46
Revising Laws to Control Cyclists

Our Right to Use the Roads

Until 1944, the traffic laws (I use the UVC as the example of all the state laws) gave cyclists the status of drivers of vehicles. That meant that they had to obey the same duties as other drivers and that they had the same rights as other drivers. However, the highway establishment was unhappy with that status. Its members had come to believe that the bicycle was obsolete and delayed motor traffic. They wanted to clear the roads of slow traffic for the convenience of motorists, but they recognized that it was politically impossible to prohibit cycling. Therefore, they said that cyclists were endangered by motor traffic and that roads with modern traffic were too dangerous for cyclists. In 1944, they used that safety excuse to enact three restrictions against cyclists that reduced their rights.

The first law prohibited cyclists from using controlled-access highways, those highways that were intended for high-speed motor traffic and could be entered only from specified roadways. The second law prohibited cyclists from using any roadway that had a usable path nearby. The third law prohibited cyclists from using most of the roadway surface of all other types of roads by limiting them to the right margin of the roadway.

Prohibiting cyclists from those highways from which all slow traffic is prohibited has some point and is not too detrimental to cyclists where there are plenty of other roads that provide equal access to all points. Prohibiting cyclists from any roadway with a usable path nearby compelled cyclists to use the facility that they thought was worse than or more dangerous than the roadway. (If they thought it was better or safer, presumably they would use it without being forced.) Being restricted to the side of the road seems innocuous; after all, because cyclists usually are slower than other traffic, they should normally be to the right of other traffic. However, the slow vehicle rule already applied to cyclists; the highway establishment was not satisfied with that law, but wanted an explicit law against cyclists as such, regardless of their actual speed relative to other traffic, or whether they were turning left, or how much traffic there was on the roadway or the width of the roadway. The highway establishment wanted to be certain that whenever a high-speed motorist might come along, the road would be clear for him. Of course, that argument ignored stray animals, fallen tree branches, slow cars, potholes, fallen rocks, and all the other possible obstructions that limit the safe and lawful speed of any driver.

The real harm of the mandatory bike-path and side-of-the-road laws was in the combination of being enacted purely for the convenience of motorists but under the excuse of bike safety. Because the proponents could not get away with the truth, they used lies for which there was no evidence. They persuaded legislators and public that merely cycling on the road was too dangerous to be allowed and must be restricted as much as possible. From this time on, this superstition became the guiding principle of American traffic law, law enforcement, education, and public opinion regarding cycling.

Because of the basic illogicality of their position, the members of the highway establishment have ever since run a propaganda campaign to support their view. They say that fast motor traffic kills cyclists by hitting them from behind, but instead of these accidents being the motorists’ fault, they are the cyclists’ fault for merely being there. They say that riding a bicycle is dangerous, that to make it safe would require superhuman skill, and therefore cyclists really shouldn’t be on the roads because they can’t be expected to ride safely. Therefore, it is legally justifiable to prohibit cyclists from using as much of the road system as possible, just to protect their lives. This propaganda campaign is the basis for the bike-safety programs that cause so many of our car-bike collisions.

Of course, the whole thing was false. Nobody knew what types of accidents caused deaths and injuries to cyclists. It was just a convenient argument to clear the roads for the convenience of motorists. But not much happened until long after 1944. The battle against bike paths had been fought and won by British cyclists in 1937. Few bike paths were built in America from 1944 to 1970. The highway establishment stopped worrying about bicycles because there were too few to worry about. Perhaps their campaign to frighten cyclists off the roads had worked, or perhaps there were other reasons. Whichever it was, society ignored the few adult cyclists of that period. We avoided the few freeways, which were unpleasant urban roads in areas where there were plenty of other roads to use.

Then came the bike boom of the late 1960s, when adult and adolescent cyclists took to the roads in large numbers. The highway establishment got frightened with its own propaganda that cyclists plug up the roads and delay motorists. In California, a state that led the nation in highway affairs for decades, the highway establishment decided to actively control cyclists. They took two actions. The first will be described in the section on bikeways in chapter 47. In the second action, the CHP and the Automobile Club of Southern California duped a powerful state senator who considered himself a friend of cyclists, James Mills, to sponsor a California Statewide Bicycle Committee to review the laws regarding cycling and recommend revisions to the state legislature. The CHP and the ACSC had no doubt about the outcome because they had stacked the committee with highway establishment people. The committee would recommend and the legislature would adopt the mandatory-bike-path law from the UVC and a new mandatory-bike-lane law. Then California cyclists could be restricted to the bikeways that would be produced to the new standard designs that had been produced by the first action.

