Florida House Bill 971 Signed Into Law, Endangers Bicyclists
The Florida Legislature and Governor Crist recently passed and signed, respectively, a new Florida law that mandates bicyclists to use designated bike lanes except for extremely specified exceptions. While it is usually advisable to use the bike lanes that are provided, there are many instances where the bike lanes become less safe than the travel lanes that cars use. The new Florida law imperils active cyclists and other bicycle commuters throughout our Tampa Bay area because they are misled into believing that the duty to bicyclists to stay in dedicated bike lanes relieves motorists of the duty to be aware of cyclists who do not use the bike lanes, even when conditions require bicyclists to travel out of their bike lanes.
Florida House Bill 971 does not make the roads safer for bicyclists. By mandating that bike riders must ride in available bike lanes, with very few and specific exceptions, it drastically limits the rights that cyclists have as legal vehicles on the road. Partially informed motorists may begin to think that this law strips bicyclists of all rights to the road, and it is feared that driver aggression towards bike riders who use the road could escalate. While the law provides that cyclists have the right to travel out of dedicated bike lanes where the surface conditions are unsafe, these “conditions” are rarely evident to motorists. As such, motorists will always presume that where there are dedicated bike lanes, that the surface conditions are safe and the bicyclists have no right to use the other portions of the roadways.
This law discourages many from making the transition from commuting by car to a healthier commute by bike. The fear of being accused of breaking the law when avoiding unsafe bike lanes may keep many would-be cyclists from mounting their bikes. There are many roads that have been converted to include bike lanes next to narrowed travel lanes. Before this law, a cyclist had the option of using the bike lane, or “commanding” (driving as a car would) a travel lane. Many cyclists felt such narrow lanes put them at risk, and now mandatory decrees that they must use the bike lane can either put them in harm’s way or discourage them from biking.
Some roads have striped spaces to the right of a travel lane that appear to be bike lanes, but the truth is that they are too narrow to carry the legal designation. These unmarked shoulders are by no measure safe to use as a bike lane, but motorists may harass cyclists who refuse to use the lane under the misguided notion that the shoulder constitutes as such a bike lane. It is claimed that the law actually champions bike riders’ rights by encouraging the proliferation of even more bike lanes, but in actuality it takes away the legal right to the road the cyclists have enjoyed and places countless lives at risk.
If you are a cyclist who has been hit by a negligent motorist, they may claim that you are ultimately responsible due to this new law. We strongly advise you to contact a bike accident lawyer to find out what your rights are. At Perenich The Law Firm, we fight for the right of cyclists under the banner of “Share the Road”, and we believe that this particular aspect of Florida HB 971 is misguided and life-threatening to the cyclist community. As your Tampa Bay bike accident attorneys, we represent you and your loved ones when others fail to respect the rightful place of bicyclists in our community.
Thank you for posting this message. This law is an outrage. A phrase that comes to mind for me is “we take real good care of our bikers down here.”
I am not totally opposed to bike lanes, but they are installed all too often as a marketing tool rather than on the basis of good engineering judgment.
A very nasty effect of this law is its skewing presumption of liability. The bicyclist is now more likely to be held liable for supposedly being in the wrong place, although riding according to the rules of the road. Particularly, a bicyclist who has retrograde amnesia or is killed can not present any defense along the lines of “I was merging out to pass a car that was turning right” or “I was preparing a left turn.”
In my practice as an expert consultant and expert witness in bicycle crashes, I have run into this issue, and in fact been on the side of a plaintiff who lost a case due to jury bias where this was a factor, rven though she was not in violation of the law and was in plain view of the motorist who sideswiped her. See http://bikexprt.com/witness/captions.htm#hayes .