Cyclists Battle Over Bike Lanes [KBPS]

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Above: A bike lane on Aero Drive.

During morning rush hour, La Jolla Village Drive near I-5 is a noisy snarl of speeding cars, trucks and busses. There are eight lanes of traffic and no bike lanes, but that didn’t stop Serge Issakov from riding his bicycle to work on this street for the better part of a decade.

“This is where everybody thinks I’m crazy, but if you ride clearly in the lane, it works,” said Issakov, who serves on the board of the San Diego County Bicycle Coalition (SDCBC), the region’s largest bicycle advocacy group. Issakov subscribes to a philosophy called vehicular cycling, which maintains that bicyclists are safest when they act like drivers. That often means mixing with cars in traffic lanes on high-speed roads like La Jolla Village Drive.

“It’s totally non-intuitive, but once you do it a few times its like, ‘Wow, why don’t I do this all the time?’” he said of the vehicular approach. “Thinking like a driver completely changes your experience out on the road.”

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Editor's Note: Yay Bikes!, a local bicycle advocacy group in Columbus, leads a monthly ride called "Year of Yay" which leads cyclists around Columbus to visit local businesses while teaching safe riding skills.