Unfortunately for their plans, they let me become a member of that committee as the sole cyclist member. I initially thought that they had good intentions; they thought that my statement that cyclists should obey the traffic laws meant that I thought that cyclists should obey any law that they proposed. Once I discovered what was happening, I publicized their aims and deliberations and roused the opposition of cyclists. Although a mandatory-bike-lane law was passed, the mandatory-bike-path law was not and has since been withdrawn from the UVC, but still exists in only about four or five states. The basic reason for repealing mandatory-bike-path laws is that side paths are so dangerous that government organizations who require their use will be sued for the accidents that result and can’t then say that the cyclist was using it of his own free will.

The committee members always gave only the traditional argument that the restrictions were necessary for the safety of cyclists. As an experienced cyclist, I knew better. As the other committee members talked, I recognized that they were totally ignorant about cycling in traffic. Their words had no relevance to the actual facts as I and other cyclists had experienced them. Furthermore, they had no statistics to justify their claim that motorists hitting lawful cyclists from behind were the most important danger to cyclists—a claim that appeared dubious from what I knew about accidents to cyclists. Furthermore, what they said about the operation of bicycles contradicted what traffic engineers knew about the operation of vehicles. They produced no evidence to justify their claim that cyclists and bicycles were somehow scientifically different from motorists and automobiles.

As part of this operation, the California Office of Traffic Safety, practically a subsidiary of the CHP, had commissioned Ken Cross to make a statistical study of car-bike collisions. The Statewide Bicycle Committee officially accepted the finished study in a big meeting at the Sacramento Airport. Ken distributed hectographic copies of his study to those present and told of his results. When he finished, I stood up and pointed out that his statistics completely destroyed the arguments for restricting cyclists and supported my contention that cyclists should obey the normal rules of the road for drivers of vehicles. There was a stunned silence. I should not have spoken then; I should have let the committee first officially distribute Ken’s paper without realizing what its statistics meant. As it was, they suppressed the paper and the only copies ever available were those that he distributed at the meeting. Until 1991, when I told him this story, Ken was still puzzled about why his paper had disappeared.

My words didn’t faze the committee members. They just went ahead regardless of the weakness of their position. Because they refused to inform me of the purpose of the committee, I had to discover it for myself, partly by actual discovery and partly by inference from their actions. I discovered the existence of a Bikeway Design Standard that had been produced by the Transportation Studies Department of UCLA under contract from the State of California (Bikeway Planning Criteria and Guidelines; Institute of Transportation and Traffic Engineering, UCLA-Eng-7224, UCLA; State of California, Business and Transportation Agency, Department of Public Works, Division of Highways, April 1972). This design standard copied the Dutch and German sidepath designs that I already knew were extremely dangerous for cyclists trying to operate as drivers of vehicles. Quite obviously, the committee’s purpose was to work out laws that would enforce use of these bikeways on cyclists. As the committee’s work proceeded, the members refused to do anything of a traffic nature that would be good for cyclists; all that they would do was to work to restrict cyclists to the edge of the roadway, to bike lanes, and to bikepaths (as in the UCLA document). By inference, it became clear that the committee’s purpose was to restrict cyclists as much as politically possible, to prevent them from operating as drivers of vehicles, to enforce a cyclist-inferiority mode of operation on them. While the committee members always talked about bicycle safety, not only did they have no evidence that their actions would promote it, they had data demonstrating that their actions would not do so. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that these members were either completely controlled by the cyclist-inferiority phobia or were motivated to make motoring more convenient, or some mix of the two.

I concluded that their intent was to restrict cyclists as much as was politically possible, because no other intent stood up to examination. They couldn’t have done what they did if they had been acting in the interest of cyclists.

However, I had initially argued for repeal of the mandatory side-of-the-road law, pointing out its logical deficiencies. The committee hated my challenge to the side-of-the-road law, but they had to accept my logic. However, to recommend repeal would destroy all the effort they had exerted to get cyclists restricted even more. So they adjusted the law to account for those contradictions that I had used in argument. This is why the present UVC side-of-the-road law has the five excuses for not riding as close as practicable to the side of the road. The excuses were inserted not because the committee members wanted to do good for cyclists, because they never did cyclists any good of their own free will in any other matter, but to protect the side-of-the-road law against challenge in the courts. Because I sensed their aim, I did not use the right-turn-only lane as another argument, and the committee members were not smart enough to include that as another excuse. That is why the right-turn-only lane did not become another excuse until several years later.

