforce both car driving violations and bike driving violations, but based on lethality of the vehicle. Right now both driving a car drunk and riding a bike drunk are a DUI, which is ridiculous.
4) Legislation that privileges driving over biking harms children, because they can ride a bike starting age 8 or so, but can't drive until 16.
5) Driving is an extremely lethal activity, but AFAIK biking deaths are mostly attributable to automobiles. If you try to run someone over with a car you can be charged with (I forget the wording but more or less) "using a deadly weapon". Because that's what it is. A killing machine.
[+] [-] sharkweek|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiku|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bsder|5 years ago|reply
Do you want ANTI-bike laws that ban bikes from everywhere not permitted? To someone rich, the "solution" to having to deal with bike liability is to ban bikes.
The only solution is separate bicycle and car infrastructure. Period.
Yes, it sucks that San Francisco has backed off separate infrastructure due to budget. However, the solution is to go lobby SF and to make pro-bike infrastructure a single vote issue to make them put it back.
One thing I do not understand: why hasn't some rich millionaire/billionaire taken some second/third tier city and funded bike infrastructure into it? It seems like it would be a lot easier to get bikers to move to a city that has infrastructure rather than trying to jam infrastructure into city that is basically land-locked/water-locked.
[+] [-] TylerE|5 years ago|reply
And let's hit cyclists with the same penalties as drivers for the same violations.
I see cyclists blowing stop signs and ignoring traffic lights regularly.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
In the limited experience that I have as a frequent pedestrian visitor with dedicated cycling lanes in NYC, they feel dangerous to pedestrians. Many cyclists don’t want to stop or yield to pedestrians, and left turn markings on avenues are still evolving and confuse a lot of drivers.
[+] [-] Retric|5 years ago|reply
This is why both drivers and cyclists really should be recording things. It doesn’t prevent injuries, if it can make a huge difference afterwards.
[+] [-] D13Fd|5 years ago|reply
In another case, a cyclist blew by my at full speed down a steep hill on the sidewalk, again coming stupidly close to an accident (for both of us) for no reason.
As a driver, I constantly see cyclists on the wrong side of the street, back and forth between the sidewalk and not, and not obeying stop signs or stop lights (let alone other rules). I’ve never even heard of one being ticketed.
I’m all for new bike lanes that are separated from traffic. But honestly before a city encourages more bike riders I really think they need to dramatically step up enforcement of traffic laws against them. If running a red light or stop sign is a $200 ticket in a car, it should be a $200 ticket on a bike. Otherwise it is just unsafe for everyone involved.
[+] [-] teucris|5 years ago|reply
I’m all about incremental measures to test theories. This is not one of the situations that warrants that approach. If a city wants to test out increasing bicycle infrastructure, they unfortunately have to build bicycle infrastructure.
[+] [-] acwan93|5 years ago|reply
My hometown (and where I work now) is in an LA suburb and it and two adjacent cities recently implemented their “master plan”, and what they ended up doing was making arterial roads with heavy auto traffic traveling at 45-50mph into Class III bike paths. How do you expect a cyclist to “share the road” with cars going 3-4x their speed, or encourage novice cyclists? I think they just added sharrows to the busiest roads in the city and called it a day.
The planners were clearly not cyclists, or more realistically with one of the cities I sent a complaint to, had their hands tied and couldn’t devise any other way to get cyclists safely from one side of the city to another due to the car-heavy infrastructure the city already had. “Bicycle boulevards” like I saw while living in Berkeley and Cupertino where there were literally roadblocks, bollards, and speed bumps installed would be laughed out here.
One city planner told me that city council just didn’t see it as a priority, and that the councilmen just thought cycling was a “recreational activity” and didn’t see it as a serious commuter activity even though the planner himself was a bike commuter. Meanwhile car traffic is getting progressively worse and traffic lights still aren’t timed properly.
[+] [-] matsemann|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://imgur.com/a/KSLAFzl
[+] [-] mistahchris|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] corytheboyd|5 years ago|reply
I don’t think sharrows do nothing, that feels a bit hyperbolic. If a city were to build infrastructure for example, starting with sharrows seems fairly logical to get everyone used to the upcoming change.
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
Any kind of solution that involves signage only is a middle finger to cyclists. I live in a very cycling friendly city, bike friendly infrastructure is the only thing that makes a difference. Even here where cyclists are super common, there is a pretty big portion of the population who treat cyclists as little more than road debris.
[+] [-] jopsen|5 years ago|reply
Most of all though, coming from Europe, I was shocked by how wide the street was, how wide the pavements was, and the enormous amount of space dedicated to inefficient street parking, even on major roads.
Somehow 400-500 years old city centers in Denmark manage to find room for cyclist in the very narrow streets. Often dedicating them to pedestrians and/or bikes. And adding bike lanes on major roads. But this is old cities without room for making bike lanes.
In SF, you could have bikelanes everywhere, give up street parking on one side of street... Or even just make the pavement less broad on broadway :)
It's a choice, Americans choose not to. To be fair their cities tend to be less dense involve greater distances.
[+] [-] wonnage|5 years ago|reply
SF bike lanes are a joke though, most of them have no actual barriers, so Uber drivers will just park in them/use them as a passing lane.
