This year, Bike Maryland did heroic work to increase bikeways funding. At current levels, it will take 369 years to build all the bikeways in the plan, but Bike Maryland convinced legislators to pass a bill to increase that from ~$2 million to $3.8 million a year (which still means hundreds of years). Then Governor Hogan vetoed it on May 24th.
In addition to the Bikeways funding, the bill the Governor vetoed helped to ensure that the creation of a much-needed transit plan for Central Maryland was informed by residents and leaders in the region.
Since the cancellation of the Red Line in 2015, Central Maryland has been without a transit plan to help guide transit investment and projects. HB 1281 would have clarified and strengthened elements of the 2018 law that mandated the Regional Transit Plan. Governor Hogan’s veto indicates that he is not seriously interested in creating a robust transit plan that would allow for an expansion of the light rail, MARC, and bus service that is needed throughout Central Maryland.
The veto can be overridden next year.
Please click on this link and email your representatives in Annapolis and tell them to override the veto when they go into session in 2020.
Despite the veto, this is a success as it gets them two votes away from victory.
In addition, the Maryland Legislature passed a Vision Zero bill that the Governor did sign.
specifying the purpose and goal of Vision Zero; requiring the Department of Transportation to designate a coordinator to oversee the implementation of Vision Zero; requiring the coordinator, in implementing Vision Zero, to collaborate with certain entities; requiring that the implementation of Vision Zero include certain strategies; requiring that the funding for Vision Zero be as provided by the Governor in the State budget; requiring the Department to submit a certain report to the Governor and the General Assembly on or before a certain date each year; requiring the Department to make a certain report available on its website; defining certain terms; and generally relating to the establishment of Vision Zero.
They also expanded the Complete Streets policy to include access to healthy foods; worked with the Sierra Club to pass a Transportation and Climate Initiative bill that authorizes the Governor to include Maryland in any regional governmental initiative, agreement, or compact that limits or reduces greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.
Other bills did not fare as well. A Vulnerable User bill passed the house, but not the Senate as did a bill removing the "narrow road exception" to the 3 foot passing law.
All in all, there's a lot to build on there, but still more work to do.
Yesterday, Delaware became the 2nd state to put in place an Idaho Stop law, though it's not as expansive as the Idaho version. Governor John Carney signed the "Bicycle Friendly Delaware Act" that, among other things, allows cyclists to treat stop signs as yield signs (the stop-as-yield half of the Idaho law) but only on two lane roads. The law also
prohibits drivers from honking their horns at cyclists, unless a collision is imminent, requires drivers to change lanes when passing cyclists and calls for the installation of bicycle-specific traffic lights.
It also removes the "ride right" requirement. Gov. Carney also signed a separate law that
enhances the penalties for drivers who cause serious physical injury to a cyclist and gives jurisdiction over these violations to Delaware Superior Court, which handles the more serious criminal cases in the state.
Both laws take effect immediately.
So Delaware joins Idaho and parts of Colorado in allowing stop-as-yield (albeit limited to most roads), and it happened because they got buy in from the Delaware State Police (I'm pretty sure that the opposition of MPD is what killed the Idaho Stop law in DC).
To get the State Police buy-in, the Delaware Yield does not include traffic signals (red lights) and only applies on roads with two travel lanes. But that includes most city streets and most suburban/rural roads where yielding makes sense versus a complete stop with no exceptions.
Jeffrey Whitmarsh, a lieutenant in the Delaware State Police and a cyclist himself, said it’s best when traffic laws reflect how people actually behave on the road. That way, everybody knows where they stand.
“[The new law] adds safety for cyclists, and it adds realistic expectations for drivers,” he said.
“If you’re trying to move a safety bill forward and the police hate your bill, you might as well go home,” said James Wilson, executive director of Bike Delaware. “They don’t have to love it. They don’t have to work on its behalf, as long as they're not speaking out against it to their legislative friends.”
Interestingly, the push for the "change lanes to pass" portion came from the police. They found the 3 foot law to be too hard to enforce, which it probably is.
