Cycling, traffic safety, traffic justice, and legal topics; energy, transit and transportion economics
Spoiler alert: No. Ray Road, in Phoenix, does not now, nor has it ever had a bike lane. As I wrote in 2003 and again in 2010 Is this a Bike Lane? the answer is a flat ‘No’. Bike lanes must be marked to be a bike lane. (this also applies to portions of Chandler Blvd under discussion). Continue reading “Does Ray Road have a bike lane?”
Green means go, right? Even when there’s something really big, with really bright flashing lights. Yet somehow a driver missed all those cues — “The Jeep’s driver told the responding police officer that he didn’t realize the bus was going to stop at the railroad tracks and kept driving because there was a green light”. Continue reading “Tempe City Council candidate hurt after car rolled under school bus in crash”
URGENT: Google has announced the tool used to present the crash maps on Azbikelaw, called “Fusion Tables” is being discontinued Dec 3, 2019.
Azbikelaw is looking for a volunteer familiar with GIS and web-presentation to help effect transition to something else.
That something else would likely need to be free-to-use, either open source or free-commercial. Commercial tools run the cost gamut from prohibitively expensive to free for non-commercial use, which this application would be.
Ideally the replacement would offer all the features of fusion tables; which includes in addition to mapping, rudimentary filtering; for example find all crashes occurring at night in some particular city where a motorist was turning left in years 2010-2015.
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Message to my loyal azbikelaw readers: Most of the time, I don’t create a new article, but rather add information to a related existing article; for example a new bike lane was added right near my house, and I placed info about it in the article about shoehorning.
SO FROM EARLY 2019 ONWARD PLEASE SEE @azbikelaw ‘s TWITTER FEED FOR UPDATE NOTIFICATIONS. (and note that a twitter account is not necessary, though if you do have an account please “follow” @azbikelaw and you’ll receive notifications via twitter)
E-mail subscribers still receive notifications as usual but only when a new article is posted, not when I add infomation to an existing article.
This comes about a year after Arizona Cardinals General Manager Steve Keim was arrested and plead guilty to extreme DUI, emphasis added:
“The Chandler Police Department released a report on Wednesday afternoon detailing the traffic stop and arrest of Ron Minegar, the Arizona Cardinals executive vice president and chief operating officer, Saturday night on suspicion of driving under the influence… A 911 caller alerted police about a white Chevrolet Tahoe swerving and possibly speeding up to 60 mph, according to the report.
An officer stopped Minegar around 11:30 p.m. near Pecos Road and Arizona Avenue for speeding, failure to drive within one lane of traffic and driving within the bicycle lane “— azcentral 8/14/2019 Continue reading “Another Cardinals exec arrested susp of DUI”
There is nothing remarkable about this intersection; it is a prototypical arterial-arterial signalized intersection like many others in the Phoenix Metro area — this one is in the City of Tempe. Both streets are high-speed (45mph posted maximum limit); with two through lanes, a bike lane in each direction; in addition each approach the bike lane discontinues ~ 250′ from the intersection where the space flares to become a dedicated right turn only lane, additionally all approaches have a dedicated right turn only lane. The signal is timed, and there is a demand, leading, left turn arrow on all approaches. Continue reading “McClintock And Warner Wreck”
Great Summit this year; hope to see you at ABS2020! Continue reading “Arizona Bicycling Summit 2019”
The increased risk posed by SUV (more generally, “Light trucks”) drivers on other road users has been pointed out before, many years ago. See e.g. Lefler 2004, or Paulozzi 2005 for studies published in Accid Anal Prev, and Inj Prev. Though the harm to peds is notable, it also noted at that time by the IIHS this heightened risk, while decreasing (at that time, the early to mid 2000s) modestly, extends to drivers of other motor vehicles, see IIHS: SUVs Becoming Less Deadly.
[UPDATE: Arizona law was modified in 2022 to allow “limited” lane-sharing for motorcyclists, see comment] This is still in quite rough form. Bear with me as I elaborate. The premise is (motorcycle) lane-splitting is related to (bicycle) lane sharing. Lane-splitting is also sometimes referred to as “filtering”.
I was under the impression, what I believe now to be a common misconception, that motorcycle lane-splitting refers to a motorcyclists splitting between two lanes; in other words riding on the dashed line.
There are two related traffic rules, the first is general and applies to all persons driving any vehicle: motorcyclists, motorists driving cars/trucks, and incidentally also to bicyclists. This general rule implicitly makes lane-splitting by riding on the dashed line illegal. Continue reading “lane-splitting is lane-sharing”
The drumbeat to encourage bicyclists to always wear “hi-viz” (hi-vis, high-visibility, fluorescent) colored clothing — even in daylight — seems to become louder and louder. But it appears there is scant evidence suggesting any measurable safety improvement. The best I get when asking what evidence exists is something along the lines of “it can’t hurt”. (this has echos of the never-ending helmet wars; helmet’s claimed safety improvements have been overstated, sometimes vastly, over the years) Continue reading “Hi-viz clothing and safety”
If ~ $250 sounds like a lot of money for a civil traffic infractions — learn where all that money goes. Most of it does NOT inure to the city which issues the ticket. Cities only get a small fraction of the ~ $250. The rest of the money goes to state-levied “surcharges” that fund all sort of law-enforcement-related programs. This give lie to the myth that cities are getting fat off of enforcement in AZ; see revenue-from-traffic-fines for some examples, e.g. city of Phoenix generates about 1% of it’s budget from traffic fines. Continue reading “35% drop in AZ traffic tickets”
I found these two only because they appear in asdm data for 2015. I find nothing googling. Given the paucity of data and the profusion of UNKNOWNs these two appear to simply have the hit-and-run flag mis-coded?? These both have absolutely no location information, i.e. no streets, and no Lat/long. Continue reading “Two “missing” 2015 hit-and-run fatalities”
A low speed fender-bender makes national news? Continue reading “Low speed, no injury collision is headline news”
Police work entails risk, and the risk from a traffic crash is a leading cause of death among officers; e.g. see more-police-killed-by-traffic-than-guns Continue reading “Pickup driver plows into Police car; 2 officers seriously injured”
Adot has released Crash Facts 2014 in early June (of 2015), as usual/expected; and I received the database from them very promptly. I have updated the graphical crash map so it now has data from 2009-2014 for ped-MV and bike-MV crashes. Continue reading “Arizona Crash Facts 2014”