AndreyT

"Lane splitting"? Why are you talking about lane splitting? Lane splitting is a completely different practice, which has little relation to bikes riding next to the right shoulder. Bicycles ride in their own separate lane. They don't really lane split.

The key difference is that bicycle in a bike lane is explicitly allowed to proceed forward through an intersection, while cars driving in the normal lane (on the left-hand side of the bicycle) are permitted to make a right turn at the same intersection. Moreover, at least in California bicycles are permitted to proceed forward through an intersection from a "right turn only" lanes (!), where cars are required to make a right turn. As we all know and understand, this obviously sets the stage for the notorious "right hook" - the most frequent (by a huge margin) form of car-vs-bicycle accident on public roads.

Meanwhile, "lane splitting" does not allow anything like that. "Lane splitting" motorcycles are no allowed to interfere with right-turning cars. "Lane splitting" motorcycles are not allowed to proceed forward from "right turn only" lanes. "Lane splitting" is a completely different story. No need to bring it up here.

"Taking the lane" is a practice that is intended to reduce the probability of "right hooks". A "sharrow" is intended to encourage (or prescribe) the cyclist to ride single-file with cars, thus eliminating the setup for a "right hook". The rest is up to the state and its legal law-enforcement practices, which are just forming...

I'm talking about cars making right turns specifically.

mschwett 

wrong terminology, perhaps, but are you suggesting that it is NOT legal for a bicycle in California to proceed forward past parked cars on the right and slow moving or stopped cars in traffic on the left, where there is no bike lane, but there are sharrows? This is the nearly constant condition for a huge amount of urban cycling, and i was under the impression that it was in fact a form of lane splitting, between the parking “lane” and the rightmost traffic lane, and now explicitly allowed for bicycles. That said, I couldn’t find the citation.

The suggestion that somehow sharrows make this illegal due to their placement is perplexing to me - it certainly bears no relationship to the reality on the ground in cities in California which have sharrows, but that wouldn’t be the first time the actual law and practice diverged.

retswerb

I was riding just to the right of a painted sharrow on a quiet residential street near me a couple of weeks ago when I got rage-passed by an SUV with a passenger yelling out the window for me to get onto the sidewalk. Some people can't be helped.

I do like the sharrows on roads that have them, anecdotally I feel that I am typically less likely to experience driver impatience on those roads as they help drivers to understand their need to share the road. I have wondered, though, the degree to which drivers may assume that roads without sharrows are not to be shared. It's an argument from silence, of course; probably the only way to confirm or allay this suspicion would be to poll drivers regarding what their road-sharing responsibilities are on sharrowed and unsharrowed roads. My guess is that most drivers don't even see them anyway.

scott967

Have extended family from "down below" in Jeff Parish (think Jean Lafitte, Barataria, etc) and literacy wasn't a high priority. But they rarely traveled "up front" to New Orleans so sharrows wouldn't be a thing.

scott s.
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scott967

Just want to say thanks for an engineering view of the "problem" ( or solution?). Here in Honolulu suburb they have applied sharrow where road was "paint engineered" to add additional lane in each direction. So where previously FRAP allowed (careful) passing in lane, now it's not feasible and I think the sharrow enforces that or at least gives drivers a heads-up. In Honolulu they have sharrow on some designated bike routes. In some cases (thinking of Young St) kind of superfluous as it's kind of narrow 2-way with parking on both sides and I think people get it with/without sharrows. I take it they were added due to being a designated bike route.

scott s.
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FBinNY 

Is there an echo?

From post #14
I'm a bit surprised by this example, because it seems that the roadway is wide enough for safe shared-lane passing. On that street, I'd keep left, riding out from the parked cars, and ready and willing to move over if/when necessary to make passing possible.

I don't know if there are any specific rules that apply, but it seems that clipping and copying a prior post and posting as your own would be a faux pas.

retswerb

Same poster just did this in another A&S thread too. Probably a weird bot. Chesterfieldway , got anything to say for yourself?

I-Like-To-Bike

Weird bots are probably no more weird or less original than allegedly human posters who repeat the same old/same old uninformed responses to reports of bicyclist collisions and associated legal procedures, or "experienced" cyclist unpleasant interactions with unworthy members of the public to include LEO, motorists, pedestrians and "unexperienced" cyclists riding so-called BSO's in their vicinity.

livedarklions

Speaking of a guy who copies and pastes his own posts from one thread to another....

Seriously, is this an act of self-parody? You dragged up about 5 pet peeves of yours that have nothing to do with the thread or the act of copy/pasting someone else's post just so you could repeat the same damn pet peeves for the zillionth time.

livedarklions

I checked out its post history and stopped at 5 instances of it doing this exact same thing on other threads. Frankly, no way of telling if any human inteligence is involved in the process. The sentences pasted into the posts seem randomly selected.

Ttom

Some of those roads in the French Quarter have pot holes that will swallow a bike.

Roughstuff

VROOM!! Good music too.

Paul Barnard

The Quarter isn't all that bad compared to neighborhoods like Lakeview. It is bad enough that riders have to pay close attention to the road surface, rather than focusing more of their attention on the larger traffic picture. The quarter can be a minefield of glass. I have ridden it when there was 10X the litter shown in this pic.