Numerous websites are reporting that Marin County, CA, (where mountain biking was founded) is going to start enforcing a 15mph speed limit on the trails out there. story - despite the date it’s not an April Fools joke. This one is not dated 4/1. Neither is this one.
According to the Uniform Vehicle Code, "Every person propelling a vehicle by human power or riding a bicycle shall have all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of any other vehicle…except as to special regulations in this article and except as to those provisions which by their nature can have no application. " IOW, bikes are treated like cars when it comes to motor vehicle laws.
Equipment laws aren’t retroactive. If you vehicle didn’t come with some OEM equipment, you aren’t subject to that; IOW, you can’t get cited for a seatbelt violation in an antique car that didn’t have OEM seatbelts. Why then could you be cited for speeding in a vehicle that doesn’t come with an OEM speedometer?
The options for a speedometer on a bike are: Traditional cyclometers:
Are optional equipment
Have to be manually calibrated by the user based on wheel/tire size (& pressure).
May have a wire that can become cut/damaged rendering the unit useless
Because they are battery operated, they may not be operational if the battery dies.
GPS based units:
Are much more expensive
Display limited information on the screen at any given time, meaning speed might not be displayed.
Sometimes don’t display accurate information if they don’t have a good view of satellites, like one might have in tree cover.
There is not a modern US street-legal automobile produced today that doesn’t have a permanently displayed & operational OEM speedometer. If yours isn’t working, it’s your responsibility to fix your equipment & make it operational again but cars don’t have any of the issues listed above with bike computers/speedometers, yet I know of no bikes that come with an OEM speedometer.
I can remember years ago when bicycles would sometimes be ticketed for speed violations on the street and I think it still does happen now and then in our state. Speeding, as a violation, seems more about the action than the equipment. Think of it more like DUI and remember the various mowers and buggies.
Now should they require some sort of inspection sticker for bicycles in our state ----- there you have a good OEM argument just like some early/antique cars and motorcycles do. But you still can’t speed.
Because speed limits pre-date speedometers by quite a bit.
Ulysses S. Grant is the only US President to have received a speeding ticket while in office. He was driving a horse-drawn carriage at the time.
The antique cars so old they don’t have a speedometer still have to obey the speed limits.
Anecdotally, my brother once revived a verbal warning from a police officer for speeding on a bicycle. He reports the officer said it would have been a ticket, but he felt the story would be disbelieved. He was going to tell the story at the station, though, so if he or any other officer saw my brother doing it again, a ticket would be issued.
(On a really long downhill, he had managed to get his racing bike up to about 55 in a posted 45 on his way home from the Community College.)
No bicycle has turn signals (standard, there are some crappy illuminated signals available aftermarket). Older cars do not have turn signals.
But you still have to signal turns.
The difference here is that they teach you, as part of driver training or even introductory bicycling, how to signal turns without turn signals. This is in part so you will recognize the hand signals when you see someone else using them.
But nobody ever taught you how to estimate your speed without a speedometer.
The people I have known who regularly went fast on a bicycle were very good at measuring by eye a short distance ahead of them, and from the knowledge that 1 mph is about 1.5 feet per second, could get their speed from how much distance they covered in 1 second. If the speed limit is 40, pick a spot 60 feet ahead of you: if you reach it in less than a second, you need to slow down.
But they don’t teach that in Driver’s Ed, it isn’t on the written test to get your license, and this leads you to wonder why you should be expected to know how to do it should you find yourself without a speedometer.
Also, the fact that “mechanical failure” is usually accepted as a defense is confusing you. That is, you can get out of a speeding ticket by pleading guilty to the lesser charge of having a broken (or miscalibrated) speedometer, so long as you bring proof of repair.
It is a load of bollocks, but given a certain level of complaint then the police have to be seen to do something, however futile. Shared use trails cause conflict the world over.
I doubt it’s possible to accurately use a radar gun on proper singletrack, so it’s not like there will be speed traps out on the real stuff. I would expect it to be more like multi-use fire-roads with a long, straight field of view that are popular with families, horse-riders etc. If you’re smashing it through here you probably deserve a ticket anyhow.