In Marin, if you speed on your bicycle you're now going to get a ticket | Hacker News Reader

In Marin, if you speed on your bicycle you're now going to get a ticket

mbr.co.uk

27 pointsbifrost57 comments

This is part of long-standing tension between mountain biking and other trail users in Marin. Odd that modern mountain biking was invented in Marin, but there are no dedicated trails (and very few single track trails at all) available to bikers.

And for the record, 15 mph is slow. 5 is really, really slow.

15mph might be slow to a racer or hobbyist who does regular long distance riding, but it's about typical for commuters and the very casual end of hobbyists. Maybe it's slow downhill. It's definitely not slow to pedestrians: a collision with a cyclist going 15 mph can be quite injurious.

Life is injurious, stay home if you don't like it.

Why not: life has laws, stay home if you don't like them.

Mandatory foam suits for all then? How long until "mountain bikes" are required to have black boxes? 2024 CA: where you need a "bike license".

This doesn't have anything to do with commuters, it's hikers vs mountain bikers in a recreational area.

I wonder if enforcement tends to be more strict when a hiker happens to be present.

In previous reports I've seen, they generally speed gun at a blind downhill corner. It's a good choice: the biker is speeding in a location which might have a hiker, so the guys getting the tickets are in fact the ones endangering others.

A collision between a cyclist and a tree at 15 mph can be injurious. Cyclists try to miss obstacles, pedestrians included, for their own safety.

So do most auto drivers. It is a fact that lower speeds correlate to fewer accidents and accidents with generally less bad outcomes, though.

There's got to be a floor somewhere. Do you think 5 mph is safer than 6? What about 1 mph?

It's too bad the mountain bike hall of fame did not stay in Crested Butte rather than move to the overcommercialized aspect offered by Marin county.

What's overcommercialized about it? It looks downright mom and pop to me. (Full disclosure: I live in Fairfax and donated to its opening.)

There's not much in this town that looks overcommercialized, to be honest. It's a pretty laid-back town.

On a shared walk/bike trail? Sounds not that slow.

Really depends on the trail.

That's actually the crux of the problem: there are no dedicated mountain bike trails on public land in Marin. So people who want to mountain bike use the fire roads, and often skip over to the 'single track' where bikes are disallowed. (For the record, I've personally never done this... but I'm also not a 'real' mountain biker.)

And of course, there are irresponsible mountain bikers out there who take risks, scare hikers, and deserve tickets. And those few bad actors lead to rules like this one... I think.

If self-driving cars become ubiquitous in large cities, it is likely that one of the large side effects will be more regulation for bikes, scooters, longboards (electric or not), etc.

When self driving cars start to become a normal thing, accidents with pedestrians or other cars won't be very likely to happen. But accidents with bored teenagers on small electric motorcycles or longboards... those will be an issue.

Biking is much more legislated in cities like Tokyo than San Francisco, and I expect the latter to follow the former. I don't think the "millenials" of 2040 will be riding their bike much.

It's just as likely that well behaved drivers will enable the creation of (at least effectively) segregated space for smaller vehicles.

It'll be a long time before buildings are reclaiming space taken by streets.

I don't see where this argument is coming from. There's no reason why self-driving cars can't be as or more capable at interacting with cyclists than human-driven cars.

Even if issues with self-driving cars did require new regulation, there's no reason that regulation should favor the cars. Cities and their streets are managed by democratically elected governments. If people like cycling -- and many of us do -- then we can construct the regulatory and physical infrastructure to support it.

It's not that it favor cars, but that it favor predictability and thus order and as a result fewer collisions meaning more healthy people!

note: I'd be glad to register and pay for a bike license if that means more dedicated lanes for cycling --so long as scofflaws get ticketed.

> If self-driving cars become ubiquitous in large cities, it is likely that one of the large side effects will be more regulation for bikes, scooters, longboards (electric or not), etc.

Irrespective of any s of-driving cars, it's a near certainty that the California mindset of 'regulate everything and we can create a safe utopia' will result in more regulation for non-car personal transportation.

The article title says "bike trails", but it says "shared trails" in the body. I can understand limits on shared paths, but it's hard to see the point on bike only ones?

"having points put on their license" Do you need a bike license in SF?

