Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater
If you're a motorcyclist you probably know about lane-splitting. This is when you ride your bike between slow-moving cars on the freeway or large multi-lane roads, allowing you to go faster than the car traffic.
On the face of it, lane-splitting seems to offer a couple of advantages and a couple of disadvantages. The big pro items are moving faster, and escaping the inattentive rear-end collision. The big cons are that you're playing slalom with a bunch of car drivers who may or may not be paying attention, or actively working against your safety, and that if you're not on your toes, it's easy for collisions to happen.
In my earlier years as a motorcycle rider, I was dead-set against lane-splitting. The reason is that in Washington State, where I live, it's illegal. It's not that I necessarily agree or disagree with the law, but that law provides the backdrop for reality: it's illegal, so no car driver expects it to happen. Therefore, they won't be on the lookout for it, and you can reasonably expect that they'll change lanes without any consideration for a motorcyclist illegally lane-splitting. It's just a bad scene. Then, thinking about it, I couldn't see the real advantages in a place like California where it's legal, or Europe, where it's common practice.
Now, having spent some time in Europe and participated in lane-splitting, I have a more nuanced view of the practice. I like the improvement in speed through slow traffic, and where drivers are expecting it, it seems reasonably safe (although it was still something of a white-knuckle experience the few times I did it in Europe). I still think that doing it in Washington is a terrible idea. It's still a thing that, should Washington legalize lane-splitting, I would be quite leery of until I had some confidence other drivers wouldn't be reacting poorly.
Thus I was interested to read a report from UC Berkeley about lane-splitting accident statistics in California. Turns out that for motorcyclists who are safely lane-splitting (which they describe as riding no more than 10 MPH over the speed of traffic, and through traffic moving no faster than 30 MPH), the rate of injury in collisions is much lower. It doesn't really address the rate of collision, since they didn't collect total traffic vs. collision. What they did collect is stats comparing lane-splitting collisions to non-lane-splitting collisions, and there were far fewer lane-splitting collisions than non-lane-splitting.
The conclusion that can reasonably be derived from the Berkeley study is that prudent lane-splitting is safer. Safer than what, exactly, is hard to define: safer than the other riding activities you might engage in, I guess, but that's a very large category. Importantly, though, it's the inverse of what I had previously thought -- lane-splitting is not your one-way ticket to collision and injury. There's even a Belgian study which found lane-splitting to improve traffic overall. The Belgian study is quite interesting to read about, with some pretty surprising numbers when you change 10% of the car drivers to motorcyclists who lane-split.
So at the end of the day, I find myself with mixed feelings about lane-splitting in Washington. Yes, it would be awesome to be able to do it on those terrible traffic days. But I would spend several years worrying about coming across that small class of car driver who doesn't know, or is convinced that by lane-splitting I'm stealing something from them.
I guess I do ultimately hope it's legalized here. It's far from that point, but that would be a good outcome. But I also hope that the bill legalizing lane-splitting would include a goodly amount of driver education as part of the package.
Posted at 12:04 permanent link category: /motorcycle
Categories: all aviation Building a Biplane bicycle gadgets misc motorcycle theater