Cyclists like push for safety in bill
CRITICS SAY PROPOSED BUFFER WILL PUT DRIVERS IN HARM'S WAYBy Edwin Garcia - MediaNews Sacramento Bureau
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``It says if a driver passes you close, and there's a police car nearby, they can pull them over,'' said d'Souza, who rides 70 miles a week and advises the city of San Jose on bicycle issues for the task force studying development in Coyote Valley. ``It's a step in the right direction.''
The measure is gaining traction among serious cyclists and also parents whose children ride bikes to school. Still, it faces an uphill climb from the same forces that helped defeat Nava's similar bill last year.
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Critics' concerns
Opponents, including the Teamsters Union, worry that drivers forced to swerve around cyclists would place themselves on a collision course with oncoming traffic, especially on narrow roads.
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Nava introduced the measure after the death of 21-year-old Kendra Chiota Payne, a University of California-Santa Barbara triathlete who was struck by a passing truck while training along the side of a road.
``That was a situation that just cried out for some kind of relief,'' said Nava, a former prosecutor, adding that six states already have similar buffer laws.
The number of injury accidents caused by bike-car collisions have generally declined since at least 1999, according to the California Highway Patrol. The most recent statistics, from January 2006 through September 2006, showed 7,759 injury collisions and 114 cyclist fatalities.
Santa Clara County during that same period logged 475 injury collisions and two cyclist deaths.
A Mercury News analysis in 2005 showed that in the previous five years, 25 cyclists had died in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties after colliding with vehicle drivers. And according to investigators, about half the riders failed to follow a basic rule of the road or lost control of their bikes.
It is not known how many collisions statewide result from motor vehicles passing bicycles.
Under existing law, a driver overtaking a bicycle in the same direction is required to pass to the left at a ``safe distance,'' or face fines of up to $250.
Under the proposed law, a driver passing a cyclist in the same direction must keep ``a minimum of three feet,'' without interfering with the safe operation of the bicycle. Violators would face a $250 ticket.
Crossing center line
The measure also allows a motorist to swerve away from the bike and cross the double yellow line into a center turn lane. Under existing law, that center lane can only be used to make left turns and, in some places, U-turns.
But driver safety groups worry that using the center lane for passing could lead to head-on collisions.
``You can conceivably get into a situation where you've got bicycle traffic on both sides of the roads, and you've got two drivers in the center lane,'' said Sean Comey, spokesman for AAA of Northern California. ``You can have two vehicles accelerating toward each other in the same lane, in the opposite direction.''
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