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Comment by tucosan | Hacker News Reader

Bikelanes are for cyclists. Blocking them even for 30 seconds endangers the cyclists, how will have to merge into car traffic. That your mayor does not understand this, is testament to his ignorance of the issue.

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Blocking a bike lane is potentially causing severe injury to a bicyclist, as now your car is blocking their path and they could end up smashing into your illicitly parked vehicle.

I've had friends end up going through the rear windshields of cars, getting doored, etc here in Seattle, so even though I don't bike, I make a point to go and harass people illegally parked in bike lanes (which is really common north of the ship canal).

What if a bike can't stop in time coming down the hill? They're going to likely get horribly injured due to your illegal parking job. The bike lane is for bikes exclusively, even in the suburbs.

Failure to control speed is a moving violation and should be ticketed appropriately. What if a person is crossing the street and, according to you, a bike would be potentially unable to stop?

Any vehicle on the road has a legal obligation to operate their vehicle safely and lawfully — that means a bike ought never be unable to stop in time.

Some person could get horribly injured due to a bicyclist failing to control speed.

> Any vehicle on the road has a legal obligation to operate their vehicle safely and lawfully — that means a bike ought never be unable to stop in time.

Would you make the same argument about leaving unmarked construction equipment behind blind curves on the freeway?

Blocking or unexpectedly merging into downhill bike lanes in the city is similarly bad.

Coming down a hill at 20Mph in a bike lane that should be at least partially clear on a wet day (very common in Seattle) is perfectly legal. Running into a large unexpected object in the path is hardly the cyclists fault.

> perfectly legal

Well, not necessarily.

If your reflexes are good enough, and your brakes are good enough, and your tires are good enough, that you can safely stop a bike going 20mph on a wet downhill section, then yes; you are still in control of your vehicle and operating at a safe speed. No legal problems there.

But maybe your reflexes aren't that good because you haven't had coffee yet. Or maybe your brakes are worn down. Or maybe you're on crazy thin road tires that have effectively no traction going downhill in the rain. Or some combination of all three.

The point being, if it's not physically possible for you to stop that bike in whatever time interval is required, are you really operating that vehicle safely? Probably not.

And to the extent that you're legally required to operate at a safe speed and maintain control of your vehicle, your behavior would no longer be "perfectly legal."

So 20 mph + downhill + wet roads may very well be illegal for some combinations of cyclist and bicycle but not others. It seems premature to declare that perfectly legal in all cases.

I tried telling that to the insurance agency when I rear-ended a car that suddenly stopped in front of me. It didn't work.

Someone suddenly stopping shouldn't be unexpected, nor is it necessarily against the rules of the road. Hacker News is fun and all but consistently gets beaten by 15 seconds of googling e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/28/nyregion/double-parking-i...

If you can't see whether there's a large object in your path within time to stop, you're going too fast. There could be a fallen or slow bicyclist in the lane.

This is so obviously, indisputably true. How can anyone be downvoting?

You’ve clearly never been going downhill on a bike and had someone illegally stop their car or pull out in front of you. Bikes take more distance to stop than cars.

You've clearly never considered the necessity of matching your speed to conditions and surroundings and whatever surprises they may hold.

I have. For close on fourty years of much cycling and driving. Which may be a contributing factor in my never having suffered an accident.

No, it's always their fault. /s

That’s the point. People in cars have to be able to avoid objects in front of them (whether that’s drivers suddenly stopping or other obstructions) and so do bicyclists.

now your car is blocking their path and they could end up smashing into your illicitly parked vehicle. I've had friends end up going through the rear windshields of cars

I agree with the arguments about moving cars pulling into the bike lane, doors opening, etc, BUT if you can't avoid smashing your bike into a parked car with enough force to go through the rear window, then you definitely aren't skilled or responsible enough to be riding in the city.

Would you feel the same about a driver hitting a car parked on the freeway?

Of course. My belief is that if you ram your car into a stationary object, regardless of the conditions, you're at fault. Either you weren't paying attention or you were driving too fast for conditions.

Thanks for the consistency.

