What are they?

According to the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center in response to the Frequently Asked Question “Are bicyclists allowed to ride on the road?” they say, “Yes! In all 50 states, bicyclists are either considered vehicles or have the same rights and responsibilities as the operator of a motor vehicle.” Case closed, problem solved, why am I still writing this article? The reason that I am writing this article is that because, unfortunately, that’s not the whole story and it can matter — A LOT — whether your state considers bicycles vehicles and/or gives a person operating a bicycle the same rights and responsibilities as a person operating a motor vehicle.

It’s been awhile since I updated the Bike Law University series and this subject — how states treat bicycles as vehicles — has been the missing topic for over a year since those laws were added to our state bike laws page. I’m addressing this topic now because I had to update the state bike law page for Illinois. I had to update the Illinois page because they changed their law that gives a person operating a bicycle the same rights and responsibilities of a person operating a motor vehicle.

Illinois felt that it had to pass this law because a judge decided, based on its previous law, that a bicycle was not a vehicle and that because of that it was appropriate to dismiss a ticket for a driver who failed to yield to Dennis Jur, who was riding a bicycle, and was killed because the driver failed to yield. In response to this decision, the Illinois legislature overwhelmingly passed “Dennis’s Law” which clarified how bicycles are treated as vehicles. The law was supported by many interests including the Illinois Trucking Association. It is great to see the Illinois legislature act to ensure that their traffic laws protect bicyclists and that the injustice suffered by Dennis Jur and his family does not happen again.

The only problem with Illinois updating its law is that the previous Illinois law is substantially similar to laws that exist in the majority of states. If the type of injustice that motivated Dennis’s law can occur in Illinois then there may be little stopping it from occurring in other states with similarly worded statutes, particularly in the 20 states where — like Illinois — bicycles are not vehicles by definition.

What occurred in Dennis Jur’s case is emblematic of the complicated nature of how bicycles are treated like vehicles and the many potential pitfalls embedded in the laws that lead bicyclists to “either [be] considered vehicles or have the same rights and responsibilities as the operator of a motor vehicle.” The impact and limitations of these laws can go far beyond whether bicyclists can ride on the road, as discussed below.

Who has them?

Vehicle Definitions that define bicycles as vehicles

In 30 states and the District of Columbia, the definition of vehicle includes a bicycle. There are a few complexities here:

Connecticut: bikes are motor vehicles

Idaho, Oklahoma, and Tennessee: bikes are vehicles, but not motor vehicles

New Hampshire: bikes are vehicles, but not for the chapter regarding insurance

In the remaining 20 states, the definition of a vehicle either excludes bicycles specifically or excludes human-powered vehicles (including bicycles). In Massachusetts and Vermont my review only found definitions for motor vehicles and there was no definition of a vehicle.

“Rights and Duties” statutes that give bicyclists the rights and duties of vehicle operators

Forty-seven states, and the District of Columbia, have a “rights and duties” statute. The three states that do not have a “rights and duties” statute are Kentucky, Ohio, and South Dakota. In each of these states bicycles are defined as vehicles. Therefore, it is correct to say that, “In all 50 states, bicyclists are either considered vehicles or have the same rights and responsibilities as the operator of a motor vehicle.”

46 states, and DC, have a “by their nature” exception that may limit the “rights and duties” that apply to people operating bicycles

16 states do not limit the applicability of the “rights and duties” statute to certain physical spaces, such as “roadways” or “highways.”

Six states do not limit the rights and duties that apply to bicyclists to specific chapters or other parts of traffic law.

Two states — Ohio and Kentucky — only mention “duties” and do not mention “rights.”

Two states — Louisiana and Wyoming — suffer from poor drafting or transcription and it is not clear by reading their “rights and duties” statutes that the rights and duties referred to are the rules of the road for vehicles.

Spotlight State: Illinois

Illinois prompted this article and it is ostensibly focused on motorist-bicyclist behavior in order to address the fact that the driver who killed Dennis Jur was not even held accountable for a traffic ticket for the most basic offense possible: failure to yield. However, Illinois is also notable for the incredibly problematic decision of Boub v. Township of Wayne, 183 Ill. 2d 520, 702 N.E. 2d 535 (1998) which found that bicyclists are not “intended users” of roadways and that local governments cannot be held responsible for the injury or death of a bicyclist caused by negligent road design or maintenance. Dennis’s law does not necessarily change the decision in Boub as the court in that case found that “[w]hether a particular use of property was permitted and intended is determined by looking to the nature of the property itself” rather than looking at, for instance, the statute that gives bicyclists the rights and duties of people operating vehicles. This case adds an additional dimension to the complicated nature of whether a bicycle is a treated as a vehicle.

Where did they come from?

The Uniform Vehicle Code provides for both defining a bicycle as a vehicle and that a person operating a bicycle has all of the rights and duties of a person operating a vehicle. The two sections are:

1-215 Vehicle

Every device in, upon or by which any person or property is or may be transported or drawn upon a highway, excepting devices used exclusively upon stationary rails or tracks.

11-1202 Traffic laws apply to persons on bicycles and other human powered vehicles

Every person propelling a vehicle by human power or riding a bicycle shall have all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of any other vehicle under chapters 10 [Accidents and Accident Reports] and 11 [Rules of the Road], except as to special regulations in this article [Article 12 – Operation of Bicycles, Other Human-Powered Vehicles, and Mopeds] and except as to those provisions which by their nature can have no application.