Although many cyclists did not like the committee’s recommendation, there was one offsetting aspect. Before the committee had started, the legislature had disavowed its former policy of statewide uniformity in traffic law by authorizing local governments to produce bike lanes and to make their own laws about operating on streets with bike lanes. Palo Alto, for instance, had enacted a law that was both a mandatory-bike-lane law and a mandatory-bike-path law by simply defining sidewalks as bike lanes. Some other cities had done equally appalling things. These actions and the threat of more similar actions persuaded cyclists to accept the recommendations of the Statewide Bicycle Committee and not to lobby against them, because the new laws would return to the policy of statewide uniformity. Bad as the California laws were, they repealed the worse ones that cities and counties had enacted. That compromise is the only reason that California cyclists accepted the California revisions of 1975. Those revisions of 1975 became the UVC revisions of 1976, and hence the basis for the nation’s present traffic laws for cyclists.

Not all cyclists agreed with my strategy. There were cyclists who thought that cyclists needed the side-of-the-road law to justify their use of the road. They thought that unless they had that law, they had no right to use any part of the road, but with that law, they had the right to use at least the right edge. The thought that cyclists had the right to use the public roads simply because they were travelers was completely foreign to their thoughts and even aroused them to anger. This is the cyclist-inferiority phobia in action. They couldn’t conceive of themselves as legally equal to motorists when riding a bicycle.

The right of the people to use the public roads has been a basic principle of common law from medieval times, a right that has never been doubted. Motorists are not allowed to exercise that right until they have demonstrated their ability to operate their dangerous vehicles safely, but other people, on foot, on bicycles, or in horse-drawn carts or buggies, or merely driving livestock, do not have to have a license because they are not nearly as dangerous to the public as motorists are.

Yet this principle has been turned upside down by the propaganda of the highway establishment, whose members believe their own falsehoods with religious fervor. Just after this controversy, I was riding around the north end of Lake Tahoe. I was stopped by a Placer County sheriff for not riding on the bike path that ran between the highway and the lake shore. Remember, in California, we had prevented the mandatory-bike-path law from being enacted. He jawboned me for 40 minutes while I rested from my ride and ate food and drank water. At one point, he pointed to the motorists and said, “Those motorists have the right to use the roads. You have only a privilege that can be taken away. The county spent a lot of money on that bike path.” I told him that the county had wasted its money and he should call his supervisor by radio and see what should be done about me. After he had done so and returned to jawbone me some more, I got up and told him that I had no business with him and it was evident that he had no business with me. Therefore, I was leaving. His hands shot out halfway between us and then stalled as he realized what would happen to him if he tried to arrest me without any legal justification. He wanted to, because he felt that I had been disobeying the law as it should be, but he realized that because the law was different than he wished he would be in severe trouble if he arrested me without justification.

The Bicycle as Vehicle

There have been other changes in traffic law besides the growing restrictions against cyclists and the partial repeal of mandatory bike-path laws. The most talked-about is the change that defines bicycles as vehicles.

As I wrote previously, all states gave cyclists the rights and duties of drivers of vehicles without defining bicycles as vehicles. It is true that a Virginia judge held that Virginia’s law was not specific about rights, but immediately after that, the state legislature revised its law to be specific. There was no legal problem in using this scheme, and it avoided some other problems, such as mandatory vehicle insurance. However, those cyclists who felt inferior and did not understand the working of the law developed the feeling that if bicycles were defined as vehicles, they would have all the rights that motorists had—especially the right to use the roads. The highway establishment also felt this way and resisted the proposal. Therefore the controversy became well-publicized even though there was no substance in it. Cyclists were restricted to the side of the road not because they were not driving vehicles, but because they were riding bicycles, and changing the class to which bicycles belonged would make no difference; they would still be bicycles and the highway establishment would still oppose their use and could still enact laws to do so.

One of the errors that caused this thinking is the idea that the word “vehicle” means a thing with a motor, while a bicycle is a special class of vehicle that doesn’t have a motor. That is wrong. Vehicles are all entities which carry people or property, and motor vehicles are a particular subclass of vehicles whose members have motors. But the supremacy of the automobile has led people to believe that “vehicle” means a car and everything else is subsidiary to it. I spent 40 minutes explaining this elementary principle of traffic law to the Commissioner of the CHP (the body assigned by the California Legislature to be responsible for the California Vehicle Code), and he showed no later sign of having learned anything from the discussion.