Where I am, bicycle infractions will land you demerit points on your drivers license.

Which leads to awkward things like being fines for riding a bicycle drunk, losing your car license from it, but still being able to ride your bike because you don't need a car license for that.

There are very few if any bike-only trails in the Marin public open spaces. Generally there are hiking only, hiking/horse and hiking/horse/bike trails. There's no horse-only or bike-only or horse/bike trails.

$200 fines (incl. court fees) for a speeding ticket on bicycle are also a bit absurd.

It mentions that getting a ticket can result in points on your license, what if you don't (or claim to not) have a drivers license?

From my experience you will not receive points marked against you on your license. I received a ticket for going through a red light on my bike in California. The infraction code used for a bike is the same as a car. The officer noted on the ticket that it was a bike offense and as a result I did not receive any marks against me at the CA DMV and the fee was nearly halved. Had the officer not made the distinction between bike and car I may have received points against my license. Unfortunately that clerical error seems likely to happen frequently.

I wonder if that clerical error could result in dismissal of the ticket altogether. Just take it to court and ask for the license plate number of the car, registration, insurance, etc.

Without also requiring bikes to come with speedometers* I think this is absurd. The whole reason speed limits for motor vehicles is a reasonable concept (regardless of the speed limit itself being reasonable) is that all motor vehicles made since about 1910 have had them a speedometer. Of course you can tell if you're moving 30 MPH versus 15 MPH, but speeds marginally faster than 15 MPH just don't feel significantly faster. Without the ability to see your speed, and more importantly, the expectation that everyone on the trail can know their own speed accurately, this smells of an easy cash grab by law enforcement. I'm not even saying I think speeding on a bike on a mountain trail is safe or a good idea. I just think it's unfair to enforce something like this if your average person isn't going to be able to make sure they're complying like your average driver of a car can. If no one mountain bikes without a speedometer then I suppose my point is moot, but I'm not a mountain biker so I wouldn't know.

*A quick search on Amazon reveals many for less than $20, but I've never seen a bike sold with one attached.

Smartphones with GPS can also help in ascertaining groundspeed. I would imagine it would make sense to only ticket those coming down bends and turns recklessly where they could easily barrel into a ped.

The whole reason speed limits for motor vehicles is a reasonable concept is that the majority of them weigh more than a ton. Applying similar logic to bicycles is asinine.

People routinely break their own bones when mountain bike riding. There is plenty of momentum available to do serious damage.

It's a shared trail. Would it be safe for hikers if someone rode a bike at 100mph? Of course not. To paraphrase Churchill, we've established the need for a speed limit, so the only thing left to discuss is which speed to set the limit at.

There are weight limits on many bridges yet pickup trucks are sold without a built in scale. Basically, if you think you might be breaking the law, it's up to you to figure it out.

I ride very causally, and use an App to measure my ride. From that, I know I average around 10mph when riding with my spouse. It's not hard to extrapolate and figure out where the limit is.

5mph when passing? I hope they ticket runners too.

For a runner a 7 min/mile pace is 8.5 mph.

Same for any object.

Or a 5 mph speed is a 12:00 min/mile pace, a speed most casual runners are capable of on flats and downhill.

Hikers are erratic. It's common when a person is walking to see something interesting and immediately walk towards it. It's Nature, and you are there to see stuff, right? (I catch myself almost doing this on a nearby shared use trail. I only avoid doing this because I'm aware of the challenges bikers face).

Expecting hikers to not behave like humans is foolish. 5mph really is about right for passing someone.

This is nothing new in CA. I mountain bike at Saratoga Gap, which has had a 15mph speed limit for bikes for years. The only place they really enforce it is at the base of a very wide hill, where visibility is fantastic, so everyone goes over 15mph. I got a ticket there on my bike, doing 19mph.

http://www.openspace.org/preserves/saratoga-gap

I received points on my driver's license, but I successfully disputed them. A friend refused to show his license, so he was arrested.

I'm curious: since AFAIK one doesn't need a driver's license to ride a bike, what's the legal justification for the police demanding to see it?

