<p>Engineer4life correctly notes that cars turn right from the rightmost travel lane. Just a reminder to drivers: that’s the rightmost travel lane. if you are driving on a road with a bike lane, you are not in the rightmost travel lane. **You must merge into the bike lane, yielding to cyclists already there, before you turn right. ** Drivers have a regrettable tendency to just make the right turn without merging, hitting a cyclist who had the right of way.</p>
<p>The accident we’re discussing was similar, in that the driver turned right and cut off the cyclist. However, in this case the driver almost certainly had the right of way. Sidewalk bicyclists rarely have the right of way over anyone.</p>
When you say they are “invisible” I assume you mean that drivers don’t register that they are there, rather than that they cannot be seen. Would the driver have had the “right” to run over S if he had already been IN the fast-food driveway?</p>
<p>Sometimes literally invisible, when there are trees or parked cars in the way. But always in a place that drivers don’t expect traffic and therefore don’t look. </p>
<p>If the cyclist was already in the driveway, then the cyclist would have the right of way. But if both motorist and sidewalk cyclist are approaching the driveway, the driver has the right of way. Everyone should try to avoid collisions, but expecting the driver to yield the right of way that is his, when he probably didn’t see you, is a recipe for disaster. It’s like running a red light the wrong way on a one way street; you can hope that drivers won’t hit you, but you’d be smarter to follow the rules.</p>
<p>In many of the towns that I have lived in, sidewalks are set back from the street by a grass strip and there is a row of trees planted on the grass strip. Additionally, cars are parallel parked on the street. So a cyclist on a sidewalk is shielded from view by not only a row of parallel parked cars but also by a row of trees. They are essentially invisible to vehicles in the drivers lane.</p>
<p>Again, I don’t think this was the layout of the exact situation that sylvan’s kid experience. But when we write traffic laws (such as barring bicycles on the sidewalk or saying that a sidewalk bicyclist must yield to cars turning right), we must consider that these situations exist somewhere. And I would be very surprised if nowhere in NYS does a row of trees and parallel parked cars separate the sidewalk from the roadway.</p>
<p>I don’t think bicyclists should ride on the sidewalk for the very reason that the sidewalk is not designed to be a travel lane for moving vehicles (including those that are human powered).</p>