Yes, there was a bike lane, as I said in my last response to you. Sorry I forgot to mention it in the OP. I guess I thought it was implied by “coming up on my right,” and they are so common around here that the default is to assume that there is a bike lane, not that there isn’t one.
Oh-well, then, he should have just gone on like you expected him to. I was picturing a suburban or residential street with little traffic.
I posted the answer in post #31 from the California Driver’s Handbook:
There are a couple of things that piss of people that ride bikes.
- Having a driver try to kill them.
- Having to slow down, and lose hard won momentum due to some stupid move by a driver.
- Drivers acting in an unpredictable manner.
Had you stayed behind the guy on the bike, this thread would not exist. Instead you either didn’t think, didn’t estimate speeds correctly, or decided to save that extra 5 seconds. Whatever your motives, you hit the bike rider’s trifecta. you acted unpredictably, you (from his point of view) tried to kill him, and you cost him momentum.
As far as going around the left side of a car turning right, there are times when this is physically impossible. I have had occasions where a car turned right in front of me while the rear bumper was still behind the leading edge of my bike. Factor into that, that the driver is hard on the brakes (because it would have killed them to merge in behind me and take the extra 5 secondes) I the bike rider am pretty well fucked. So unless I can get Scotty to beam me over one lane, making a lane change isn’t always possible.
I called up the Washington Driver Guide (PDF!) and I can see why it would be confusing. On the one hand, it says drivers should yield to cyclists before turning right and crossing a bike lane (thus forcing cyclists to pass on the right), yet it also says to cyclists:
I think California’s rules are much safer and less ambiguous.
I’m not certain now, several days later, but given the normal traffic patterns around there, I probably didn’t pass him at all, and certainly not within the past 5 seconds - the car lane was probably going slower than the bike lane.
I got it! You screwed up his phone call!
Well, I don’t see where the OP said that they passed the bike rider and then immediately wen to turn right. Maybe the bike rider was coming fast, since they’re in a bike lane. Maybe the OP turned onto the road and the bike turned also… or maybe any number of things.
From what I’ve seen, the biker acted incorrectly, and was also a jerk.
There was nothing in the OP about being stopped in traffic. Normally cars move faster than bicycles. At least here in LA they do.
Here look for yourself
I also note the use of the word probably twice in your post ENugent. I don’t want to grind on you, but you sound like you didn’t have very good situational awareness. In other words, you were in your own little world and not really paying attention to what else was on the street around you. This is scary.
If you were in fact stopped in traffic, and the bicyclist wasn’t, you should have checked your mirrors before turning on your turn signal. If you see a bike approaching on your right, just wait a few seconds for them to pass. This prevents the “Oh Shit, I’m gonna die” reaction from a bike rider.
I do agree that the guy was a bit of a douche.
And this is really fucking rude. Do you remember exactly what happened in a traffic altercation that happened to you several days ago? I’ll note that there were exactly zero "probably"s in my OP - they are coming in as I try to remember details that people are asking about after the fact. I don’t remember how tall the bicyclist was, either, but I could have told you if you’d asked me at the time.
I know I was not stopped in traffic, because I know I was slowing down as I turned on the turn signal. But it often does move very slowly right there - I know that I regularly have to stop at the green light half a block before the turn waiting for the intersection to clear enough to go across. So it may have been doing that on this day - I don’t remember. The fact that I don’t remember what it was doing on a particular day has absolutely nothing to do with my “situational awareness” at the time, though. If I was off in my own little world, I wouldn’t have been aware enough to perceive the situation I’m asking about or to ask the question.
Well, at least we agree on something.
If the altercation ended with me being cursed out by the other person, you bet your ass I would recall completely and exactly it several days later. There would be probably about it.
Those things tend to stick in my mind.
YMMV
Since the bicyclist was in a bike lane, I had to think about this a bit. I’m going to assume ENugent was in the right hand automobile lane, and the bike was in a marked bike lane. I’ll also assume ENugent was traveling slower than the bike, so he didn’t just pass the bike, and that the bike is behind the car a bit. In this case, I believe the proper behavior when you’re going to make a right turn into a driveway is to turn on your blinker and merge into the bike lane a short ways before your turn, then make your turn when you get to it. You won’t fit, obviously, but you’ll physically block the bike lane preventing the bicyclist from coming next to you.
