points by cameronh90 3 days ago | 0 comments
When you turn off a road, you need to look for pedestrians and motorbikes. Why is a bicycle so different?
For busy cycle routes, specific infrastructure to deal with this is installed like separate lights and banned turns to de-conflict the road.
[–] dgunay 3 days ago
[–] asdff 3 days ago
The issue is the parked cars not the bike lane. Planners are aware of this. There is recent efforts to “daylight” intersections as they call it when they work to increase these sightlines.
[–] hobo123 2 days ago
You say that, but routinely cars/trucks drive RIGHT NEXT to a bike lane with someone riding a bike, then pull right and drive over the cyclist like they couldn't have seen him or her.
Apparently the possibility of vision / line of sight is not the issue. Maybe the willingness, maybe the understanding that yes indeed, there is another lane next to the road, and maybe you should monitor it for traffic, especially before taking a right or left turn.
[–] clickety_clack 3 days ago
I think this reasoning is like “you can be right and dead”. If you’re cycling at 20km/hr, some bike lanes are arranged so that it’s very hard for a driver to see you whether you have the right of way or not. You can’t legally mandate someone to see what they physically cannot see.
[–] hobo123 2 days ago
Seeing someone ride right next to them doesn't prevent drivers from routinely killing cyclists while doing a right turn.
[–] kristjank 3 days ago
Bicyclists are a lot faster than pedestrians while being even more fragile.
Something similar to this dynamic happens anywhere you would "look both ways" as a driver but don't have far enough visibility to extrapolate a safe window of passage relative to the speed of oncoming traffic. It can happen when parked cars block your view of oncoming traffic, or when parked cars block view of the bike lane, or when parked cars, trees, hedges, fences etc block view of the sidewalk that a non-pedestrian is using.