Driving in Davis, Where the Bikes Outnumber You

Davis is not a town with bike lanes. It is a town organized around bicycles that has also made room for cars, and the difference shows up in the first five minutes of driving there. Bike lanes on nearly every arterial, bicycle roundabouts, a university core where cars mostly do not go, and at class-change time a volume of two-wheeled traffic with no real parallel anywhere else in California.

Drive it like a Sacramento arterial and you will frighten yourself. Or somebody else.

The right hook is the collision

If you take one thing from this page, take this. The most common serious conflict between a driver and a cyclist is the right hook: you pass a bike, then turn right across the lane you just passed it in. From inside the car it feels like the bike appeared out of nowhere. From the saddle, a car overtook and then cut across the front wheel.

The fix is a habit rather than a skill. Before any right turn in Davis, check the bike lane over your right shoulder, not in the mirror, because the mirror has a blind spot almost exactly the width of a bicycle. If a rider is close, wait. You are giving up four seconds.

Three feet, by law

Vehicle Code section 21760, the Three Feet for Safety Act, provides that a driver shall not overtake or pass a bicycle at a distance of less than three feet between any part of the motor vehicle and any part of the bicycle or its operator. Three feet is more than it sounds like from the driver's seat and considerably less than it feels like from the bike. On the narrower residential streets in Davis, giving three feet often means you cannot pass at all until there is a gap. That is the correct outcome, not an inconvenience.

Dooring, and the passenger nobody warned

Opening a door into a bike lane injures the rider and wrecks your door, and it lands on the person who opened the door rather than on the cyclist. The habit worth teaching everyone who rides in your car, teenagers especially, is to reach across with the far hand. That turns your body toward the mirror and the lane behind you automatically. It takes about a week to become permanent.

What a bike-versus-car claim actually costs

Here is what makes this an insurance page rather than a safety pamphlet. California's minimum liability limits, set by Vehicle Code section 16056(a) and referenced by Insurance Code section 11580.1(b), are $30,000 for injury or death of one person, $60,000 where more than one person is injured, and $15,000 for property damage.

Now consider what happens to an unprotected human body struck by a car. An ambulance ride, an emergency department, imaging, an orthopedic surgery and a night in the hospital can pass $30,000 without anything unusual happening at all. Above your limit, the difference is not covered by your policy. It is yours, pursued against you personally, in a university town full of people with long careers ahead of them.

Minimum limits satisfy the law. Whether they protect you is a completely different question, and in Davis it is a live one. Higher limits are one of the few things in insurance where moving up a tier tends to cost modestly relative to the exposure it removes. Ask for it priced rather than assuming.

If you are the one on the bike

A cyclist struck by an uninsured driver can often turn to the uninsured motorist coverage on their own auto policy, even though no car of theirs was involved. That surprises people every time. Uninsured motorist coverage must be offered with a liability policy under Insurance Code section 11580.2, and it may be rejected in writing, which means some people have signed it away without registering that they did. Check your declarations page.

Want limits and uninsured motorist priced properly? Two minutes to start.