(If he decides to go around you in the left hand part of the automobile lane, that’s his business. I don’t think he’s supposed to do that, though. Either way, not your concern.)
I base this on analogy from two situations: First, when I was in California, the bike lane lines became dashed approaching an intersection, and this is what you were supposed to do when making a right turn onto a road. Second, again in California, there was a road (Lawrence Expressway in Santa Clara?) with HOV (carpool) lanes on the right. (For anyone who doesn’t know, it’s an expensive ticket if you’re caught driving solo in a carpool lane.) To make a right hand turn when you weren’t a carpool, you merged into those lanes a short distance before your turn, then made your turn from there. No way would you make a turn directly from your non-carpool lane.
All assumptions correct except my gender. 
What if the bike is coming up too fast to merge in front of him? Wait for him to go by before putting on the turn signal, then merge as discussed? If he were a car I’d signal and wait for him to go by, but some in this thread seem to think that’s a good way to cause a heart attack in a bicyclist (although it’s not solely for the cyclist’s benefit that I signal - there are other cars on the road, too - so it’s not yet obvious to me that that should be my main consideration).
Based on the additional information posted by the OP, I can think of two scenarios where the cyclist would have been justifiably upset (though that doesn’t justify yelling obscenities, of course):
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The driver (OP) turns on the turn signals and immediately starts moving to the right, and then notices the cyclist. The car stops in time, but cyclist still feels it was too close for comfort.
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The cyclist sees the turn signals and slows down, leaving plenty of room for the car to “merge” and turn right. But the car just sits there. The cyclist is forced to come to a complete stop, wasting time and momentum.
Either situation would have been prevented if the “merged” into the bike lane before the turn. Or if the traffic is so heavy that cyclists on the bike lane are overtaking you, then it might help to check the mirror before turning the turn signals on and starting the turn.
In this situation the law is not clear and there’s no obvious answer. This is why I don’t support on-street bike lanes* as a public policy option.
If there were no bike lanes, and all the cyclists in the OP’s city acted like automobile drivers, and all the automobile drivers were accustomed to treating them as such, this wouldn’t have been an issue.
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- bike lanes must be physically separated and independently signalled in order to keep everyone safe.
This is correct. (In Chicago anyway). Treat the bike lane like a regular lane that just happens to have skinny, slow-moving cars in it. Whether you merge behind or front of the bike depends on relative speeds.
You should never be in a situation where you are sitting stopped with your turn signal on waiting to turn across the bike lane. Imagine if it was a full-sized lane that you were waiting to turn across and you can see what the problem is.
I’m glad we clarified that the cyclist was in a bike lane. That makes a big difference.
I’ve been commuting and recreationally riding for 14 years. That doesn’t make me an expert - just experienced.
My thoughts - a car should never move into the bicycle lane to make a turn. It’s called a bike lane, not a turning lane. Few things piss me off more than having to stop because a car is blocking the bike lane.
The OP did everything correctly. Turn on your blinker as soon as you normally would. As a cyclist, the sooner I know someone is turning, the more options I have available to me. Two things I would recommend to the driver - if you are stopping to let a bicyclist behind you go past before making your turn, keep your wheels straight. To me, that says you are definitely waiting. Second, try to make eye contact and wave the cyclist on. If you haven’t acknowledged me, you could be waiting for another reason (a pedestrian who looked like he might step off the curb, reading the street sign, spooked by a car that looked like it might turn in front of you) and have no idea I am approaching. If you were stopping for another reason and that reason changes, you still might turn into me. Until you acknowledge me, I have to assume you don’t know I’m there.
Yes, I hate to lose momentum when on my bike. I like getting hit by cars even less. Every time I approach an intersection, in a bike lane, and I am gaining on car(s), I slow down.
I have never cussed out a driver for being overly courteous to a me. I always thank a driver for being courteous to me, even if their courtesy slows me down. Which way would you rather have drivers err?
