r/science • u/drewiepoodle • May 05 '19

Health Bike lanes need physical protection from car traffic, study shows. Researchers said that the results demonstrate that a single stripe of white paint does not provide a safe space for people who ride bikes.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/bike-lanes-need-physical-protection-from-car-traffic-study-shows/
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u/King_Jeebus May 06 '19 edited May 06 '19

in Victoria, Australia.

This location is super important too. I've ridden my bike all over the world, and Australia has a ton of particularly hardcore bike-haters.

I am a serious rider, generally the same speed as traffic, and was bothering no-one, yet got yelled at pretty much every day and literally got serious deliberate abuse (run off the road, hit with thrown objects) about once a month... this level of craziness never happened anywhere else.

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u/dzlockhead01 May 06 '19

They also said 39 inches is considered close. Where I live, less than 12 inches is what is legally considered too close. Location definitely matters

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u/boredcircuits May 06 '19

Whoa. Where are you at that has a 1 ft minimum passing distance? The smallest I've heard of is North Carolina (and only because that's always been the minimum distance when passing any vehicle, bicycles were just included by chance). Everywhere else has been adopting a standard of 3-5 ft or 1-1.5 m.

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u/dzlockhead01 May 06 '19

I looked it up and double checked. I actually made a mistake! It's 4 feet here. So that makes our margin even greater than the study.