I’ll have to get a closer look next time:
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Posts Tagged ‘doored’
Is This a Rear-View Mirror for Taxi Passengers? Anyway, It Looks Like a Cyclist “Dooring” Prevention Device
Friday, January 11th, 2013Reverse Dooring Narrowly Averted on Busy Market Street – Drivers Need to Pull Over to Let Passengers Out
Friday, July 27th, 2012Generally speaking, people inside cars are held at fault when they open up doors without checking and harm results
The DMV calls this rule “Opening and Closing Doors”
“22517. No person shall open the door of a vehicle on the side available to moving traffic unless it is reasonably safe to do so and can be done without interfering with the movement of such traffic…”
Which is fine, but moving traffic can come by both sides of a parked car. See?
Another Market Street dooring narrowly averted – the cyclist in front almost collided with the right rear passenger door when it flew open expectantly:
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So I don’t know, I think I’d tell my passengers to look out before I dropped them off for them to drop their money at our shopping malls.
And I’d pull all the way over to minimize this concern in the first place.
Anyway, the next time this law gets rewritten, let’s write it more better…
The Reverse Dooring of Cyclists on Market Street – Here’s an Example
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011Here’s an example of what I was talking about in the comments section here:
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IMO, any cyclists who get into collisions on Market Street as seen above would be held not at fault, but the law’s a tiny bit ambiguous on this one.
This is not the typical dooring situation that was on the minds of the people who drafted CA’s dooring law back in the 1960′s, anyway.
Personally, I’d have the van’s right-side tires hugging the curb before I let anyone open the door on the right side, but maybe that’s just me.
Tool Time: Sanctimonious Cyclist Misinterprets the California Vehicle Code, as Many Have Before Him
Tuesday, March 8th, 2011This wasn’t a temporary thing or nothing, this is just the way this guy rolls – like right down the center of the lane, block after block.
A fairly wide lane, IMO. A lot wider than what they’re giving you these days on the new and so-called “improved”* DivCo (Divisidero Corridor, srsly) where cyclists “take the lane” whether they want to or not, whether they’re in the door-zone or not.
Oh well.
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*”Improved” in this case means widening the useless median and narrowing the slow lanes. Oh well.
Black Friday Forces San Francisco to Give Up on its “No Cars on Inbound Market” Experiment
Monday, November 30th, 2009Not officially or anything, but the DPT /SFMTA / SFPD folks who normally work on keeping inbound Market Street free of cars from Eighth Street to Fifth Street took a break last Friday (yes, Black Friday). So it was like totally wide open to traffic, temporarily anyway.
This was the result: a string of slow-moving vehicles for as far as you could see, all the way to the Ferry Building. Click to expand:
Note the new signs. The previous versions talked about how “private vehicles” were banned from continuing. The current versions allow ”buses, taxis, trucks, and bikes” on Market. So that makes things more clear for the tourists.
Speaking of whom, Our Visitors just ignore the signs. They understand that they need to keep out of the bus and taxi-only diamond lanes, but they don’t seem to get the idea that they’re not allowed to proceed on Market the way they used to. It seems they need a crew of MUNI Parking Control Officers to tell them what’s up.
Oh well.
(Myself, I got doored by one of these cars a couple minutes after I snapped this photo. I was on the slow lane of the beige portion of the street to the right of the vehicle when the passenger door opened - it was an against-the-rule dooring just like the Incident at the Juicy Couture.
Oh well.)
Bikes, Car Doors and California Law – An Incident at the Juicy Couture
Monday, August 24th, 2009I gotta tell you I don’t know a whit about the Yelp-rated Juicy Couture store at 865 Market Street. What I do know is that its manifest succulence makes it a magnet for tourists like these folks with the white Subaru wagon from the east bay. Since Juicy has an address on Market, drivers are apt to stop right out front to drop off passengers. But the problem with that is that it blocks half of the inbound lanes.
And sometimes you get “doorings,” detailed below.
After the creating the recent “Incident at Juicy Couture,” these east bay tourists moved along to a parking cutout in front of the the bebe reserved for commercial vehicles. That’s one way to do it:
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The thing is that these days, lots of people are riding bikes on Market Street. Back in the day, there used to be more bike messengers, but now it’s mostly people commuting to work in the Financh and the SoMA. So, when you open your car door you need to make sure that you’re not going to “door” a cyclist that’s zipping by your vehicle.
Does California have a special law covering this issue? Of course. The DMV calls it “Opening and Closing Doors”
“22517. No person shall open the door of a vehicle on the side available to moving traffic unless it is reasonably safe to do so and can be done without interfering with the movement of such traffic…”
What that means is that it’s almost impossible to door a cyclist without it being your fault. Typically, a dooring results from the driver trying to exit a parked vehicle. But the driver in the Subie above didn’t get out of the car. In this case the driver left some room, maybe two or three feet, between the right side of the wagon and the curb. That left enough space for a cyclist to come through and then get surprised when a passenger on the right side opened a door to exit.
The author of California Vehicle Code Section 22517 seems not to have anticipated the possibility of “moving traffic” flowing past both sides of a parked vehicle, but any injuries to the cyclist would almost certainly be the fault of the passenger or the driver (depending on the circumstances).
Now in other states, things might be different – O.K. fine. (Actually, in other states, they say things like, “My Door Almost Got ‘Biked.’”
But in California, you need to take extra care before opening your car door. Just saying.
