For a while now, the City of Austin has entertained the notion of restricting traffic to bikes only on Nueces Street running north from Third Street to MLK.  According to the Statesman, that idea is receiving quite a bit of backlash from business and property owners in the area.  Just by the number of comments on the article, one can see that this issue is going to be a point of local contention for quite some time.  The article’s author, Ben Wear, says that the current Austin City Council is bike-friendly, so maybe this fantasy can become a reality?

I know that people detest change, and as Wear himself says, “the car almost always wins,” but I just don’t see the harm in taking a street that already gets very little traffic and creating a route exclusive to bikes.  To me, the reasons favoring the idea seem far more compelling than the reasons against.  For one thing, you’d probably have a lot more people biking along this street in general, which would decrease traffic around the heavily congested capital area.

Bike boulevards may be bad for individual property owners, but they are good for the City of Austin as a whole. Skeptics should check out Portland’s success with bike boulevards before crying wolf.  I anticipate discussing this issue more in the coming months.

According to the Tampa Tribune,

The decision followed [a] ruling earlier this year from the Florida 2nd District Court of Appeals that Tampa’s law conflicts with a state law that says violations of bicycle laws are considered traffic offenses, not criminal infractions.

That ruling was based on a court challenge from Lamarvin Barry Brown, who was arrested in April 2007. Police searched Brown, who was 16 at the time, and found marijuana in his back pocket and charged him with possession as well.

Brown’s attorney argued that the marijuana couldn’t be used as evidence since, under state law, he shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place for not having a bell.

The appeals court agreed and tossed out Brown’s conviction from a lower trial court, suggesting that Tampa consider updating the law to confirm with state regulations.

It sounds to me like the court of appeals got it exactly right here.  In most states, minor traffic offenses are not considered criminal in nature, and thus the subject may not be arrested for their violation.  This is true regardless of whether he or she is driving a car or riding a bicycle.

What Tampa tried to do (and probably succeeded in doing for twenty years) was to legalize a pretext stop in the bicycle context (see this article for more information on pretext stops).  It is doubtful that Brown was pulled over because his bike lacked a bell.  Rather, he probably just looked suspicious and officers needed an excuse to stop him.

After the Supreme Court’s ruling in Whren v. United States, such pretext stops are constitutional as long as officers can point to some sort of probable cause for the stop.  In this case, merely witnessing an individual without a bell on his bike would be enough.  It is irrelevant if the officer’s actual motivation for the stop is illegitimate (e.g., racial profiling) if he can point to other probable cause.

The lesson: if you ever happen to be arrested while riding your bicycle, once you get out of the slammer, make sure that under state law you could have been arrested for that particular offense.  If you were arrested for a petty traffic offense, there is a decent chance the arrest was invalid.  Any evidence obtained against you pursuant to that arrest would not be admissible if the arrest should not have occurred in the first place.

Recently, several state legislatures have adopted or at least considered safe bicycle passage laws for when cars pass cyclists on the road.  The list of states that have successfully enacted such bills stands at nearly a dozen, and a few of them may surprise you, including Oklahoma, Arizona, and Arkansas.  Recently, the Texas legislature passed a law requiring a three-foot buffer when a car passes a cyclist on the road, but even though the bill had overwhelming bipartisan support, Governor Rick Perry surprisingly vetoed it.  The move turned quite a few heads here in Austin, and no one can quite understand Perry’s rationale, but safe passage in Texas will have to wait for at least another two years (here in “small government” Texas, the legislature is only in session biennially).

Another recent addition to the safe passage states is Colorado, a state that seems to have both a pretty active road and mountain biking community.  Still, according to The Daily Camera, a Boulder publication, the new law doesn’t seem to be garnering much attention.  Officials have given lots of warnings but very few actual tickets for violations thus far.  The reason?  Probably because a violation is impossible to prove without an officer witnessing it firsthand.  How else can you ever prove whether or not the 3-foot buffer was encroached?  According to the article:

Dan Grunig, executive director of Bicycle Colorado, said awareness about cyclist safety hasn’t increased as quickly as he would like because the Bicycle Safety Bill was passed without an educational funding component.

And therein lies the problem.  With no educational funding, most in the general public will have no idea this law even exists.  Accordingly, those who are driving dangerously in the status quo will have no incentive to change their behavior.

It wouldn’t have taken much to have given this bill some real teeth.  Say, $50,000 in educational funding for signs, commercials, bumper stickers, etc.  That amount of money would certainly be a drop in the bucket of Colorado’s total state budget.  Still, it’s possible that the law may have only passed in the first place because it was unfunded.  As soon as money was attached, it probably would have become more contentious.

I do, however, really favor this part of the bill:

The law also punishes anyone who throws an object at a cyclist with a fine of between $250 and $1,000 and a possible sentence of three to 12 months in jail.

Jail time might be a little extreme, but it’s nice that Colorado is sensitive to the fact that some drivers really do abuse cyclists in dangerous and ignorant ways.

But the backlash from students was intense, and PTS, as far as I knew, decided to scrap the program.  I left Kentucky in May, so I lost touch with the issue shortly thereafter.  Imagine my surprise when I stumbled upon this little gem of an editorial in UK’s student newspaper, The Kernel:

Bike permits miss sustainability targetby Mahan Ellison

And, a quick glance at the PTS website indeed confirms that mandatory bicycle registration is back: http://www.uky.edu/Parking/transportation-bicycle-info.html.

MY COMMENTS:

I believe that Ellison has hit the nail on the head with his criticism.  The bottom line is that PTS’s policy is poorly conceived and will have the opposite effect of encouraging cycling on campus.  It’s nice that PTS got rid of the $15 fee, but that was never the issue.  The question is whether the average person who is considering biking rather than driving to campus will be encouraged or deterred by this policy.  I’ll give you a hint – it’s the latter.

This is a classic case of over-regulation stifling innovation.  Now there will be dozens, if not hundreds of kids who say, “Yeah I was thinking about riding to campus, but I hear that if you don’t get a permit they’ll ticket you and confiscate your bike.  Screw that.”  Not to mention that the policy, by its own terms, applies to every Tom, Dick, and Jane who puts one wheel on UK’s precious campus.  Local high school kid who needs to use UK’s library to do some research?  Sorry kid, gotta register the bike.  Out of towner who brought his bike up to tour campus with his freshman friend?  Sorry, gotta register.  Non-student local who rode her bike to UK’s dental or medical clinic for treatment?  Gotta register.

There are a plethora of reasons why the registration system will do nothing to curb bike theft either in the short term or the long term.  There is also probably at least some validity to the suspicion that PTS is using this policy to eventually generate revenue, as many of us familiar with PTS’s past practices can attest.  I believe these are valid concerns, but I’m not going to discuss them now.  The fact is that if UK is serious about increasing sustainability, decreasing traffic flow, and encouraging healthier students, it should scrap this policy immediately.

First, let me say that by no means am I on expert on either of these two topics independently.  I just graduated law school, so really I don’t know squat about the law from a practical standpoint.  Nor do I know much about bikes other than that they are fun to ride and girls look prettier when they ride them.

Accordingly, this is not a blog where you come to the expert to find the right answers.  It’s a blog where I will document my thoughts, opinions, and learning processes regarding bicycle laws to whoever has an interest in listening.  In the narrow sense, I hope to focus on traffic laws, general safety laws, helmet laws, appropriate cyclist and motorist behavior, and a variety of other topics.  In a broader sense, I plan to write about sustainability, city planning, personal responsibility, and prudent policy decisions for our future.

Viva la velolucion!