Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
1–10 of 71 posts
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#2California has the same law. This is a great way to get tools into the hands of police to help them enforce the law and educate drivers.
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#3To me the best solution is to have dedicated lanes for two wheeled vehicles of up to 50cc or equiv on high traffic roads and then lane sharing on less congested and lower volume roads. Lane sharing in high volume roads is asking for accidents to happen, no matter the best intentions of drivers and cyclists alike. on roadways where the speed is over 25mph I think it'd be best to have dedicated lanes, if possible and lane sharing should be an interim solution during the transition (construction).
It would also mean all involved be subject to all road rules, like speed, distance, red lights and stop signs
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#4If the police are measuring with ultrasonic rangefinders, then cars need them too. How are human drivers supposed to judge that distance?
The article makes the analogy of trying to enforce speed limits without a radar detector. Fine, but cars have speedometers that give the driver the same information. We don't demand drivers just get a feel for how fast they are going.
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#5If the police are measuring with ultrasonic rangefinders, then cars need them too. How are human drivers supposed to judge that distance? The article makes the analogy of trying to enforce speed limits without a radar detector. Fine, but cars have speedometers that give the driver the same information. We don't demand drivers just get a feel for how fast they are going.
We do ask people to guess whether or not they are committing DWI/DUI though, which is a huge problem in my opinion. Cockeyed.com sums it up better than I can:
http://www.cockeyed.com/science/breathalyzer/breathalyser01....
> Monitoring blood alcohol levels is difficult. Holding people accountable for crossing the .08 limit is like holding them accountable for trespassing once they walk past a particular longitude. The line is invisible. It is possible to determine your longitude, but it is awfully tricky if you don't own a sextant or GPS unit.
> Imagine if cars did not have speedometers, but speeding laws were still enforced with $2,000 police radar guns. It would be really difficult to tell how fast you were going, particularly (as is the case with blood alcohol levels), you had never experienced having your speed tested, nor had any real experience with what a particular speed (for example 55 mph) feels like.
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#6If the police are measuring with ultrasonic rangefinders, then cars need them too. How are human drivers supposed to judge that distance? The article makes the analogy of trying to enforce speed limits without a radar detector. Fine, but cars have speedometers that give the driver the same information. We don't demand drivers just get a feel for how fast they are going.
I do it by overcompensating so there is no chance I am too close to the cyclist. If there is not enough room (e.g., oncoming traffic) then I wait until there is an opportunity. I can't see cars broadly introducing this technology before we're not the ones driving them.
FWIW, I worked on a "citizen jury" that recommended the adoption of the one-metre passing rule in my state. The default opposition on the jury was "what if there isn't enough room?" Many didn't think to presume that give way rules could apply in this situation. No one raised your point about equivalent technology. I guess the difference is that I am good at estimating one metre but poor at estimating 60km/h.
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#7If the police are measuring with ultrasonic rangefinders, then cars need them too. How are human drivers supposed to judge that distance? The article makes the analogy of trying to enforce speed limits without a radar detector. Fine, but cars have speedometers that give the driver the same information. We don't demand drivers just get a feel for how fast they are going.
As a cyclist I don't mind cars that are only two feet away, or even only one foot if they're not going that much faster than me. It'd be pretty awful to be ticketing people for only being 35" away (especially since riding in a 1" band is not feasible on most streets, so most of them wouldn't even be the car's fault), but on a lot of streets you could be pretty much continuously writing tickets for passing 6" away, and blaming a lack of instruments for that would be like blaming a broken speedometer for going 50 in a 25 zone.
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#8PA law is actually four feet, but given the width of bike lanes this is sometimes physically impossible.
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#9What I find more interesting than the device is a quote from the officer, "Their attitude will determine whether I issue a citation. If they take it and just throw it on the seat, then I know I wasn’t effective. Then in that case I would issue a citation."
Does this seem extremely subjective and arbitrary to anyone else?
Re: Police use ultrasonic device to make sure drivers stay 3 feet from cyclists
#10If the police are measuring with ultrasonic rangefinders, then cars need them too. How are human drivers supposed to judge that distance? The article makes the analogy of trying to enforce speed limits without a radar detector. Fine, but cars have speedometers that give the driver the same information. We don't demand drivers just get a feel for how fast they are going.
We do ask people to guess whether or not they are committing DWI/DUI though, which is a huge problem in my opinion. Cockeyed.com sums it up better than I can: http://www.cockeyed.com/science/breathalyzer/breathalyser01.... > Monitoring blood alcohol levels is difficult. Holding people accountable for crossing the .08 limit is like holding them accountable for trespassing once they walk past a particular longitude. Th…
There's two ways to ensure that you aren't inadvertently running afoul of drinking and driving laws: you can either not drink, or wait a large amount of time after drinking before you drive.
Same with passing bicycles - you can give them so much more than three feet that there's no chance that you're within three feet of them, or not pass them until there is that much room.
Three feet is the minimum. The expectation isn't that drivers should try to get as close to three feet without going over.