You technically don't have to carry ID, but you are required by law to identify yourself. Some police misconstrue that as being required to show the license. You generally get the charges dropped in court, providing you were honest about your name, but it's a pain. I know because that's what my friend did - identified himself but refused to show papers. He was arrested on a Sat and had to spend the weekend in jail until the court opened on Monday.

Interesting. I've often wondered what would happen if you poached National Forest Wilderness trails. Mountain bikes are barred, but equestrians and pack companies are allowed to trash them as much as they want. It sounds like it's probably not worth it.

It's a fairly common misconception that bicycles are banned in Wilderness Areas due to their surface impact/damage to trails, but that is not the primary reason—all mechanized and motorized transportation is banned, because the spirit of the Wilderness Act is to preserve areas that restrict travel to low speed and more traditional forms of transportation—foot, horse, boat—and provide a place for people to travel more ponderously.

So while horses do certainly cause damage to trails in high use areas, that's not so much the motivation for allowing them but not bicycles.

I love mountain biking and think there absolutely should be places for it to be done, but I also love designated Wilderness Areas and their restrictions and protections.

Thanks -- I hadn't thought of it in terms of speed before. That said, I still think allowing horses in popular wilderness is a bigger mistake than allowing bikes. They turn a trail into either a trench full of shit-powder, a well-churned bog, or a set of awkwardly high and long steps meant for horses rather than humans.

It can definitely be an issue and a point of conflict in popular areas. It may be an issue that needs to be resolved with permits—limiting to a certain number of horse users per day per trailhead, for example. I hate permits, but if visitors are beginning to significantly impact the Wilderness (which the Wilderness Act is established to protect against) then permits to reduce impact are necessary.

Where I live, most Wilderness Areas are relatively little used and suffering from post-fire erosion, and so the trails often suffer from overgrowth and fading tread. As a result, horse use is actually quite welcome as it's currently below the threshold where it goes from helping keep the trail beaten in to actively damaging it.

You're lucky to live near relatively untrodden wilderness. In my experience as a hiker, many trails in the Sierra Nevada have been beaten into dusty trenches by horses, mostly thanks to pack companies. Quite a few in the southern Rockies have clay-rich soil, which horses will destroy when it is wet (so will bikes, but mud-riding is awful, so most riders will stay away). I have also been in some areas where horse traffic is the only reason that unmaintained Forest Service trails have not grown over.

I think banning commercial packers from the Wilderness would go a long way to fixing the problems with horses. Perhaps with some sort of licensing system, mountain bikers could be allowed as well.

The police can demand identification when issuing any citation: jaywalking, littering, etc.

Speed guns have been used on Mt Tam for at least 25 years. Not sure why these reporters think this is new.

There are a lot of fire roads on Mt. Tam and in the Marin open spaces that are shared and are totally safe to go more than 15 mph on, although honestly it varies a lot on how windy the road is and what the visibility is. There are also a few narrow trails that are shared and 15 mph seems pretty fast to be going on those.

Seems like maybe this should be a 20 or even 25 mph speed limit on the fire roads and then a 10 mph speed limit on the narrow trails? Or they should just make some of the fire roads bike only. There are tons of fire roads out there, it seems like it wouldn't be that hard to find some to dedicate to mountain biking. There are even some that already have parallel hiking-only or hiking/horse trails.

P.S. don't ride your bike on hiking only trails. There are bikers who do this (a small minority, but you end up being judged by the worst members of your community, sorry, that's life). This is a dick move, not only because it's dangerous, but because bikes can really tear the trails up and cause erosion.

At least the nice thing about running from cops on trails, is that bikes can outmaneuver cars

Cops travel at the speed of light via radio, and on trails, they ride bikes. It's usually park rangers handing out the tickets and cops only come if you're being difficult.

don't carry ID. when ticketed, give a false name and address. problem solved.

Then the officer calls the home planet to verify that an ID exists for that name and address. Problem worsened.

Speeding is an infraction. Giving false information to a police officer is a misdemeanor.

How are they going to enforce that? I go uphill faster than that.

>How are they going to enforce that?

From the article: with radar guns.

>I go uphill faster than that

I guess they'll fine you going uphill.

I read the article... bikes don't have plates so how will they id individuals?

Sigh... the pedantry on HN is really tough to bear sometimes.

I'm going to take a wild guess and say that they pull you over... You know: the classic approach.

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