Police officials also suggested the requirement that drivers change lanes while passing cyclists even when there is a double yellow line, on roads too narrow to share side by side. That rule arose from the fact that police often struggle to enforce the state’s existing passing law, which requires drivers to provide a three-foot buffer when maneuvering around cyclists.
“There are certain laws that are best left at the conceptual level, because they are exceptionally hard to enforce,” Whitmarsh said. “So it’s important to include law enforcement in those initial conversations. We have insight on what it’s like to actually enforce these laws.”
The law will create a new license plate "with a bicycle awareness design that includes an image and wording to educate motorists on the 3 foot passing rule." Drivers who choose this plate will pay $45 in fees, and those fees will go to the Vision Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Fund (the old "Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Fund").
The bill still needs to go to the Mayor, but she has already expressed support through Lucinda Barbers, the Director of the Department of Motor Vehicles, who testified in support of the bill back in September. So it looks like this will become law. This, plus the safety law and the Contributory negligence law, makes for a pretty big year, legislatively speaking.
The passing distance awareness plate seems to be a bit rare, with most states going for "Share the Road" or Missouri's "Same Road. Same Rights." Here are some examples of passing distance plates from other states.
This bill will increase safety for bicyclists on the road by allowing motorists to buy specialty automobile license plates that emphasize the 3-foot minimum passing law and by assigning the $25 application fee and annual $20 display fee for these specialty plates to the Vision Zero Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Fund.
The Committee invites the public to testify or to submit written testimony, which will be made a part of the official record. Anyone wishing to testify should contact Ms. Aukima Benjamin, staff assistant to the Committee on Transportation and the Environment, at (202) 724-8062 or via e-mail at [email protected]. Persons representing organizations will have five minutes to present their testimony. Individuals will have three minutes to present their testimony. Witnesses should bring 5 copies of their written testimony and should submit a copy of their testimony electronically to [email protected].
I suspect the plate will be similar to this one, but for DC, but the design will come after the bill.
In Maryland's General Assembly, an amended House Bill 214 passed the House 113-24 and now moves on to the Senate. The first Senate hearing on the bill was last Thursday. On the Senate side, SB 1123 is sponsored by Senators Klausmeier, Raskin, and Lee. A huge thanks to everyone who called or emailed their delegates. Learn more about the amendments here. In summary, if drivers cannot give three feet they will have to slow down, similar to California's three foot law and our "Move Over; slow down" law for passing emergency vehicles on the side of the road.
It's unclear what bike-specific legislation is this year, but if you want to lobby for better bike laws (or more funding) in Maryland, this is a great opportunity to do so. One issue highlighted is fixing the three-foot passing law.
We worked with Senator Kathy Klausmeier (District 8) and Delegate Stephen Lafferty (District 42A) to enter SB 547 and HB 588, which closes the "insufficient roadway" loophole in the current three-foot law. We feel that this loophole prioritizes driver convenience over bicyclist safety, and we want the law to mandate that if there is not sufficient roadway width, then drivers need to wait until it is safe to pass. The next hearing is Thursday, March 5th.[WC: Whoops]
There's been talk in the past of doing this in DC, but the council is so much smaller - and everyone already lives in biking distance - so it may not be necessary.
A paper a couple of year's ago studied the 3 foot passing law in Maryland (the law that requires drivers to pass cyclists with at least 3 feet). It asks the question " Is the three-foot bicycle passing law working in Baltimore, Maryland?" I would not be surprised if the answer to that question is no, but this study doesn't make that case, even though it implies that it does.
For the study, five cyclists rode around Baltimore in 2011, logging over 10 hours of video recordings which were then analyzed to see how many time cyclists were passed in violation of the law. Surprise - drivers were breaking the law 17% of the time. This says that the law is not causing compliance to go to 100%, which is a pretty high standard. But without knowing the rate of close passing before the law went into effect, it can't tell us if the law worked or not. If 80% of passes were less than 3 feet beforehand, that would make the law pretty effective.
