Given that the pass must be safe, you would think that it gets used a lot. Not so. We can’t get law enforcement to use it. There are some known problems with the enforcement of the law.

1. Officers that have used the statute have expressed frustration that the judges have dismissed the charges on a regular basis. There seems to be nothing the officer can say when the driver claims the rider swerve.

2. Officers are not using the “safe pass” portion of the statute. If they did, they might win the cases more often.

3. Officers claim they cannot judge what is 3 feet. The bicycle community has often said that we don’t care about when it is borderline, but when the rider flinches or is hit the driver slams on the brakes or swerves, or the roadway is clearly not wide enough, then that’s pretty good indication that the driver didn’t leave 3 feet.

4. Some officers believe that motorists are complying with the law because they tested it out. They put an officer on a bike and motorists passed safely. Duh! It says POLICE on the shirt. So then the offices tried something different. Put a plain clothes officer on a bike with a camera on the frame and another in front. Film it. Well, the cars that darned near clipped the camera bike were moving left by the time they got to the front rider and nobody seems to have violated the 3-foot distance. Ok, that failed too. But law enforcement seems to be pointing at that study as some sort of proof that drivers are in compliance with the law.

It is frustrating and there is absolutely no doubt that the 3-foot law is not being used in Arizona.

Funny, we had a driver rear end a well known rider some years ago and the police refused to issue a 3-foot saying that they absolutely could not invoke the statute because the driver didn’t “pass” the rider. So they used the failure to control speed statute which is common for rear end crashes. Shortly after that another rider was rear ended, only in a different jurisdiction and the officers did use the 3-foot statute, went to court on it, and won. Go figure. This tells me that our enforcement and judiciary don’t know how to handle these kinds of statutory citations and need training.

No. Such laws further discrimination against cyclists by treating cyclists different from other drivers, and establishing an absolute minimum that criminalizes motorist making safe passes at less than three feet in slow moving urban traffic. Worse still some states also apply these laws to cyclists, thus taking away their legal right to pass at closer distances in urban traffic. Mindless minimum laws work against cyclists’ driver rights.

The problem these misguided laws attempt to solve is police enforcement of existing passing laws, which already the passer not to interfere with the safe movement of the passee. The police usually do one of two things when a cyclist is hit by an overtaking motorist:
1) Cite the cyclist for violating the FTR law and no citation for the motorist
2) No citation for the motorist

In case 1), the cyclist is blamed for being in the roadway and loses any hope of recovering civil damages and the motorist is given a pass. In case 2) the motorist is given a pass and the cyclist will have a tough time recovering any civil damages, since no fault assignment was produced.

The correct solution is to do two things:
1) Repeal the FTR law, so the police don’t an easy tool to use to discriminate against cyclists who are injured by overtaking motorists
2) Educate police to recognize a cyclist’s right to use the roadway (which is easier to do if there is no law forcing cyclists to the edge) and that motorists have the same obligation to pass cyclists safely as they do for other motorists.

Adding a 3′ law to an existing FTR law pushes cyclists to the edge and then requires motorists “give them space”, even though pushing cyclists to the edge encourages too-close in-lane passing. This is schizophrenic, and is like placing a band-aid on a severed limb. It’s better to restore the limb to proper function (repeal the FTR law).

Steve, I only consider luck to be related to my location, not my operation. I do feel lucky to have taken the TS101 and LCI classes though.

Another part of my “luck” is that most of my travels are on four to ten lane roadways, with six lanes being the most common size.