Arizona Bike Law Blog

“Idaho Stop” bill re-introduced

Stop-as-yield has been reintroduced.

49th Leg, 2nd Regular Session; HB2633 ( text of HB2633). Its been assigned to the House TI (Transportation and Infrastructure) committee. It’s hard for me to imagine Chairman Biggs letting this bill go anywhere.

You can review articles and background materials from the last session here.

The City of Flagstaff Hates Bicyclists

Speeding Flagstaff City bus skims by cyclist

The City of Flagstaff (Police Department, and City Attorney’s Office) has a new spin on not enforcing §28-735. They claim it doesn’t apply when cyclists are riding in a bike lane.

The incident involves a cyclist riding at the far left of the bike lane; much of the rest of the lane being blocked by snow, and a (speeding, by the way) city bus passing dangerously close.

The law is pretty simple; it has three parts, A, B and C. Part A says overtaking motorists must (without qualification) maintain a minimum of 3 feet of clearance when passing a bicyclist. Part B allows for enhanced penalties in the event of serious injury or death. And Part C says that these enhanced penalties in Part B don’t apply in certain situations if a bike lane is involved.

The part C business, one would suspect, is the fig leaf that the city attorney’s office is using to cover this bit of malfeasance. No word from the city attorney about if speeding laws don’t apply.

These stories often have an air of he-said-she-said to them but in this case the surveillance video from the bus company itself is pretty compelling. The original video (taken by the city bus) is here.

It would be one thing for police to claim they don’t have enough evidence to issue a citation (or it’s too fuzzy, or whatever) but there is no excuse for this pretending the law says something that it does not.

Some discussion here.

[as an aside, I've always felt that we would be better off if Parts B and C were just gone entirely; leaving unsafe passing as a normal traffic infraction. If enhanced penalties were desired, the right way to do it would be to get 28-735 added as one of the enumerated items that triggers 28-672 / 675 / 676 ]

The Bus Company

The entity that oversees public transit in Flagstaff is NAIPTA,  Northern Arizona Intergovernmental Public Transportation Authority. It is not clear to me if they contract out operations, or directly operate the buses; There is an entity referred to as “Mountain Line”, and the general manager is Jeff  Meilbeck.

What sort of company (or entity?) hires this sort of driver? A driver who is demonstrably doing little correctly, and by his own words has no grasp of traffic laws. And showing a flagrent disregard for safety. Do they do any training? Oversight by the city?

Bus operators are normally and understandably concerned with risk management, and best safety practices because of the huge liability exposure — say if one of your buses is speeding along and wipes out a cyclist or pedestrian.

Disorderly Conduct

Another distasteful chapter of this story is that the cyclist was charged with a crime (these ridiculous charges were later dropped). I’m not sure who to blame for this; the main suspects are the bus driver, and Flagstaff PD. The video shows a quite civilized discourse; but I’m guessing the police could not have seen the video at the time. Statements made to the police should be verified against the video record — did someone make false statements to the police?

More on the socialized cost of parking

An integral part of unrestrained car use is having somewhere to put the darn things when we’re not driving them. Enter the “free” parking space.

They aren’t, of course, actually free — thus someone else is paying, not the driver using it, it is external to the cost of driving; call it socialism for drivers. Thus leading to ever more demand for more driving and more parking spaces.

from the Arizona Republic 12/28/2009; Ahwatukee Park-and-Ride Lot Expanding.

In the example mentioned in the story, 353 spaces are being added to the existing 562 for a cost of $3M. That’s $8,500 per space. But that is only the cost of construction (or land but that is cheap); the ongoing costs aren’t listed but they are significant. A not exhaustive list would look something like; lighting, maintenance like sweeping and cleaning, and re-sealing asphalt, full-time(one employee ~ 50hrs/week) security during operating hours, cost of operating the small building (heat and cooled approximately 24×7, even though no one is usually there; didn’t these people ever hear of a programmable thermostat?).

see Doug Shoup’s book mentioned here; The High Cost of Free parking.

In the particular example of a transit park-and-ride lot it gets even more interesting because of the cross-subsidies involved in mass transit. One wonders if the best use of presumably limited transit funds is to build parking spaces for the relatively well-off remote suburban commuters. This lot serves only one bus line; a rapid/express (no intermediate stops) route between Ahwatukee and downtown Phoenix. The line only runs one way, and only in the morning and evening. Thus the parking spots have low turnover — one spot equals one round trip rider.

Are Cyclists Required to Carry Identification?

(blog note: this is a “legacy article”, published at http://azbikelaw.org/articles/TucsonID.html in 2001)

In an interesting, and potentially far-reaching case from Tucson, Arizona in 1999, a cyclist was arrested spent a night in jail for not carrying identification.  He was subsequently acquitted of the criminal charge, and note that he was not even charged with any vehicular infraction (though he could have been). Read the rest of this entry »

Pre-preliminary 2009 Fatality Report

First, some perspective: In the state of Arizona, approximately 1,000 people are killed per year in traffic collisions of all types. The number of cyclist (usually called a “pedalcyclist” in the jargon) fatalities fluctuated between15 and 36 per year over the past twenty years, with an average of about 25/year.