Faced with this problem of public demand versus their own reluctance to give cyclists the rights of motorists, the highway establishment thought a bit and discovered that it could indeed make the requested change. After all, the change was nothing substantive (as I have explained), but the establishment could use this change to restrict cyclists still further than they had been. So it agreed to make the change. Some cyclists cheered, and the League of American Wheelmen has taken credit for the change and assumed responsibility for getting the change accepted by individual state legislatures. I opposed the movement to make bicycles vehicles, but I was overruled by the majority.

The change defines bicycles as vehicles. The change therefore specifically prohibits bicycle racing, which was never before prohibited, because the Code prohibits all racing of vehicles. Because of the way the motor vehicle laws have been written, the change also prohibits trying to finish a ride in a certain time, as in time for work, or to ride faster than some other rider, even though in neither case does the cyclist exceed the speed limit. The change also prohibits pace-lining because the change includes a change to the following-too-closely law that makes it applicable to all vehicles rather than only motor vehicles. There is another later change that prohibits cyclists from turning left where other vehicles may turn left if the local traffic engineer wants to prohibit it. So the highway officials took advantage of poorly informed and emotionally damaged cyclists to make a change that made those cyclists feel better while doing real harm to their interests.

We cyclists in California considered whether we would benefit if California changed bicycles from devices to vehicles. We considered that the benefits would be minuscule while the problems would be large. A large number of parts of the vehicle code would have to be changed. For example, the requirement for minimum tread groove depth on tires would have to be changed to permit many good bicycle tires. Considering that any change to the law about bicycles runs the risk of being turned about by legislators who know nothing about cycling but are full of opinions, we decided to recommend against the change, and it has not occurred.

Conclusions from the History of Traffic Laws for Cyclists

This account covers all the important changes in traffic law for cyclists that have ever occurred. There is no sign anywhere in these changes that the highway establishment that effectively controls traffic law, or anybody else for that matter, lifted a finger to help cyclists. Every change is one of motorists restricting cyclists without any justification at all, merely for their own convenience. The only people who objected to these processes were cyclists themselves, those cyclists who saw that they were being oppressed by a majority gone amok with power. These cyclists have managed to discredit and largely repeal the mandatory-bike-path law, but that was possible only because they made the highway establishment afraid of lawsuits for accidents caused by requiring cyclists to use dangerous facilities.

If you think that American laws are improving toward cyclists, or that any part of American traffic law favors cyclists, you are wrong—dead wrong. The only protection that we have is our status as drivers of vehicles that gives us the right to operate as drivers of vehicles, to the extent that it is not repealed by the special bicycle laws. That status requires that others legally respect our right. That is a very valuable right, because it makes the law apply equally to both cyclists and to motorists. Because motorists won’t do themselves harm, we benefit from the protection of laws that are enacted for motorists, at least to the extent that the legislature doesn’t make them apply only to motorists. We must protect that right and oppose any changes that would reduce it by either giving motorists rights that other drivers don’t have or by taking from us rights that other drivers do have. To the extent that that has been done to us over the last fifty years, we have been harmed, and those changes should be reversed.

This increasing discrimination against cyclists has been made possible by the cyclist-inferiority superstition and phobia. Cyclists who suffered from the phobia aided the highway establishment in its efforts to strengthen the side-of-the-road restriction against legal challenge. They also enabled the highway establishment to charge the price of greater restrictions upon cyclists in return for making them feel better by defining bicycles as vehicles. Highway establishment people who suffered from the phobia were driven by their fear that cyclists would plug up the roads unless they were legally kept off the roads as much as possible. The public, to the extent to which it was concerned, favored the changes because it too believed that cyclists must be restricted for their own safety. Though that concept is false, the cyclist-inferiority phobia made people believe that it is correct.

As long as the highway establishment continues to discriminate against cyclists, our rights are in jeopardy. The enormous twenty-first-century national program of cyclist-inferiority cycling on bikeways (now including side paths under the name of cycle-tracks) makes it both more difficult and more important for cyclists to preserve their rights as drivers of vehicles. Lawful, competent cyclists cannot prevent the nation from following its policy of incompetent, and therefore dangerous, cycling, but they should work very hard to prevent themselves from being so constrained. The only route left for lawful, competent cyclists is to get the restrictive laws repealed, whichever of them exist in each jurisdiction, so that those cyclists who choose to do so are allowed to obey the rules of the road for drivers of vehicles.