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Run (drive?) for your lives! It's the Two-Wheeled Terror! (thelemmy.club)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/fuckcars@lemmy.world
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[–] 8 points 3 days ago (7 children)

In Spain drivers are required to leave 1.5m gap when overtaking a cyclist. In my experience 99% of them respect that. It's way more common for them to leave a gap and force the driver going in the other direction to slow down than to pass to close to me. Overall drivers suck here (worst in Spain) but this one rule they do obey.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 days ago (2 children)

    Same rulein France. 1.5m on rural roads, 1m in town. However, in my experience, about half of drivers overtake with less than a 50cm gap.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 child)

    It's good they're respecting that. We have a similar law in Québec that requires drivers to leave 1,5m when overtaking on a fast road, and 1m in towns and urban environments. It's unfortunately not very respected.

    I can't find the article back but some police forces bought tools to measure that, but they thought it was too dangerous to send police officers on bikes to use that tool and fine the drivers not respecting the law. They just gave up.

    EDIT: Is the police enforcing this in Spain? I'm guessing there are fines?

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  • [–] 2 points 2 days ago

    EDIT: Is the police enforcing this in Spain? I’m guessing there are fines?

    I ride mostly on secondary roads where you almost never see police so it's pretty much impossible for them to actually see someone breaking this law. No idea if they would stop someone passing dangerously close to a cyclist if they saw it. Honestly, I don't know why most drivers respect this rule. They don't care that much about other rules.

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  • [–] 2 points 3 days ago (1 child)

    In America, I think drivers don't know how to drive around cyclists, so quite a few will drive frighteningly close. I wouldn't care to guess about the percentage.

    But even 1% is a lot of people. A bicycle even on a short trip will be passed by 10s of cars. So, if you bike everywhere, that might be 1 close call a day. So, I'm guessing that Spain is not actually as dangerous as 1% and you were just picking a large number.

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  • [–] 3 points 3 days ago

    I don't think about each time a driver passes me a closer than 1.5m as a "close call". Once I went off the road and fell right into 1.5m deep ditch. Now that was a close call... I still don't know how I didn't hurt myself. I did get fired next day but it was unrelated.

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