357
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2026
357 points (96.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
16681 readers
820 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
In Spain drivers are required to leave 1.5m gap when overtaking a cyclist. In my experience 99% of them respect that. It's way more common for them to leave a gap and force the driver going in the other direction to slow down than to pass to close to me. Overall drivers suck here (worst in Spain) but this one rule they do obey.
Same rulein France. 1.5m on rural roads, 1m in town. However, in my experience, about half of drivers overtake with less than a 50cm gap.
Yep, they do the same everywhere. Pretty much everyone knows that French drivers are the worst.
So.. they're like Massachusetts' drivers then. Ooooo. Matched only by drivers from Maine who tend to be slower than the Second Coming of Christ.
It's good they're respecting that. We have a similar law in Québec that requires drivers to leave 1,5m when overtaking on a fast road, and 1m in towns and urban environments. It's unfortunately not very respected.
I can't find the article back but some police forces bought tools to measure that, but they thought it was too dangerous to send police officers on bikes to use that tool and fine the drivers not respecting the law. They just gave up.
EDIT: Is the police enforcing this in Spain? I'm guessing there are fines?
I ride mostly on secondary roads where you almost never see police so it's pretty much impossible for them to actually see someone breaking this law. No idea if they would stop someone passing dangerously close to a cyclist if they saw it. Honestly, I don't know why most drivers respect this rule. They don't care that much about other rules.
In America, I think drivers don't know how to drive around cyclists, so quite a few will drive frighteningly close. I wouldn't care to guess about the percentage.
But even 1% is a lot of people. A bicycle even on a short trip will be passed by 10s of cars. So, if you bike everywhere, that might be 1 close call a day. So, I'm guessing that Spain is not actually as dangerous as 1% and you were just picking a large number.
I don't think about each time a driver passes me a closer than 1.5m as a "close call". Once I went off the road and fell right into 1.5m deep ditch. Now that was a close call... I still don't know how I didn't hurt myself. I did get fired next day but it was unrelated.