There’s a big square – about the size of a pickup truck hood – on the pavement where you wait for the traffic light to change. Two lanes, square is in left lane, left lane is for going straight or turning left. Right lane is only for turning right. Square is not painted, it’s where they put the wire-loop for the traffic sensor. There’s an icon of a bicycle painted right in the center of the square, suggesting that’s the place for a bike rider to stop to trip the sensor.
The problem is, the sensor won’t trip if I stop my bicycle on the icon in the middle. I have to stop on either the right or left edge of the square. If I stop on the right edge, I block folks from turning right. If I stop on the left, then when the light turns and I’m going straight, I have to move from the left to the right which confuses the cars behind me.
Just curious for some ideas for the safest way for me to handle this situation?
Just a thought…
how about mounting something like these foldable side markers. maybe the sensor will pick them up. fold them back up after you pass the intersection.
Normally in this situation I’d do as suggested above, move to the right hand sidewalk & push the bike across in the pedestrian crossing. In this particular case there’s no pedestrian crossing on the right side of the intersection. To do that, which I’ve done before , I have to move to the left hand sidewalk, which poses its own safety problems. But that still may be the safest method.
Do you have to wait on top of the working spots until the light changes? What if you stopped on the right edge for a few seconds and then moved a little left so you are where you really want to be?
Also, is this a street that has hardly any vehicles going straight through? Why not pull far enough forward so that the typical car traffic can land on top of it?
+1
Those in-road sensors are a thing of the past in my area. They didn’t work well during winter road conditions, and the need for road repairs frequently caused the wires to be severed.
Good ideas. I’ve never tried tripping the sensor first, then moving from the optimum sensor position to elsewhere, might work. Sort of awkward maneuver, and anything awkward confuses other drivers, is often unsafe. I do stop as far forward as possible, hoping a car will from behind to trip the sensor. Sometimes no car appears, or a car appears but they don’t pull close enough to me to trip the sensor. It’s sort of a comedy of errors trying to inform them to move forward, only using hand signals.
I tried a new strategy that seemed to work a little better, seems fairly safe. I stopped over the right side of the square to trip the sensor, but leaned the bicycle to the left to make more room for cars making a right hand turn to pass me on the right.
You folks above are absolutely correct that the best solution would be sensors that don’t require the bicycle to be in an unsafe position to trip the sensor.
It is sort of odd that San Jose, being the high tech capital of the world, doesn’t use the latest traffic sensor technology. IIRC one of Bill Gates/Microsoft’s very first products had to do with traffic-light control.
Progress Report: I have done some experiments. If I stop right the bicycle right at the edge of the square (defined by the road sensor wires), either right or left edge, seems to trip the traffic light pretty reliably. Stopping bicycle in the middle of the square (where the bicycle symbol says to stop) , not reliable.
