On 6/13/2019 6:21 PM, John B. wrote:
On Thu, 13 Jun 2019 16:59:03 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 6/13/2019 4:07 PM, Duane wrote:
Riding on the sidewalk is illegal here.

Weirdly enough, riding on the sidewalk used to be mandatory here! At
least in theory, that is.

Someone in the Ohio Bicycle Federation found out that many small Ohio
communities had very similar and _very_ crazy bicycle ordinances. As a
result, the OBF successfully lobbied the state for a law that said
municipalities could not pass bike traffic laws that were fundamentally
different than the state's.

So I dug into the local ordinances, and found to my amazement that
bicyclists were not allowed to ride on a street if a sidewalk was
present. Bicyclists had to stop and walk across all intersections with
"through streets," whatever that meant. (It was undefined.) One could
not leave a bike parked, even for a minute, without locking it. Children
under 10 could not ride on any street... and so on.

I typed up a document explaining the follies of each such measure, and
pointed out that the village was in violation of state law. The village
solicitor then urged village council to repeal all those ordinances as
an emergency measure, which they did.

I still don't know why dozens of little burgs had those identical laws.
Someone theorized that decades ago, some company found a way to sell
packages of laws to little towns. These crazy laws don't matter much
since they're never enforced, but they might have caused trouble if a
negligent motorist were to hit a bicyclist who was not on a sidewalk, etc.

Isn't "must ride on the sidewalk" akin to the concept of a segregated
bicycle lane?

Yes, I would say so. In both cases, the bicyclist will enter an
intersection from a location (and often, direction) that motorists are
not used to scanning.

This is surely part of the explanation for the "protected cycletrack"
installed in Columbus, Ohio generating a 700% increase in car-bike crashes.


--
- Frank Krygowski