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I'm sure many people are good about being far from the door zone. I'm also sure there are many of us that think we are out of the door zone but may not actually be riding with safe distance. I found this video by accident a minute ago and I want to share.
This is a great demonstration. I once got doored when riding more than 3 feet away from a parked car.
The issue is that there are virtually no roads in LA that are wide enough so that you can ride this far out into the lane and also share the lane with cars. Even more troubling: if we use this metric to judge the safety of bike lanes, they all fail. They literally position cyclists within the door zone, and it is illegal not to use the bike lane if there's one available.
I agree. If you watch cyclists use bike lanes, you'll see that more than 90% of them ride straight down the middle of them, the way they are designed to be used by cars. It is counter-intuitive to ride on or just outside of the left-hand stripe of the lane - you can't expect a marked lane to mean one thing for cars and an entirely different thing for bicyclists.
Bike lanes are a deeply flawed traffic device, but I suspect that they continue to be favored by the DOT primarily because they funnel cyclists out of the way of cars, whether it's actually a safe practice or not.
angle responding to a comment by Joe Borfo
08.23.09 - 11:02 pm
Yup bike lanes are flawed. But given the choice between a bike lane and nothing i will take bike lane- and I Do ride on the left stripe left side of the bike lane.
in my opinion. Any infrastructure is better than none in this town.
Maybe all cars should be required to have these or "Lambo doors". Then you'd have the problem of drivers getting "biked" as they exited their vehicles.