Seems like an almost daily occurence on the Rimrock Road overpass bridge crossing the Hwy 12/18 "beltline". Few I feel are intimidation or deliberate threatening acts. Most are merely the side effect of too-fast driving on a four-lane divided "street" where the right-most lane driver can't/won't ease to the left because there is traffic in the left lane which is unyielding. So the right-most lane traffic stays within its marked lane, as does the bicyclist, and there is little room for error. Of course the driver could slow down and move when able, but that is most certainly a fanciful expectation in this car-centric world.
So where does the 3' legal passing zone begin and end? If put my bicycle into the gutter, and ride so my pedal narrowly misses the curb, then the bike lane marking stripe is probably 3' away. But if I ride defensively in my bike lane, and use its full width to navigate around pot holes, debris, and wind gusts, then the painted line does not confur an automatic 3' clearance. I am left to fend for myself, literally, since drivers of motor vehicles do not deviate from their lane (generally) when passing a bicyclist in a designated bike lane. (It seems all the worse now that Rimrock's bike lanes are full of construction gravel due to the many dump trucks which use Rimrock to haul road construction materials to the job site. No street sweeping by the Town of Madison. Will have to wait until next spring when the county snow plows move everything, snow, ice and gravel to the sides. I can hardly wait for the Badger ped/bike overpass to be completed.) _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
