Lane splitting

[eminva]

Look, a pony!

[jnva]

Thats good news!

[DismalScientist]

I’m reserving judgement. I worry about left hooks, particularly when there are parked cars as a buffer. It looks like it is one way eastbound. I hope that is true.

[ShawnoftheDread]

@eminva 30977 wrote:

Look, a pony!

“Because taxis and buses pick up and drop off passengers on the right hand side, placing a bike facility there can result in pedestrians and motor vehicles frequently cutting across a bike facility located there.”

Sounds like it’s designed by someone who’s never actually been on L Street, or anywhere in DC for that matter. Taxis don’t drop off and pick up on the left side of a one way street? Right.

[jnva]

Yeah, L street is a mess and I’m not so sure bike lanes will help unless all vehicles obey the rules. There are parking garages on both sides of the street too. I may end up splitting lanes and dodging traffic more often with the bike lanes in place.
It is one way eastbound.

[Brendan von Buckingham]

I’m an unapologetic lane splitter and filterer. Clarendon, Wilson, Key Bridge, M Street, Independence, L Street, wherever traffic is stop & go and I’m overtaking vehicles. The space between lanes is wider than the space between the car and the curb in the right most lane. I don’t have to worry about right hooks. In an emergency if my flanks are two cars there’s always a chance one of them could adjust their position (a curb just sits there like a giant endo lauch pad). No car doors when splitting. When traffic starts going faster than me I can take the center of either lane. Once traffic starts to outpace me, and lights get spaced farther apart, I stop splitting lanes and move right.

When I split lanes I’m like a twig on the stream.

I was pulled over and ticketed for splitting lanes going WB on Wilson between Clarendon and Virginia Square. The judge dismissed the ticket because I was overtaking vehicles in the right lane and avoiding poor road conditions in the curb lane.

[jnva]

Cool – I don’t feel so bad splitting lanes now. I definitely do feel safer going down the middle of L.

It shaves about 20 minutes off my commute compared to driving.

[dasgeh]

I’ve seen an argument for why filtering is a good idea, but can’t find it now. I think it’s similar to why it’s more efficient for everyone if people use every available inch of lanes that are ending and merge at the last possible moment. If you’re stuck in an non-moving, non-ending lane, it may seem like the people staying over in the ending lanes are jerks, but they are using the road most efficiently.

Interestingly, the Washington Post article about drivers and cyclists specifically called on cyclists not to filter, which I believe is the only legal behavior they discouraged. I was disappointed.

[Brendan von Buckingham]

My uncle is a highway engineer for Delaware. He’s highways, sign standards and intersection design. I’m like screw you old man. Wait, I’m an old man now too. Anyway.

He and the highway engineers HATE when a lane in a merge goes to waste because everyone merges early. That’s a huge amount of wasted space. Take the lane to the end, and if you’re not in the lane, leave space between cars so the merge is easy and dummies fighting over the 10 feet of space at their bumpers don’t grind it to a halt.

And that’s the key to eveything, including filtering. Space. Make space and use space, but never use all your space. If you do that the system is at its most efficient and will never stop. Traffic with space never stops. Time, speed, distance. You can’t stop time, you can’t (shouldn’t) break the speed limit, but you can always create space (distance).

[OneEighth]

Be like water.

[Tim Kelley]

@OneEighth 31189 wrote:

Be like water.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jO96bz_Fo

[jnva]

@Tim Kelley 31194 wrote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jO96bz_Fo

Bruce would approve.

[mstone]

Why is filtering a good idea? Because once you’re across the street, there’s much less chance someone will run over you while focused on making the light.

[Brendan von Buckingham]

I was thinking more like Mark Twain in “Life on the Mississippi.” Here, a young man who is trying to learn how to be a river boat pilot is in the company of veterans. He’s realizing he has to memorize every bend, sandbar and tree banch in the ever changing river. I feel the same way about the pavement, curbs and sightlines of my commute. The insider speak of the pilots sounds like a bunch of cyclist insider speak too.

We had a fine company of these river-inspectors along, this trip. There were eight or ten; and there was abundance of room for them in our great pilot-house. Two or three of them wore polished silk hats, elaborate shirt-fronts, diamond breast-pins, kid gloves, and patent-leather boots. They were choice in their English, and bore themselves with a dignity proper to men of solid means and prodigious reputation as pilots. The others were more or less loosely clad, and wore upon their heads tall felt cones that were suggestive of the days of the Commonwealth.

I was a cipher in this august company, and felt subdued, not to say torpid. I was not even of sufficient consequence to assist at the wheel when it was necessary to put the tiller hard down in a hurry; the guest that stood nearest did that when occasion required—and this was pretty much all the time, because of the crookedness of the channel and the scant water. I stood in a corner; and the talk I listened to took the hope all out of me. One visitor said to another—

‘Jim, how did you run Plum Point, coming up?’

‘It was in the night, there, and I ran it the way one of the boys on the “Diana” told me; started out about fifty yards above the wood pile on the false point, and held on the cabin under Plum Point till I raised the reef—quarter less twain—then straightened up for the middle bar till I got well abreast the old one-limbed cotton-wood in the bend, then got my stern on the cotton-wood and head on the low place above the point, and came through a-booming—nine and a half.’

‘Pretty square crossing, an’t it?’

‘Yes, but the upper bar ‘s working down fast.’

Another pilot spoke up and said—

‘I had better water than that, and ran it lower down; started out from the false point—mark twain—raised the second reef abreast the big snag in the bend, and had quarter less twain.’

One of the gorgeous ones remarked—

‘I don’t want to find fault with your leadsmen, but that’s a good deal of water for Plum Point, it seems to me.’

There was an approving nod all around as this quiet snub dropped on the boaster and ‘settled’ him. And so they went on talk-talk-talking. Meantime, the thing that was running in my mind was, ‘Now if my ears hear aright, I have not only to get the names of all the towns and islands and bends, and so on, by heart, but I must even get up a warm personal acquaintanceship with every old snag and one-limbed cotton-wood and obscure wood pile that ornaments the banks of this river for twelve hundred miles; and more than that, I must actually know where these things are in the dark, unless these guests are gifted with eyes that can pierce through two miles of solid blackness; I wish the piloting business was in Jericho and I had never thought of it.’

[Author]

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