Several years ago, it was illegal in Oregon for a cyclist to move past a line of stopped cars and up to a traffic light in order to proceed through a controlled intersection. According to the law back then, just like any car, the cyclist had to stop behind whatever car was stopped in front of them and wait for the light, even if there was ample room on the side of the road to move right up to the red light.* Never mind that cars could whiz by the bike on their way to – well, anywhere; if a cyclist rode past a line of stopped cars, technically they were breaking the law. For fun I once tried following this actual procedure as I approached a busy intersection during rush hour. It took me two extra stops to get through I light I would have breezed through no problem if I had simply ridden up to the light. The law made no sense for a bicyclist.
* If there was a bike lane, this restriction didn’t apply.
I never met anyone who actually got a ticket for breaking this law. Heck, I rode right past stopped police cars to do it myself, both before and after I found out it was a traffic violation. The law was designed to keep cars from driving along the shoulder of the road and up to a light (say, to make a right turn) without having to wait for the traffic in front of them. Now that was a dangerous situation, whereas a cyclist doing the same thing is usually not.*
* USUALLY! One of the six times I’ve been hit on a bike was when I was doing exactly that and a driver decided, without signaling, to turn into a parking lot right in front of me. I got hit, I was at fault.
Ultimately, bike advocacy organizations like the Bicycle Transportation Alliance got together and got a change in the law through the Oregon legislature that said it was okay for a cyclist to pass a line of stopped cars as long as it was ‘safe to do so,’ with ‘safe’ being left essentially undefined. A completely squishy law, open to myriad interpretations, but cyclists now could at least now ride normally up to traffic lights without being lawbreakers.
Welcome to our future. It’s no surprise to a cyclist, but many traffic laws make sense for nothing but automobiles. The whole ‘no U-turns’ thing is nuts, as is never going the wrong way up a one-way street. Or waiting for a traffic light to turn green before proceeding, say, at midnight, on a deserted street, in a driving rainstorm with the temperature in the thirties. Cyclists quickly figure out that if they want to get somewhere, they’re going to have to use their own judgment sometimes and break a law.*
*And can we agree not to use the term ‘bend’ a law? We’re not bending them, we’re breaking them.
Even the police acknowledge this. I attended a talk given by a traffic officer who told the story of setting up a bicycle trap at a popular four-way stop in SE Portland. Cyclists were known to blow those stop signs with impunity and the Portland police wanted to make the point that cyclists were supposed to follow the law as much as any other vehicle on the road. But even then, the police were lenient about which cyclists to stop. The officer making the presentation said that if a cyclist slowed and looked both ways before proceeding, but didn’t actually stop at the stop sign, they weren’t pulled over. Some that did get pulled over only got warnings. It was only the really egregious sign-runners that got a ticket.
Thus, the history of traffic laws changes, a cyclist’s own common sense, and even the city police all agree that some traffic laws make no sense for a cyclist to adhere to rigidly. At the same time, I occasionally get yelled at by indignant drivers for not coming to a full stop at a stop sign or for other situations where I break the law. I even still sometimes hear it when I ride up past a line of cars stopped at a light. Car drivers demand that cyclists act like cars at all times.
Except that we can’t get up to thirty miles per hour in three seconds just by pushing down on the vertical pedal. We can’t occupy an entire lane of traffic to protect our position on the road from cars behind us, we don’t make the noise most cars do to announce our presence to cross traffic and pedestrians. In short, we don’t have many of the advantages cars do that make the traffic laws work. It's like playing a game of poker where the other guy not only holds all the cards, he makes up the rules, too.
Those two things – how traffic laws were designed and how cars function – evolved hand in hand, and at the start it was cars who were in the minority. When the car was first invented, lawmakers decried how dangerously fast they went (funny how little some things have changed). Horses and people were getting killed by the handful and many cities limited autos to traveling at no more than five miles per hour – about the speed of a walking horse. Eventually, of course, the car lobby become not so much a lobby as a universally embraced way of life. Laws were changed to let cars do what they did well: carry a bunch of people and stuff at high speeds. Nearly everything about traffic laws until very recently was designed to let automobiles go as fast as they safely could.
This time around, the upstart on the street is the bicycle, and this time the rules of the game are being changed by us, they're not happening to us. Bicycles are amazingly fleet and agile. They can turn on a dime, stop and start almost instantly, go just about anywhere. When I’m on my bicycle there is no such thing as a traffic jam; on a bike, there’s always a way around the delay. A lot of the ways traffic is regulated don’t work for bikes, often they are a nonsensical applications of general traffic laws to transportation options those laws were never designed to regulate. Forward-thinking communities like Portland are adapting as quickly as they can, but the going can be slow due to funding issues, getting mindsets to change, and coming up with reasonable alternatives to current laws. Looking back, the change required in the laws to let auto drivers use the advantages they had came relatively quickly. But to those drivers and manufacturers who had to wait for those laws to change, I bet it felt like the change of pace was ridiculously slow.
But what auto drivers of the time didn’t do was ignore the laws. Okay, surely some of them did, but doing so and risking the lives of people and horses only slowed down the changes in laws they themselves wanted to see. Most drivers sucked it up, drove five miles an hour through town, muttered under their breath and endured the malevolent stares of horse owners. They waited and they lobbied, and things changed.
Which means two things for cyclists. First, flagrant disregard for traffic laws is not a political statement, it’s social irresponsibility. Need to run that midnight light in a rainstorm? You’ll get no complaint from me. Ride against traffic, up and down sidewalks at speed on busy downtown streets because just because you can? You’re only making things harder on the rest of us by reinforcing negative stereotypes of bicyclists, by giving the rest of the community the idea that working with us isn’t worth the trouble because we’ll do what we want anyway. As I noted in an earlier blog, the time for righteous anger in traffic has passed.
The second thing it means is that for everyone interested in changing laws so that they embrace cycling traffic more effectively, there is work to be done, for more bike parking, more and wider bike lanes, slower car speeds, better intersection management. All of it takes political will and money (which comes from political will), and political will takes a constituency. If every cyclist in Portland went to just one city planning meeting a year … why, the meeting planners wouldn’t be able to accommodate us all.
Or ignore us. We're only in the infant phases of a traffic revolution the likes of which hasn't been seen since the automobile was introduced. There are opportunities now that haven't existed for a hundred years. It's an amazingly exciting time to ride a bike.
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