It would be instructive if more people took motorcycle safety training. They really emphasized that you should ride as though there could be a dropped load of concrete, boulder, or pothole around every corner, every blind hill, or every car, and stop accordingly.

I think this is mostly because the consequence of hitting debris is much more likely to be fatal on a motorcycle, but it would be good advice for anyone, really.

Exactly. Because one time there will be such a surprise object in your way.

You should see the driving and biking conditions in Seattle. Expecting a bike to stop on a dime when coming down a hill just after it rains is wholly unrealistic.

First, I don't understand why you need to "stop on a dime" to avoid a stationary object ahead?

Second, a huge part of safely operating any vehicle in an environment (especially a chaotic one you share with cars, bikes, and pedestrians) is awareness of your surroundings and the ability to avoid collisions. This is seriously driving / biking 101.

If you are zooming around on your bike and just thinking "hope no objects / people / cars are sitting stationary in my way because there's no way I can stop and I'll definitely hit them", then you're a dangerous menace.

s/bike/car and good luck in court. "But I couldn't stop! The road was wet!"

Maybe you shouldn't be cycling in Seattle then?

I think you are making the wrong argument here. A bicyclist should have control of their bike. If there is injury involved, that is on the cyclist. (Dooring is another issue.)

But I think the problem becomes very clear if you allow another car to pull up next to the one in the bike lane and stop in the middle of the lane to berate the first car. Just for 30 seconds or so. If somebody rear-ended that car, the person in the moving vehicle should get a ticket. But what should be the consequence to the person stopped in the middle of the lane? Would the mayor be so casual to "30 second" stops if car lanes were blocked by parked cars 40% of the time?

I once had to go around a car stopped in a bike lane, slid and fell badly while trying to re-enter the somewhat elevated bike lane (about two inches from the road - it's like a red painted sidewalk, two feet wide, with a bevel on the edge). The driver was inside the car having a phone conversation, so he was probably stopped there for just 30 seconds - enough to cause a bicycle accident.

You could have, you know, stopped and waited for the car to start moving. As cars do when blocked.

A post elsewhere hear said it already, but it’s my experience too: cyclist break laws constantly, due to apparent feeling of entitlement to keep moving fast, regardless of the traffic, lights etc. the thought of just stopping safely for a few seconds didn’t even cross your mind in the situation.

No. Sorry. They did not cause an accident. It is important that your understand this.

Note that I am not sympathetic to the driver of the car. They probably deserve criticism, but not blame for your slide. I know that you want to blame somebody that is not yourself. That's human. But when any pedestrian, bike, car, airplane, drone, skateboard, etc. runs into a stationary pedestrian, bike, car, airplane, drone, skateboard, house, fence, animal, etc. it is almost certainly the fault of the moving object's operator.

In your case, you failed to change lanes safely. It sounds like you really blame the lane design for having a bevel between lanes. It's interesting to me that the bevel probably has almost zero effect on cars/trucks but a significant effect on bikes. That seems like a bike-hostile design. The fact that it is only two feet wide seems questionable to me. A slow-moving bike would also encourage you to change lanes, navigating the bevel twice.

So by the same logic, if you stop your car in the middle of the highway and someone slides into the parapet after going around it, you did not cause an accident?

I agree with the bike hostile design part. Navigating the bevel downwards is not a problem. Navigating it upwards at a steep angle of attack is.

The mayor's view is consistent the engineering rationals for bikelanes. Bikelanes are for cars. Not in the sense that cars are meant to drive in bikelanes. In the sense that bikelanes exist to relegate bicycles to second class road use for the sake avoiding inconvenience to motorists. Ticketing cars for standing in bikelanes would inconvenience motorists.

Roads are mostly 2D which prevents such simple rules from working. If nothing else people and cars need to pass bike lanes at intersections.

On top of that almost every bike lane I have seen has had parking one side with the only way to park a car is for the car to also use the bike lane. EX: 3rd google image for bike lanes: https://bikesiliconvalley.org/wp-content/uploads/Veterans-Bl...

