Originally Posted by extrashaky
From what I can tell, everything seems to go back to one study from a pro-biking organization that indicated that lane splitting helps prevent bikes from being rear-ended. But there's a trade-off. Nobody in his right mind could argue that it's also safer to be next to a car whose driver decides to change lanes or between vehicles that approach too close together.
California, one of the most heavily studied traffic locations in the country, steadfastly refuses to track lane splitting accidents as part of its regular traffic data because they consider emissions reductions to be a higher priority than life and property, and they are deathly afraid that state-collected statistics could be used to debunk the safety claims and jeopardize the law. Individual bikers don't want the stats because they want to be able to zoom past stopped traffic, regardless of whether it endangers anybody else.
So as far as I can tell it's really not possible to determine whether it's really safer overall, at least not yet. The studies only address half the issue but are dishonestly used as if they support it in total.
Whenever these objections are brought up among lane splitting zealots, the inevitable response is that the responsibility should be on drivers to be looking out for bikes. In normal driving, I agree. I don't ride, but my dad did, and I grew up around bikes and learned from my first day behind the wheel to respect them on the road.
Yet lane splitting puts those bikes in places where they are difficult to see, coming from unexpected directions, in cramped locations where the infrastructure--the lanes--are not designed to accommodate them. Bikers seem to believe they deserve to get home faster than everyone else, so everyone else has a moral responsibility to make way and create lanes where they don't exist. That's a religious attitude of privilege I find impossible to respect, when bikers don't want to have to extend the same respect to cars.
The moral issue then leads to a legal issue. Whose fault is it when the driver doesn't see the bike coming? The bikers want it to be the driver's fault, despite it being unnatural for the driver to anticipate this kind of behavior from another vehicle.
California's idiotic solution was a ridiculous confusion of speed limits and speed differentials. If you're going 10 miles faster than the car, it's the car's fault. If you're going 20 miles faster than the car, it's the bike's fault. If you're going 15 miles faster than the car, but the car is going 40 miles per hour, it's the bike's fault because the bike is going faster than 50. You can only do it when traffic is moving less than 35 MPH.
Okay, great. Except that humans are actually extremely bad at judging speed by eye even with training. The driver is going to say the bike came out of nowhere 30 MPH faster, while the biker is going to say he was only going 5 MPH faster. No civilian driver has any kind of speedometer on his dash to tell how fast a bike just passed him. Nor does a biker have anything to measure exactly how fast traffic is moving unless he's matching their speed. So it's basically up to the cop to determine whose bullshit he believes, and that's rarely going to come out fair with respect to what actually happened.
Furthermore, California complicates it even further because it's a comparative negligence state. So even if the biker was driving like a moron, chances are good that the driver walks away shouldering some of the expense for the biker's mistake.
Maybe this risk of (unfair) legal liability will make drivers extra careful. Maybe they'll slow way down and become very conservative in their maneuvers. Then traffic slows down, traffic jams become worse and all those idling engines put even more hydrocarbons into LA's sky. Environmentalist fail.
As an atheist agnostic with comparatively liberal views who grew up in a small community ruled by an invasive and oppressive Southern Baptist church, I react violently to cultish political and religious movements, especially when their outreach is based in large part on dishonesty. The Cult of Lane Splitting reared its ugly head when I worked in TV news in DC and again when I lived in Texas, joining the ranks of PETA members and gluten zealots spouting pseudo-scientific claims and dishonest interpretations of science in support of dishonestly stated motives. Luckily they've been slapped down so far. If you just keep your bike in your lane and don't expect other people to shoulder the burden of your unsafe behavior, there's no problem.
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