Letter: Actually, motorists must yield to bicyclists in crosswalks

Posted 3/28/18

To the editor:

In response to the letter to the editor, “Note to people using bike path, you’re supposed to stop before crossing,” the writer has a valid point for bicyclists who …

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Letter: Actually, motorists must yield to bicyclists in crosswalks

Posted

To the editor:

In response to the letter to the editor, “Note to people using bike path, you’re supposed to stop before crossing,” the writer has a valid point for bicyclists who refuse to stop at all at bike path crossings like Bay Spring Avenue.

However, I bicycle across Bay Spring Avenue on the bike path hundreds of times each year, and there is a crosswalk there. 

Our state law saws that a bicyclist traveling “along a crosswalk, shall be granted all the rights and shall be subject to all the duties applicable to a pedestrian under the same circumstances.” R.I. Gen. Laws § 31-19-12.  In turn, state law says that, for an intersection like Bay Spring Avenue, a motorist “shall yield the right of way… to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within a crosswalk when the pedestrian is upon the half of the roadway upon which the vehicle is traveling, or when the pedestrian is approaching so closely from the opposite half of the roadway as to be in danger, but no pedestrian shall suddenly leave a curb or other place of safety and walk or run into the path of a vehicle which is so close that it is impossible for the driver to yield.” R.I. Gen. Laws. § 31-18-3.  

Since state law gives pedestrians the right of way, and bicyclists have the same “right and duties” as pedestrians, once a bicyclist stops and then enters the crosswalk, motorists must yield to the bicyclist in the Bay Spring Avenue crosswalk. 

Like the previous letter to the editor, I invite our police chief to visit Bay Spring Avenue. If he does, I suspect he will issue many more tickets to the legions of motorists who travel in vast excess of the speed limit, and who don’t yield to pedestrians and bicyclists in the crosswalk, than he will ticket the few idiot cyclists who fail to stop at a blind intersection and risk their lives.

Tim Baldwin

Barrington

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