I don't think that's the case and I'd be surprised if the law changed much in that respect. Most drivers probably don't know the law and at the time of the study it had only been enforced twice - both times after a crash; but even after a crash the law has value - if it helps a cyclist to win a court case for example.
Here's another criticism of the study which is mostly concerned with its conclusion that driver compliance was 100% if there was a bike lane present.
Two years ago Maryland created a new crime of vehicular negligent homicide in Maryland, which allows prosecutors to seek criminal penalties when a sober-but-aggressive driver causes an accident that kills someone. As far as I know, no one has been prosecuted under this statute for killing a cyclist. But Anne Arundel County prosecutors should be seriously thinking about doing so in the case of Patricia Cunningham, an Annapolis high school coach who was killed August 21 on Riva Road.
Today a young female cyclist was killed on Riva Road...
Right at Indian Point Ct is a quick rise in the road. At its highest point you can't see traffic coming from the other way. A van traveling possibly 40 or so mph saw the female cyclist and decided to pass her as she was going over the hill. As the van went to pass on the other side of the road a vehicle coming the other way appeared. The van immediately swerved right RIDING OVER the cyclist. I won't go into details of her injuries. Let’s just say her shoes were knocked off her body. She died at the scene. A little patience by the driver of the van and 2 peoples lives would not be forever changed.
Aggressive drivers who kill are rarely prosecuted unless they are drunk or leave the scene of the accident. Perhaps because many “respectable people” drive aggressively, it is hard to feel comfortable sending people off to jail when they accidentally kill someone while driving in a way that most people drive. But it is also hard to feel good about the idea that killing someone has no legal consequence. Courts and the Maryland legislature have wrestled with this paradox for decades.
Let’s take a look at felonies that might be committed by a driver who kills another person. We can rule out murder in this case, because that requires intentionally killing someone, or at least total indifference, such as when someone deliberately drives into a crowd of people, not caring whether they live or die.
The next most serious form of homicide is manslaughter, which has a maximum sentence of 10 years. Manslaughter means killing someone through reckless conduct. To be reckless, someone must (1) be driving in a way that has a high chance of killing someone, and (2) realize that she might kill someone. Many drivers have been convicted of vehicular manslaughter, but had their conviction reversed by an appeals court even though the drivers clearly did something absolutely terrible, because there was no proof that the drivers realized that they might kill someone. For example, a driver in Takoma Park swerved to the right and struck some children walking home from school. The jury convicted the driver of manslaughter, but the appeals court reversed the conviction, because the jury was never told why the driver swerved off the road. (There were no passengers in the car and the driver chose not to testify.)
Convictions of vehicular manslaughter do occur when the driver is either drunk or drag racing, even without witnesses who can testify what the driver was thinking. Courts in Maryland are willing to assume that, in this day and age, everybody who drives drunk or drag races on a highway realizes that they might kill someone. But otherwise, the difficulty of proving what the driver knew makes a manslaughter conviction almost impossible to obtain. So usually, prosecutors do not even try.
In October 2009, Curtis Leymeister was killed one morning in St. Mary’s County while riding his bicycle on the right side of the main travel lane, by a driver who simply did not see him. Kathy Lee May had cleared the frost off a small area on the driver side of her windshield, but she chose to wait for the defroster to clear the right half of the windshield. She hit Mr. Leymeister before the windshield cleared. While it should be obvious that you might kill someone when your windshield is covered with frost, there was no proof that Ms. May realized that she might kill someone. She was charged with negligent driving and had to pay a fine of $287.50.
Two years ago, the Maryland General Assembly created a new criminal offense for criminally negligent vehicular homicide with a maximum sentence of three years. To be guilty of negligent homicide, one’s conduct must be a “substantial deviation” from the duty of care, and the driver should know that there is a substantial risk of killing someone. The prosecution need not prove that the driver knew she might kill someone, but only that she should have known that she might kill someone.
The General Assembly did not go as far as the District of Columbia, where even ordinary negligence may be sufficient to convict a driver of negligent homicide. As the Washington Post reported, the Senate Judicial Proceedings committee only wanted aggressive drivers to be prosecuted:
[The chairman felt] that new standard [should not] be applied to the mother who fatally hits a bicyclist when she takes a glance at a crying child in the back seat of her minivan.