Going 3d with dedicated bike skyways can solve this problem, but bikes are 3rd/4th class citizens in most places because they get a relatively small fraction of overall transportation. (Cars, walking, subways or other public transit, then biking.)

Crossing a bike lane isn't the same as stopping in it. You can check that there aren't any bikes in the bike lane before crossing it to park. You can't check that there won't be any bikes in the lane for the next 30 seconds before stopping to load some groceries.

Parallel parking takes most people a while. Bikers can easily show up in that timeframe.

Good point. I guess bicyclists just have to stop and wait like a driver would on a street without a bike lane. We accept that but not double-parking.

I believe the biggest problem is due to the design of bike lanes. They are often narrow and squeezed between car lanes and car parking. Due to this design bike lanes are also more often subject to being blocked by construction and forced to merge with car traffic. The visibility on bike lanes are way poorer than regular car lanes due to the above factors. In cities you also have to deal with the loading and unloading of goods. This means large, tall vehicles blocking the sight and often crates and people moving in your lane.

How often do you experience your whole lane blocked by the content of a whole appartement?

In Stockholm where I live snow, and ice make bike lanes hard to see and also makes them inaccessible.

I really agree that you shouldn't keep a speed where you can't control your vehicle, but so common design flaw puts an unreasonable amount of responsibility on the biker compared to heavier vehicles misusing the bike lane.

> Bikelanes are for cyclists

As a regular biker in NYC I would agree. But there is a cultural gap that we have not bridged yet. NYC was designed for cars (as were most cities in America). The biking ecosystem has made huge strides in NYC in the last decade - from CitiBikes, to dedicated bike lanes, to the massive increase in daily bikers.

It's pretty difficult to argue that NYC was "designed for cars" in the same way as Houston when much of it was designed in the pre-car era. See for instance Manhattan's street grid designed in the 1800s, and large parts of the other boroughs. It's true that parts were REdesigned for cars to some extent, taking away street space, adding highways, etc.

Source: researching my ancestors' addresses in NYC from 1880 onward and seeing how many of the streets from then still exist now.

(Re biking in NYC, it's great to see the changes.)

It's not that simple. In most cities cars are supposed to merge into unprotected bike lanes when turning right. This is safer for everyone.

Not sure where your at, but this is generally considered poor road design, and even on 2 lane streets you'll add a bike box to keep drivers separated from bikes. Having 2 ton boxes of metal and glass interact with bikers unpredictably is risky!

I'm only familiar with this on the west coast, but yes, you're usually required to merge into the bike lane to turn right.

Here's an image: http://www.sfbike.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/Right-Turn....

From CA directly: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/hdbk/turns

> To make a right turn, drive close to the right edge of the road. If there is a bike lane, drive into the bike lane no more than 200 feet before the turn.

This is also true in Washington State. Not sure about Oregon.

Up here in Seattle, SDOT got rid of this style of bike lane over the past few years. Outlying suburbs keep the edge of the bike lane solid at turns (not like the dashing shown). Portland has gone the same direction, separating bicyclists from drivers as much as possible.

Having spent some time in Cali, I very much appreciate our infrastructure up here. Lots of law and order type politics down there, but when it comes to actual issues like public health, its given nary a glance till upper middle class people are dying.

In Oregon, moving into the bike lane to make a turn will get you a ticket. I see people do it pretty often however, and I have only ever known one person who got caught.

Which COMPLETELY ignore the recklessness continuously perpetrated by the CYCLISTS. There's no endangering here, certainly not at the speeds the cyclists should be operating their bikes in a congested situation.

How fast do you really think they are going? 15 mph is a pretty good clip on a recreational (non-racing-style) bike. Most people I’ve run across are doing 12-15 tops.

I don’t notice any complaint in your post about how cars are flying along recklessly at more than twice that speed.

When I regularly rode in London I'd do 7.4 miles in 35 minutes on a Brompton, average of 12.5mph, but factor in red lights, hills etc and peak speed must have been 20.

Sure, on downhills I expect you’re getting up to 25 mph or more.

Whataboutism. A wrong by one side does not excuse a wrong by the other.

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