[as a sidebar, Arizona total traffic fatalities which have been as high as 1,293 just a couple of years ago, were down to 937 for 2008.  The exact cause of this happy trend is a matter of great debate, e.g. the effect of economic recession, and photo-enforcement. Even after this dramatic reduction Arizona roads remain significantly more dangerous than US averages ]

I have become increasingly frustrated by what seems to me to be short-shrift paid to analysis of crashes resulting in a cyclist’s serious injury/fatality Read the rest of this entry »

Bicycles May Use Full Lane, SLM; MUTCD updates

Apparently I’m a little behind the times, a new version of the MUTCD was released in Dec 2009 and includes a couple of new items for cyclists:

Section 9B.06 Bicycles May Use Full Lane Sign (R4-11)   and

Section 9C.07 Shared Lane Marking.

The last time I wrote about Shared Lane Markings,  see Sharrow / Shared lane marking (SLM), they were “experimental”. Read the rest of this entry »

Take the lane

*** a third win, see Another Appellate win for bicyclists in Pima County. Here is the order. ***

Educated cyclists know that they not only can (legally), but should (for safety) occupy an entire lane when conditions dictate. One of these conditions is when the lane is narrow.

Arizona law is quite strong and plain in this regard. Here is the relevant law, (I intentionally clipped the part about the cyclist’s speed, which is briefly treated later).

§28-815. Riding on roadways… A. A person riding a bicycle…shall ride as close as practicable to the right-hand curb or edge of the roadway, except… 4. If the lane in which the person is operating the bicycle is too narrow for a bicycle and a vehicle to travel safely side by side within the lane.

So this law creates a duty in part A for cyclists, but there are enumerated exceptions to this duty, the 4th one being the subject of this article.

We are reminded that from time to time, cyclists are targeted by law enforcement for “taking the lane”. This sometimes takes the form of mis-guided paternalism — “you should always ride to the extreme right so you don’t get hit”. It also can take a an uglier tone of faux-paternalism, really just a thinly-veiled automobile-superiority attitude, the sub-text being “cyclists must always get out of the way of cars”.

And disappointingly sometimes cyclists are found guilty (actually “responsible” is the correct term, I am told) by compliant lower courts.

Happily, Arizona cyclists can point to not one but two relatively recent Superior Court decisions which reversed on appeal these wrongful convictions.

The first case, Arizona V. Goren, occurred in Tempe (Maricopa County). In the second case the rider was riding two abreast, but that isn’t relevant to the case; Arizona V. Piscopo, Pima County (see more generally at Two Abreastness. Also see the case at TBL, the blog of the lawyer who represented Piscopo).

I would encourage everyone to read both of these decisions because they are brief, well-written, and illustrative.

How narrow is narrow?

This can be a grey area; it is not (directly) specified in the law. In Goren, Officer Robinson maintained that 12′10″ (his measurement) was more than ample. He was, however, not aware of the concept of usable space; and thus incorrectly counted the gutter as lane width. In the end, the court accepted that the defendant’s measurement approximately 11′ usable width was both accurate and clearly narrow. Much the same conclusion was reached in Piscopo: “credibility was not at issue and the salient evidence — the dimensions at play — appear undisputed”, the dimension according to the defendant were “no more than 11 feet wide”.

Both cases counted on using the minimum 3′ passing distance specified in §28-735 as an entitlement to the cyclist when determining narrowness. (see Three-Foot Laws for more generally about this law including other states who have a passing-distance law)

From an engineering perspective, the authoritative AAHSTO Guide for the Development of Bicycle Facilities, 1999 says minimum 14′ usable width for side-by-side sharing:

In general, 4.2 m (14 feet) of usable lane width is the recommended width for shared use in a wide curb lane…(the gutter pan should not be included as usable width).

You can play with the dimensions, e.g. if you allow a minimum of 1 foot both to the left of the (8′) motor vehicle, and the right of the (2′) cyclist, plus mandated 3′ between the cyclist and motor vehicle — you come up with something akin to the 14′ mentioned by AAHSTO. Many vehicles are less than 8′, but not by much — and don’t forget to include the mirror width which is commonly not included in specifications.

The Issue of Speed

Neither of the aforementioned cases dealt with whether or not the cyclists were “at less than the normal speed of traffic”. In a nutshell: some courts (but none in Arizona, that i know of) have held that normal means normal for a bicycle. See e.g. State V Patrick , which references the Selz decision; both out of Ohio.

But what about Impeding?

This was not at issue in either of these cases, for some more general discussion of impeding see Bicycles are not Motor Vehicles and Why it Matters.

FARS

The US DOT runs a very elaborate, publicly available, query-able database for every traffic fatality in the US called FARS — Fatality Analysis and Reporting System.

There is a web interface that leads the user through building a query, e.g. below is a tabular report for all State=4 (Arizona), and Person Type=6 or 7 (bicyclist or other cyclist) in 2008, 20 cases were found for 19 collisions (this is a slight discrepancy of the reported 19 figure in the official NHTSA state-by-state report).

some handy info can be gleaned, e.g. the gps coordinates for most incidents are listed, you can use google to map it, e.g. 32.81931389, -111.68361944 is the intersection of I-8 and I-10.
…

Stop Sign Compliance

In conjunction with the “Bikes Safe at Stop Sign” bill recently introduced in the Arizona legislature, I began to wonder more generally about stop signs in general (all traffic, not just bicycles). Read the rest of this entry »

State V. Patrick

State v. Patrick, 153 Ohio Misc.2d 20, 2008-Ohio-7142

Link to .pdf decision on Ohio Supreme Court website, or can google for it, to quick view it.

It is unusual for a lower court decision to be published (so why was this one?).

The short summary is; since there was no probably cause for the deputy to do the stop in the first place (because the defendant was doing nothing illegal), everything that came later (the alleged disorderly conduct, resisting arrest, and whatever else) was supressed. All charges were dismissed.