Lane-splitting and the law
Yesterday Rocking Bikes had its day in court, fighting for the right of bikers to engage in risky lane-splitting behaviour. Well, sort of.
This is the back story: In the deep south of Cape Town, one of our own Seven Wonders is the roadworks in Kalk Bay. For about seven years now, one of the two roads out of the Southern Peninsula has been subject to heavy infrastructure work and so reduced to one lane of stop-go driving. It shows no sign of ending.
In September 2015, I was riding past a stationary line of cars waiting at the stop-go, on a section of roadway that is divided by a broken line. The road is broad — wide enough for three or four vehicles to drive abreast — and so lane-splitting is low risk in this section, even in the presence of oncoming traffic. Nevertheless, I was pulled over and fined. When I asked what I had done wrong, the officers in attendance informed me that the department had received complaints about taxis and motorcyclists jumping the queue, and they had been given orders to pull over any vehicles doing so. After waiting a long time for the officers to decide on a charge (‘overtaking into oncoming traffic’ was the first suggestion, but the minimum fine was R3,500, which they all found excessive), they eventually settled on ‘inconsiderate driving’ for R2,500.
Now, there are two things I must stress:
Firstly, lane-splitting in South Africa is entirely legal. Organisations such as Arrive Alive, ER24 and the AA all agree that lane splitting is legal under certain provisions (though they disapprove of it as being too dangerous). The Argus of February 2013 reported that transport and public works MEC Robin Carlisle had mooted the idea of a ban on lane-splitting, but at least this indicates that the practice is indeed legal.
The national road traffic regulations say the following (the first one I’ve slightly paraphrased):
- Reg 298.2 — overtaking — even in an otherwise hazardous place — is allowed as long as the driver can do so without encroaching on the right‑hand side of the roadway.
- Reg. 298.4 — When about to pass oncoming traffic, the driver of a vehicle on a public road shall ensure that the vehicle driven by him or her does not encroach on the roadway to his or her right in such manner as may obstruct or endanger such oncoming traffic.
In other words, car drivers may overtake bicycles, for example, if they can do so without hindering or endangering oncoming traffic, and bikers can overtake cars by the same principle. This is why the police were casting around for a charge — I wasn’t breaking an actual law.
(Incidentally, Reg. 298.3 tells the driver being overtaken to move as far to the left as possible to assist the one who is overtaking. This means that the guy in the bakkie who actively swerved at me while I was lane-splitting is the law-breaker. So love a biker and move aside. It’s the law.)
The second thing to stress is that the police were acting on department instruction to stop bikes. It was not for any specific act of recklessness that I was stopped, nor the bike behind me. It was for the fact of our (legal) lane-splitting.
Is lane-splitting inconsiderate?
So what about the charge that I was given? Is lane-splitting inconsiderate? Legally, I don’t see how law-makers could possibly have laws that permit lane-splitting while also having laws against inconsiderate driving that include lane-splitting. If lane-splitting is legal, it can’t be inconsiderate. If lane-splitting is inconsiderate, it can’t be legal.
But even from a purely pragmatic perspective — and very much unlike a taxi jumping the queue — safe lane-splitting is actually beneficial to everyone. We are not so much jumping queues and pushing in as staying out of queues altogether. I commute on a 125cc (and not a very good one), and I still am able to out-accelerate most cars from a standing start. So if I lane-split to the front of the queue, no car will catch me from then on. It is as if I were never in your queue. If I don’t make it to the front, I am still able to slip into the space in front of a slow vehicle — a space that would be there even if I wasn’t.
In short, there are very few occasions, dear car driver, on which I am taking your place in a queue. And if I do, there are even fewer occasions on which I will stay in your place for very long. You will soon have it back.
Conversely, if I don’t lane-split, I may be behind you today, but tomorrow I’ll be in front of you, making that queue a little bit longer. And every day, several other bikers will be in front of you. Frustrated. Pretending they are car-sized so that life is a little bit fairer. Making the queue longer.
Lane-splitting is a risk to the biker, and it almost never inconveniences the car-driver in the queue. We take the risk because we hate traffic enough to buy a bike and endanger ourselves avoiding it, and we do so for the mutual benefit of all traffic-haters. So either become a biker, or love a biker and speed us on our way.
Law & Order: Special Victim Unit
Back to the court case then. I refused to pay a fine issued for legal behaviour, and so I spent two mornings appealing to the prosecutor and a further two mornings in traffic court.
My day in court underway, I waited for my turn, reading and re-reading the ‘Quiet please’ sign written also in braille (but inexplicably laser printed and laminated shiny-smooth). I listened to the case of the snake-catcher caught speeding because he was on his way to remove a puff adder, but who had not seen it as important til then to mention that the snake in question was sharing a bed with a child.
Then it was my turn. I would point out to the court that lane-splitting needs to be more publicly acknowledged as both legal and beneficial.
I would point out that for the traffic department to fine road-users in spite of the law, not in line with it, means that what the law says is no longer practically relevant. I wasn’t breaking the law, but the traffic department was breaking the entire legal system.
I would ask that all motorcyclists wrongly fined under this instruction should be refunded their fines.
I was going to do all of this, but someone forgot to subpoena the traffic officer.
“Do you have any objection to a postponement, Mr Rocking Bikes?” said the judge.
“Well actually, Your Worship, this has taken a huge amount of my time and I have an awful lot to do. Can we not just settle this today? I am sure that if the court merely allows me to give an account, it will all be clear.” I said.
Long pause, much scribbling.
“I can see no reason for the failure to subpoena the officer involved, and so this case is struck from the roll. You may go, Mr Rocking Bikes.”
And that was that.
