windschatten wrote:
Never pass a car sitting in the traffic lane on the right unless you are sure they can't turn into you, the road ahead is clear and/or they see you.
Part of survival 101 for cyclists in urban traffic.
Yes, I hate to be preachy and that I am the slowest of my group to get out of town.
Yup, slow or stopped traffic in the lane adjacent to you, regardless of vehicle type, means you need to be slowing down or stopping too. Otherwise you hit people in crosswalks, or you get left-turning collisions. However -- do you think you could adequately judge when someone's going to open a gap in congested traffic, and hit the brakes in time? You probably have to be tooling along at 12mph to not get nailed.
Someone else in the thread called this specific situation the wave of death. The small size of on-street door-zone bike lanes and the relative lack of traffic in them drive most people to make terrible decisions in deciding when to cross them -- the person who hit Tim likely didn't even think about the bike lane. They essentially turn into death funnels. I would suggest this is an argument for better bike infrastructure, but cyclists training on the road usually favor roads in less-dense areas that wouldn't build separate bike infrastructure in the first place. In fact, the presence of a bike lane probably means you should slow down -- driver and cyclist alike.