Beginning next month, California law will require that cars stay at least three feet away from cyclists when passing on the roads. I attached this driveway reflector to the basket of my bike with some zip ties. I chose this flexible plastic stick with reflector because it was 3 feet long and it should be visible, but it should also not kill me if a car decides to drive right through it. [...]
I felt safer because of this extra 3-foot forced space. I was tucked right up against the line of parked cars.
So he's saying "I felt safer" but he's also saying "I was in the door zone the whole time".
Most traffic lanes are about 10-feet wide. If you have 3 feet of space on your left, and, ideally, at least 3 feet of space on your right in order to avoid getting doored, plus probably at least around 18 inches for you and your bike to exist, you end up with at 7.5 feet. Let's call it 8 feet. That's about how wide the lanes are in San Francisco.
If people are actually going to respect and enforce this law it'll change the way we get around in dense urban areas. Either bikes will have to act like cars, or we'll have to get full bike lanes everywhere.
The only way to have 3' on the left and no door-zone on the right is to take the entire lane all the time.
The embarrassment I felt while cruising around the city with a stick attached to my my front basket was worth it: I didn't get clipped by a car once. Let's just hope it won't come down to cyclists having to ride around with 3-foot sticks on their bikes.
The same effect could probably be observed by biking while wearing a clown suit.
In other news, water remains wet:
