Filtering, Not Lane-Splitting, OK In AZ
Thursday, March 31st, 2022
The Arizona state flag
Arizona has joined the ranks of the few states where lane-splitting is legal–sort of.
The state legislature has passed, and the governor has signed, a bill legalizing lane-splitting under very specific conditions. The new law will go into effect in three months.
What the law allows is actually more along the lines of what is referred to as filtering. In full-on lane-splitting, such as in California, motorcycles can pass between cars while traffic is moving. Filtering generally refers to bikes moving to the front of the pack when traffic is stopped at a traffic light.
That’s actually what Arizona will allow. Traffic has to be at a dead stop at a red light. And bikes can only move between them to get to the front at a speed of less than 15 mph.
The key here is that statistics have shown that one of the most dangerous places a bike can be is between cars at a stop. If someone slams into the bike from behind, or into a car further back, setting in motion a chain reaction, the biker can be caught between the cars in front and in back of him/her, to catastrophic effect.
Filtering ahead gets you out of the trap. Someone could still run into the car two vehicles back but there would not be a car in front of you to get crushed against. (Though you could get shoved out into the intersection, into the cross traffic. I’d be willing to take that chance.)
I had the chance to do some filtering in California a few years ago and it worked really well. Out there the drivers are used to it so many of them deliberately leave space ahead of them at a light. A couple other riders and I were behind the first car at the light and there was room in front so after a couple hand signals to suggest we do it we nodded in agreement and pulled around. Others followed us. The light turned green and we sped off, with acceleration much greater than the typical car. We didn’t slow them down and we were quickly out in front with no traffic to be any kind of threat.
This seems like the sensible, safe sort of practice that even bikers who consider lane-splitting to be crazy can get behind. Kudos to Arizona for being sensible.
