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If I am to respect your one-metre distance, then will you please PLEASE respect mine? If there is a line at a light, WAIT. YOUR. TURN. IN. LINE. If you don’t have a full meter to pass on the right, please don’t try to squeeze by. A cyclist hit my side mirror this morning while doing just this. Rules of the road exist to keep ALL of us safe and secure, so stop fucking it up with stupid fucking behaviour PLEASE!!
—I Drive Too
This article appears in Sep 26 – Oct 2, 2019.
Here’s the skinny. The law is permissive regarding cyclists passing on the right with discretion, but it is illegal for a motorist to do so. The 1-metre rule applies exclusively to motorized vehicles passing on the left. As for facts on the ground, cars are 185 – 200 cm wide; bicycles with even a large rider will be no more than 60 cm shoulder to shoulder, and that would be no more than 30 cm on either side of their wheels. And that would be on the wide side for handlebar dimensions (road bike: typically 38 – 44 cm wide). A skilled cyclist can easily go nearer to the curb and make their effective width on the road, even narrower. I’ve been doing this for decades: if you can’t ride through a 60 cm gap, keep practicing. Curbside, that’s more like 40 cm. I don’t ding mirrors. That’s rude, sorry to hear you got clipped. OTOH a cyclist passing a line of idling cars is easing road congestion.