“When moments of inattention can kill somebody, that’s a terrible thing...You can lose your house, your job, you can lose everything you own in a civil suit, but do we want to send that mother to jail?"
Advocates of the bill persuaded the committee that the new law was reasonable. On behalf of the Washington Area Bicyclists Association, I provided the committee with a review of a few hundred cases from eight of the states that had adopted a similar negligent homicide law.
Assuming that the account by the unnamed police officer is correct, this looks like a case of negligent homicide that would not be reversed on appeal. The driver’s actions were a very substantial deviation from the duty of care: The Maryland Transportation code requires that before passing, a driver must ensure that the “roadway is clearly visible and is free of approaching traffic”, §21-305(a). Passing is also illegal when “approaching the crest of a grade or on a curve in the highway where the driver's view is obstructed,” §21-305(b)(2)(i). Passing is also illegal if there is a double yellow line, §21-307. And once a driver decides to pass, the driver must not return to the right lane until she is safely clear of the vehicle that she just passed, §21-303. These provisions apply even if you are passing a truck. The law also imposes a duty to avoid colliding with a bicycle, §21-1209(a)(1); and drivers must leave a clearance of at least three feet when overtaking a bicycle §21-1209(a)(2). If the driver really violated all of those requirements, this was a very substantial deviation from the duty of care, and thus it was criminal negligence.
Will Anne Arundel prosecutors move forward with a homicide investigation? The probable guilt of the driver is hopefully a key consideration, but it is not their only consideration. The Anne Arundel County State’s Attorney’s office has used the new vehicular negligent homicide statute once, when prosecuting the driver who killed legendary bassist Joe Byrd, bother of Charlie Byrd. But that was not a case of aggressive driving; the driver was distracted. So the prosecutors were (at best) testing the limits of a staute that the legislature never intended to apply to cases of distracted driving. And as one would expect, the driver was acquited.
Unfortunately, prosecutors may have learned the the wrong lesson. Instead of focussing on aggressive driving, prosecutors from the State's Attorney's office have lobbied the General Assembly to repeal the new negligent homicide statute. In a Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee hearing (March 13, 2012) a top Anne Arundel prosecutor said that he does not know how to prosecute a case under the new statute. The mother of a cyclist killed in Baltimore, and Delegate Luiz Simmons (D-Rockville) responded by offering to help train the Anne Arundel prosecutors.
With a possible crime and a reluctant prosecutor, the tie breaker for prosecutorial discretion may be public comment. What bothers Anne Arundel citizens more: The possibility that routine aggressive driving might land you in jail? Or that drivers who kill can keep on driving? Your preferences only matter if you speak up. To send a message to the State's Attorney's office, please click this link.
As we have discussed on this blog many times, prosecuting the driver for negligent vehicular homicide would probably not result in a long prison sentence. The point of prosecuting a driver is not to ruin her life, but to protect society: provide the strongest possible deterrent to such dangerous behavior, prevent the driver from doing this again, and rehabilitate her into becoming a model driver. Perhaps society's interests would be better advanced by taking away her driver's license and requiring her to take a course in safe cycling.
That would be up to the judge to decide. But it's up to the prosecutor to put the matter before the court. And it's up to all of us to tell the prosecutor to do so.
(Jim Titus is on the Board of Directors of the Washington Area Bicyclist Association. An earlier version of this post was in the Edgewater Patch )
The Environmental Matters Committee gave an unfavorable report yesterday to House Bill 445, which would have removed the "narrow highway" exception to Maryland's three-foot safe passing statute. The Committee also rejected HB 160, which would have legalized riding bikes on sidewalks in localities with no local laws on the subject (Baltimore, Montgomery, Prince Georges, and Howard have local laws.)