[+] [-] noobermin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] janosett|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liversage|5 years ago|reply
Also more recently "bike boxes" have been drawn on the street effectively widening a bike lane to cover the entire lane right in front of the intersection to ensure that all bicyclist are in front of and not to the right of waiting cars.
Unfortunately bicyclists are getting injured or even killed by cars or trucks turning right without noticing the bicyclist and the blue lanes and the "bike boxes" are attempts to prevent this from happening.
Danish publication about bicycle safety in intersections with some photos: https://idekatalogforcykeltrafik.dk/krydsloesninger/
[+] [-] ryantgtg|5 years ago|reply
(I emailed this to the author a few days ago.) I’m not saying these findings would hold up with better ridership data. But they were surprising findings, nonetheless. Plus, nobody wanted to hear it.
[+] [-] redelbee|5 years ago|reply
On the majority of rides I am either dodging doors, dodging cars that are overtaking too close, or both. This entire stretch of road has a double yellow as well, which makes the overtaking even worse.
I got a Varia light/radar from Garmin so I can at least know when people are approaching from the rear. I feel a lot safer but that’s probably not actually true unfortunately. I highly recommend the light/radar combo because it is very helpful with overall awareness while riding.
I don’t know how this could be resolved because much of the street is residential with fairly small front yards and no driveways to speak of. So I’ll just have to do my best to stay safe and hope that drivers in my city get more accustomed to sharing the road.
[+] [-] imgabe|5 years ago|reply
As a starting point: ban cars from city centers. That should be the opening point of negotiation from cyclists. From there, maybe we can negotiate down to fixed infrastructure with separate cycle lanes. But the Overton window needs to be shifted dramatically.
[+] [-] hamolton|5 years ago|reply
That being said, the one way sharrows can be less deadly is to make them borderline useless for other cars, such as Silver Street in Albuquerque. Silver street has medians in its major cross streets so that cars can't continue straight, but bikes can. This, along with the facts that its speed limit is 18 mph and it parallels larger streets the reasons it's not used much by cars, despite not having the excessive stop signs that most gridded neighborhood streets possess.
[+] [-] reinier|5 years ago|reply
[0]: https://youtu.be/c1l75QqRR48
[+] [-] godelski|5 years ago|reply
But honestly where I feel safest, as both a driver and a cyclist, is in protected bike lanes. I'm much more scared of someone dooring me than I typically am of a car hitting me. I've adopted strategies to avoid moving vehicles but parked ones I'm typically forced to stay pretty close to and my avoidance options are usually 1) swerve into traffic and hope that the car next to me is paying attention and also avoids or 2) hope my brakes work super well and I can do a turn slide and hit the car door sideways. But natural reaction it to go with option 1 and 2 still sucks.
The issue is that cyclists aren't motor vehicles or pedestrians but we typically classify them as both (hell, one of the most recent Simpsons made this joke). If we're going to be encouraging cycling, and I think we should, we really need to rethink this classification conundrum.
[+] [-] hprotagonist|5 years ago|reply
it’s true, it’s much more explicit, and more equanimous.
[+] [-] corytheboyd|5 years ago|reply
Edit: I suppose it’s also worth pointing out most of my bicycling experience comes out of San Francisco. A lot of the bicycle infrastructure here is newer than you would think, it was a noticeably more hostile place to be a cyclist 10 years ago when I moved here, but same could be said of any US city I assume haha
Edit: guess the downvote button means “I don’t agree with you” on hacker news now :/
[+] [-] ricardobeat|5 years ago|reply
Lane markings could work if the whole area is designed for shared use: roads are made single-lane or one-way, speed limits lowered to safer levels (30km/h), roadside parking spots removed both for safety and visibility, buffer spaces around corners and intersections, raised crossings for cars... a lot of cycle paths in the Netherlands have no grade separation and while a little less comfortable, they are still pretty safe due to how the traffic is organized.
This doesn't cover grade separation etc but is a good look at some of those design principles: https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2018/02/20/a-common-urban...
[+] [-] femto|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etempleton|5 years ago|reply
Roads may not have originally been designed for cars, but that is what they are for now. You can make a philosophical debate that they shouldn’t be, and I would agree with you, but that is our shared reality.
The issue then is that cyclists are frustrated because they feel they have the same right to the road as cars do and drivers are frustrated because all but the most elite cyclists simply cannot keep up with posted speed limits.
The answer is full separate lanes either elevated or with a curb or barrier. We have them for pedestrians, we have them for cars, why not for cyclists where it makes sense?
It would be expensive, especially initially, but in cities it could help alleviate traffic congestion.
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
I actually once saw someone cross at the dashed lines and then take the on-ramp, and my first reaction was "whoa, that guy just careened across traffic to make his exit". Then I realized that he had actually waited for the dashed lines to appear. But when you do this (locals don't), it makes you look like a lunatic.
[+] [-] noodlesUK|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|5 years ago|reply
I watch drivers drive over them all the time. They're worthless.
Long Island, NY (where I live) is probably one of the most dangerous areas in the country for bicyclists. We had a big ol' controversy, a couple years back, when some politician stated that people just plain shouldn't ride bikes on Long Island. That did not go over well.
I used to live in the DC suburbs, where they had real curb-separated bike lanes. They were much better.
[+] [-] tqi|5 years ago|reply