It gets thousands of hits and a few new comments every month. I need to figure out why.

Also, you left the “i” out of the “cycling” in your “www.utilitycycling.org” link. Y’know, the Ol’ BluesCat NEVER makes mstakes wth leavng i’s out of hs weghty wrtngs!

When it is an isn’t safe to ride on the sidewalk is really a matter of judgement. There are times when it is absolutely the only sensible thing to do. EXTREMELY sensible!

I knew I was going catch hell from someone for my sidewalk stretch in the video. It was just a matter of waiting for that shoe to drop. However, my violation can’t be defended as being the safest thing for me to do. It was probably equally safe to the alternative, which would have been to cross the road, ride one block in the bike lane, and then cross back.

But when the concrete bike path ended, I had a green light. I looked ahead at the vacant sidewalk. I made the call in a split second, and kept rolling. A self-serving judgment call to be sure.

I sometimes wonder whether the traffic-law-compliance absolutists among us are just uncomfortable with allowing people to make these kind of judgment calls. Do they fear the slippery slope that ends up with total traffic chaos? That is a pretty scary scenario when you consider that the traffic landscape (to say nothing of the law) is, as BluesCat points out, designed to privilege a particular kind of user. And that user has the advantage of disproportionate size, weight, speed, and armor.

B: True, but sometimes it’s safer than the street.

C: Most places it’s legal to ride on the sidewalk. That’s where the drivers seem to think you belong anyway. So I’m not sure why it would upset them.

I’m not an advocate for sidewalk riding by any means. I prefer the street in 90% of any riding scenario. But until all roads are safe for bike travel, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. And if someone doesn’t feel comfortable riding on the roads, at least their riding a bike. We need more inclusion and less exclusion if we’re ever going to make some change.

But there are several roads in Phoenix where it is EXTREMEly DUMB to attempt to “take the lane” on a bicycle. And there isn’t an alternative route to a destination on some of these roads.

I spoke of one of them in a post on my blog entitled The Solidly Safer Sidewalk.

Almost ALL of the traffic laws in the U.S. have been created with motor vehicles in mind, which means sometimes it is EXTREMEly SILLY to apply them to bikes. It is EXTREMEly LAME to insist that I stop at a stop sign at 5:15 AM in the morning when there isn’t a car around for miles! I spoke of this in another blog post called Here Come Da Traffic Law Judge.