As we've discussed before on the Washcycle, Maryland's three-foot law has four confusing exceptions. One of those exceptions allows drivers to pass with less than three feet of clearance if the highway is too narrow for a driver to pass with three feet of clearance. No one knows precisely what that exception means: Bike Maryland thinks that this exception refers to virtually every two-lane road with a double yellow line, while I think that, regardless of what was in the mind of Delegate Malone when he inserted the provision, the rules of statutory construction mean that the exception only applies to narrow highways (e.g. country roads or one-lane bridges). But if the cycling advocates can't agree on what it means, clearly the statute needs clarification. The best way to clarify the statute would have been to eliminate this exception, which this bill would have done.
Why did the bill fail? We don't know yet, though some of the contributing factors are obvious. Cycling advocates have focused more on HB 339, the mandatory helmet bill. Two weeks ago, ten advocates showed up to a hearing at the Environmental Matters Committee, and passionately offered a wide array of arguments against the helmet bill. About 20 minutes later, Delegate Cardin presented the safe-passing bill to the same commitee, and only three of those advocates testified, along with Bike Maryland (which has taken no position on the helmet bill). None of the advocates were as passionate about the three-foot bill as they were in opposing the helmet bill.
The truck drivers opposed the safe-passing bill, and interpret the existing law the same way Bike Maryland construes it. They want to be able to pass cyclists more closely than three feet if the alternatives are to cross the double yellow line or wait. Trucks are wider than cars: It will often be possible for a car and a bike to share a lane with a three-foot clearance (if the cyclist hugs the edge). But a 9-foot truck can only pass with 1-foot of clearance, and the truckers want to be able to continue doing so. One representative added that they can't really tell whether they are passing with 3' feet or 2'6" anyway. None of the cycling advocates made a strong case for why a safety buffer is more important than giving truckers what they want.
Another contributing factor was that Delegate Cardin also seemed to be preoccupied with other matters. His presentation starts at 1:25:00 in the video of the hearing. There was a subsequent colloquy with Delegate Vitale in which it became clear that the committee and Delegate Cardin had different versions of the bill (1:35:00). A few minutes later, (1:38:00) Delegate Cardin closed that colloquy by providing an explanation that seemed to more closely resemble last year's bill than this year's bill.
If these are the reasons the bill failed this year, I hope that Delegate Cardin and Bike Maryland will stick with this version of the bill and try again next year. It was a step in the right direction, and the fact that we did not convince the Committee this year had more to do with the fact that our minds were elsewhere than the merits of the bill.
With a little more preparation, we can make the case for removing the narrow-highway exception. The idea that trucks should be able to pass bikes with less clearance than cars, simply because trucks are wider, is absurd.
(Jim Titus is a cycling advocate from Prince George's County. The opinions expressed here do not represent the views of any organization with which he is affiliated.)
The brown mailing envelopes in which Maryland drivers receive their registration or drivers license renewal forms this month include the message "Give bikes THREE FEET when passing, IT'S THE LAW" along with the standard sketch showing a cyclist to the right of a compact car. The message runs about 30% of the length of the envelope, right above the address window, so alot of people will probably notice it. Running along the bottom of the envelope the entire length of the address window is the message "Share the road, You could save a life."
The Motor Vehicle Administration has also created a public service message in which MVA director John Kuo explains that cyclists may use the full lane before he introduces himself. That explanation is provided over about 18 seconds of video shot from a bicycle while cars pass safely. Mr. Kuo goes on to explain the importance of leaving three feet while passing a bike, with more footage of cars passing bikes, including a bike in the middle of a door-zone bike lane.
Although some advoates have argued that the presence of a double yellow line allows drivers to ignore the three-foot rule, that is clearly not the view of the Maryland Department of Transportation: several of the shots show drivers crossing the double yellow line to leave a safe passing distance.
Barry Childress deserves credit for regularly speaking with Mr. Kuo during 2010-2011 to get MVA to promote bike safety. Then last year, the highway safety office was moved to MVA, which put Mr. Kuo in a position to do more.
(Jim Titus is on WABA's Board of Directors and represents Prince George's County on the Maryland Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee. The views expressed here do not represent the official position of either WABA or MBPAC)
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