AZGOHS supports cyclist’s rights

From the AZGOHS (Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety):

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Judge to cyclist: ride in the gutter pan

Flagstaff cyclist Justin Pryzby was ticketed for violating ARS 28-704A by a Yavapi Coconino County Sheriff’s deputy. The deputy was apparently upset that a cyclist was impeding traffic, that is blocking a lane — seeing as how there was a perfectly good bike lane available.

That bike lane was, however, marked as being “closed” (at least in one direction) and was undergoing construction, with it’s surface abraded in both directions. The judge, incredibly, suggested that the cyclist should have been riding in the gutter pan, since that was “smooth” — the deputy quickly agreed that this would great. When questioned about where to ride, the deputy replied “if you’re asking me the way I would ride a bicycle… I would NEVER ride in the lane. Myself, when I ride a bicycle, if there’s 3 INCHES on the right side of the road outside the lane, that’s where I ride my bicycle”.

The deputy’s testimony dripped of the usual false or misguided paternalism; that it’s “too dangerous” to impede traffic, and so forth. This is demonstrably not true, particularly in the circumstances then existing; that is: daylight, urban, low speed roadways. The deputy should have been (monday morning quarterback here; and I doubt it would have impacted the outcome) directly challenged on this testimony.

I’ve written before in Bicycles are not motor vehicles, and why it matters how 28-704A does not apply to bicycles. The judge summarily dismissed this argument; she quoted from 28-812, and quickly concluded that the statute does apply to bicyclists. Thus finding the cyclist responsible for the violation. (she also again brought up the bizarre notion that the defendant could have been riding the gutter pan).

The trial was heard in Flagstaff Justice Court, before the Honorable Cathleen Brown Nichols, Justice of the Peace Pro Tempore.

The cyclist has prepared a stunningly detailed appeal. I wish Justin good luck with it. All cyclists should be very concerned with the outcome.

Story published in The Noise, it’s posted on the author’s blog: City Shenanigans Leave Bicyclists with No Options, covering both the Pryzby and Bus incident.

Be sure to this tidbit for more Flagstaff hijinks.

The City of Flagstaff Hates Bicyclists

Speeding Flagstaff City bus skims by cyclist

[Breaking news; Thursday Feb 11, 2010 was media day, and this story is getting huge exposure. Today a short piece ran on channel 12 news out of Phoenix, and a longer detailed piece ran in the Arizona Daily Sun, Cyclist, city attorney in lane dispute. As of now the city attorney's office is saying "Staff at the city attorney's office has yet to make a final determination whether the state's 3-foot statute applies when a cyclist is in a bike lane" -- hint, read the law (link below), it's only like 3 sentences long. How long does a review take? the incident occurred almost two months ago.  Also a story published in The Noise, it's posted on the author's blog: City Shenanigans Leave Bicyclists with No Options, covering both the Pryzby and Bus incident.]

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Vulnerable Legislation

What is a ‘Vulnerable Roadway User’ Law?

The general idea is to create a subset of road users who are somehow more vulnerable than those inside of enclosed motor vehicle; this usually would include pedestrians and bicyclists, and might include motorcyclists, animal riders, animal drawn conveyances, and so forth. If someone in this subset is harmed by the negligent actions of a motorist, then that motorist is subject to enhanced penalties.

This page from the Cascade Bike Club (the state of Washington) describes it pretty well. The idea of making it a legislative priority is pretty popular. E.g.: Virgina Bicycling Federation. LACBC (California). Illinois. New York. Rhode Island. So it is a bit of a trend — and much like the Safe Passing Distance Laws were/are a trend, there isn’t any evidence one way or another that show these laws are effective.

Oregon

Oregon has had a vulnerable road user law since 2007 — making it the first such law in the US. Bike lawyer Ray Thomas was instrumental in passage. He offers interesting and useful political legislative considerations here. Oregon’s enhance penalties are non-criminal, and involve various trade offs between a fine, license suspension, or community service. The penalty is keyed to the comission of a careless driving offense that results in a serious injury or death.

The Texas Experience 2005-2009

San Antonio Metro Columnist Veronica Flores writes of political problems with such legislation: “For eight years, bicycling advocates worked to get such legislation passed, changing the proposal as necessary to gain widespread support… In vetoing the bill, Perry cited penalties that he said already exist when a motorist is at fault for causing a collision, “whether it is against a ‘vulnerable user’ or not.”

But here is some more detail on the actual sausage-making process… Saying that the proposal was changed as necessary to gain widespread support is a nice way to put it. NTVC (North Texas Vehicular Cyclist) puts it more bluntly “Bills introduced this session sought to include various pedestrian groups among legitimate road users in an effort to garner support among otherwise indifferent legislators” — in other words, a little horse trading that would, in NTVC’s view, would water-down cyclist’s rights.

…

Mionske’s take on vulnerable user legislation.

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 »

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 »

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.

Settlement in Phx Police crash

Fairly unusal story, stemming from an incident in September 2007.

A Phoenix police officer driving an unmarked car collided with an elderly cyclist, Edward Allen Leigh, who was crossing Third Street in a crosswalk (what I refer to as a “rolling pedestrian”). It was dark and the cyclist was unlit.  Cyclists in crosswalks generally get treated like pedestrians under civil lawsuits.

The city settled a lawsuit brought by Leigh for $750,000, who had significant medical bills as a result of the crash. [azcentral]

Who’s Responsible?

There is a claim floating around that some study has concluded that motorists are responsible for some 90% of car-bike collisions.

This would be a lot higher than is generally appreciated. I’ve grappled with this a little bit before in Understanding Collision Summaries, where I pointed out an inexplicably high proportion of  “other” violations assigned to bicyclists.

So far, I’ve found a page at projectfreeride.org with a table that is said to be source from Tomlinson, David. Conflicts Between Cyclists and Motorists in Toronto, Canada. Link to a .pdf on the Velomondial.net.

The same claim can be found in a newslettery article dated Aug 19, 2009 on a University of Toronto website entitled Smart Cycling. the information was supplied by a physcian, Dr. Chris Cavacuti, who is also involved with projectfreeride. And a correction with that article that was posted Aug 26:

In the interview, Dr. Cavacuiti is quoted as saying “The [Toronto Collision] study concluded that cyclists are the cause of less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents”. Dr. Cavacuiti has asked us to make readers aware that the Toronto Collision study was actually designed to look at the cause of bicycle/motorist collisions but not culpability.

It is actually several studies conducted by the Charles Komanoff and member of the Right of Way organization in New York that concluded that concluded that cyclists were strictly culpable for less than 10 per cent of bike-car accidents.

Dr. Cavacuiti would like to apologize for any confusion this error may have caused.

On the projectfreeride page,  in a statement summarizing Tomlinson’s findings, the page at projectfreeride says “In fact, cyclists are the cause of less than 10% of bike-car accidents in this study”. Is that really what Tomlinson found? Or should the correction mentioned above be also applied to the projectfreeride page too?

This claim got picked up by the Freakonomics blog, garnering wide exposure.

Skepticism at the commuteorlando blog. Links the 90% claim back to Komanoff’s group Killed by Automobile paper. More links here on cycledog.

(more to come…)