| Re: Bad bicycle reporting on Channel 5 in Kansas City
"psycholist" wrote:
> I hope the education program is successful. Y'all should press for the
> station to make amends by retracting some of those comments, specifically,
> and by having a "cyclists right" segment on one or more of their
> broadcasts.
>
> That is, off course, if you can come up with the appropriate statutes to
> prove that they're wrong. In my state, they're wrong. Don't know if that
> holds for every state.
This may not be the best case to make an issue of. In many (most?) states,
cyclists are required to ride single file when being passed. On a quiet
country road (which this apparently was), you can usually hear a car
approaching from a pretty good distance.
The motorist says he slowed down, honked, waited for them to get out of the
way and swerved when they didn't, but the sideview mirror on his vehicle
clipped one of their handlebars. The cyclists claim he swerved into them
intentionally. I suspect the truth is somewhere between those two extremes.
Now, certainly the driver saw the cyclists if he honked, and he is at fault
for hitting them. And certainly there are situations where cyclists have a
right to be "in the traffic lane." But I'm not convinced from what I read
that the cyclists really tried to single up.
The article DOES NOT say cyclists are never allowed in the traffic lane.
It says, "Technically the bicyclists were at fault because they weren't
supposed to ride two abreast on such a narrow shoulder." I would have
phrased it slightly differently: Technically, the bicyclists were partially
at fault because they were riding two abreast in the traffic lane while
being passed.
Art Harris
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