Well, you’re wrong. From The California Driver Handbook:
From a retired Madison, Wisconsin police officer
According to the American Safety Council:
I doubt there’s anywhere official that recommends drivers stay out of the bicycle lane, and turn through it.
Agreed. As a bicyclist, I’d like to point out that I have a much better/wider field of vision than most car drivers, thanks to my head being higher than the roofs of most cars and the fact that no parts of my field of vision are obscured by windshield/rear window frames, headrests, or passengers. So I can see what’s going on in traffic farther ahead and to the sides than can the driver of the car right next to me. As one example, I can often see a traffic signal when a car driver can’t. When I’m on a bike, I take full advantage of this extended field of vision by watching how traffic is moving and planning my own actions as far in advance as possible, so a driver doing something I wasn’t expecting is rather disconcerting.
Agreed. The only time I’ve ever cussed out a driver was the time I was coasting down a hill and spotted an SUV stopped at the stop sign on the cross street, on my right. I was watching him as I approached, mainly because there was no other traffic on the street I was on, and this guy was just sitting there at the stop sign instead of going. I also noted that he was staring off to his right (away from me), never looking in my direction. So naturally, he finally pulled into the intersection at precisely the same instant I entered it, still looking to his right (I had no stop sign). I only had two options, neither good, and only a split second to choose: slam on my brakes (never good going downhill at 25MPH on a bike), which probably still would have resulted in my slamming into the driver’s side of the SUV and sent me sailing across the hood, or quickly swerve in front of him. I took the second option, as he was only halfway across my lane and still moving very slowly, and the other lane was clear of oncoming traffic so I was able to swerve in front of him with plenty of room to spare. I glared at the driver as I zipped in front of him, but he was still looking to his right and only finally saw me after I was past him. If I’d been a car instead of a bicycle, there would have been a nasty broadside collision because he was staring to his right while crossing the lane carrying traffic from his left.
I agree in principle, except for this observation I made during my 15 years of bicycling and walking while I didn’t have a driver’s license, and having drivers who recognized me honk and wave: during daylight hours, under many conditions, reflections on automobile glass often make it impossible to see clearly into a vehicle. Unless I recognized the person’s vehicle (very rare), I never had any idea who this was honking and waving at me. And if I’m coming up behind a vehicle on my bike, the fact that my head is higher than the roof of most cars (as I mentioned earlier) means that even without reflections on the rear window, I’m unlikely to see the driver’s face in their rearview mirror.
Worse than stopping is when they simply slow down upon seeing a pedestrian waiting to cross. For a few years I lived on the outskirts of town along what was basically a highway with one lane going each direction, and a 35MPH speed limit. There were no crosswalks, and intersections were far apart, so it was often necessary to just cross wherever was convenient. I would wait on the side of the highway, watching traffic in both directions to determine when I would be able to safely cross. There would inevitably be one car that would drop its speed by 10MPH or so (almost always the same car I had planned to cross as soon as it passed), not slow enough for me to safely cross in front of it, but slow enough to allow the following vehicles to catch up to it, forcing me to stand there waiting even longer.
My city has mid-block crosswalks in the downtown core on “Main Street”, and one of these crosswalks happened to be almost perfectly aligned with the front door of a business I patronized regularly. I would lock my bike to a signpost at the end of the crosswalk, go inside and make my purchases, and then come back out and futz around putting my purchases into my backpack. Drivers were constantly coming to a full stop in the middle of the block —backing up traffic — to let me cross the street, even though I had no intention whatsoever of crossing the street and did everything I could to make it obvious that I didn’t want to cross the street (I thought the fact that I’m standing there with a bicycle, my helmet sitting on the handlebars, and holding an open backpack in my hands, and well up on the sidewalk to boot, should make it pretty obvious that I wasn’t trying to cross the street, but no …). On one occasion a woman stopped, and no amount of arm-waving and head-shaking on my part could persuade her that I didn’t want to cross the street. When I saw that she had traffic stopped clear back to the intersection, and that traffic from the opposite direction was now stopping because they saw she was stopped, I finally threw my hands up and crossed the street just to get the damn traffic moving again. Then I pushed my bike to the intersection and crossed back over when I had a WALK signal. :rolleyes: