Quebec Wants Our Three Foot Law

A poster fromt he site www.copenhagenize.com.  It’s true, isn’t it?

 

You’re riding up St. Laurent, you’re on the right side of
the road trying to keep a safe distance between you and the parked cars, but
also not take up a whole lane.  The
light behind you turns green and you hear an engine behind you,
accelerating.  A sports car passes
you, with about a foot of clearance on your left so the driver doesn’t have to
switch lanes.  You feel the car’s
air stream rush past you and you think “Wow, a foot off and I would be a bloody
pile on the pavement.”

 

Sound familiar?

 

I remember spending a day wandering around Manhattan last
year.  I was walking around with a
friend who was also a cycling enthusiast and had actually done some advocacy
work in New York City.  She kept
pointing out the white bicycles that serve as memorials for cyclists killed on
the road.  It’s an effective system
– the spray-painted, all-white bicycles serve as ghostly, elegant reminders of
the perils of cycling in our cities.  There are a lot of them in Manhattan.

 

Each one has a bouquet of flowers and a laminated note about
who the person was and how he or she died.  An overwhelming majority of them sound something like this:
“John was riding down 6^th Avenue, he swerved to avoid a piece of
construction steel and was hit from behind by a truck.”  We don’t have the white-bike memorial
tradition here, but my anecdotal evidence points heavily to this problem.

 

That’s why I’m happy to see that Maryland recently has
passed a new law to prevent such a thing. 
In Maryland, you now have to give cyclists three feet of clearance when
you pass.  If you don’t, you’re
subject to a $500 fine (enforcement is another issue!).  It came with a bunch of other
cyclist-friendly laws, like a repeal of an old law which stated that cyclists had to use the shoulder whenever it was
paved, and also a commitment to investing in cycling infrastructure.  Read about the law here.
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