There is quite a bit of history to whether a bicycle is a vehicle. In the original Uniform Vehicle Code from 1926 the definition for vehicle included bicycles, but then bicycles were explicitly excluded from 1930 until 1975. During that period most states adopted statutes that either explicitly or otherwise excluded bicycle from the definition of vehicle.

When bicycles, and other human-powered devices, were excluded from the definition of vehicle they were not entirely excluded from the Uniform Vehicle Code. Instead bicycle got its own definition (1-109) and the UVC introduced a version of 11-1202. That initial version made people riding a bicycle “subject to [the rules] applicable to the driver of a vehicle…” and did not mention any rights for a person riding a bicycle. It was not until 14 years later that the section was amended to make it clear that bicyclists had rights, not just duties. At least two states (Ohio and Kentucky) still appear to only address the duties owed by people on bikes without discussing the rights owed to a person on a bike.

Why should you care?

As the example of Dennis Jur shows us, these admittedly technical statutes can have a profound effect on the safety and justice given to people who bike. These statutes can be a bit of a rabbit hole with many opportunities for substantive differences caused by relatively few words. Getting these statutes right requires careful attention to at least two public policy choices:

Deciding whether a bicycle is defined as a vehicle, and Deciding how bicycles should behave with respect to motor vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic rules.

Deciding whether a bicycle is defined as a vehicle.

Deciding whether a bicycle should be a vehicle can be surprisingly difficult. There are many types of bicycles and types of people who ride bicycles. A bicycle can be a low-speed device used by a child, a high-speed device used by an adult, and anything in between. Increasingly, bicycles now also include electrically-assisted bicycles and, as we reported in our E-bike report, those bicycles have higher average speeds.

When a state decides that a bicycle is a vehicle there are at least two major repercussions: 1) laws written to govern “vehicle” behavior presumptively govern bicycle behavior, and 2) rights associated with vehicles also apply to bicycles. Safety issues created by motor vehicles drove the creation of modern traffic laws and states may choose to define bicycles as vehicles because vehicles have the most well developed set of rules for the road. Defining bicycles as vehicles also parallels early legal cases that defined bicycles as carriages in the time before motor vehicles. Defining bicycles as vehicles is also been consistent with the Uniform Vehicle Code, which changed its definition of a vehicle to include bicycles in 1975.

States may also choose to define bicycles as vehicles because they recognize that they are unable or unwilling to create comprehensive rights and duties for bicycles as a distinct type of vehicle or device. It’s like when the scientists in Jurassic Park filled in the gaps of dinosaur DNA with frog DNA: States, and the general transportation establishment, only had fragments of an idea about how bicycles should be incorporated into traffic laws and so they filled in those gaps with vehicle rules and hoped for the best.

Deciding how bicycles should behave with respect to motor vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic rules.

Most states take the additional step to decide how bicycles should behave with respect to motor vehicles, pedestrians, and traffic rules through a separate statute that describes the “rights and duties” of people who bike. This type of statute can be problematic and has numerous forks that can surprisingly limit the rights of people on bikes.

The many potential areas for ambiguity or interpretation of the “rights and duties” statutes are of primary concern in the 20 states where bicycles are not defined as vehicles. In five of those states there is no law that specifically deals with safely passing a bicycle, and I have heard anecdotal accounts of law enforcement failing to apply laws governing the safe passing of vehicles for that reason, despite the existence of the “rights and duties” statute that would seem to extend vehicle passing duties to vehicles passing a bicycle.

Here are some of the common issues hidden within these statutes:

The statute applies only when a bicycle is ridden upon a “roadway,” “highway,” or some other defined area.

As discussed in my article on sidewalk riding, many states do a poor job of providing rules for people bicycling on sidewalks or similar off-street paths. When a “rights and duties” statute is limited to a specific type of infrastructure, such as a “roadway” and rules are not clear for bicycles when they are not on that infrastructure it can create problematic situations where it is unclear what rules apply to a bicyclist when on sidewalks, paths, shoulders, or other infrastructure that exists outside of a “roadway” but is often used by people who bike.

An example of this type of limitation being used can be seen in Polzo v. Essex (35 A. 3d 653; 209 NJ 51 NJ Supreme Court 2012) where the court found that bicyclists are not owed same duties on a shoulder as they would be on roadway.

The statute grants rights and makes people on bicycles subject to duties of a chapter(s), section(s), or other subset(s) of state law.

This can introduce at least two problems: 1) the referenced chapter(s), section(s) or subset(s) of state laws create ambiguity regarding how some laws that apply to vehicles apply to bicycles, and 2) the law is poorly worded so that it is unclear which portions of traffic laws are referred to by the law.

An example of the first problem is Kansas, where the “rights and duties” statute would seemingly make bicyclists subject to DUI laws, but a court has found that it does not (City of Wichita v. Hackett, 275 Kan. 848 (2003)).

An example of the second problem is Wyoming, which states that a person “riding a bicycle has all of the rights and all of the duties applicable to the driver of any vehicle under this act” where the act is a law creating that statute and not the chapter of “Regulation of Traffic on Highways.” This may not be a problem for lawyers and judges, but can be a barrier to the public understanding the rights and duties of people who bike.

Dennis’s Law amends Illinois law to include a reference to Article IX of Chapter 11: Rules of the Road, but also provides that rights are not limited to rights found in that chapter. This potentially resolves ambiguity by guiding courts to be apply the principle of the rights and duties statute broadly.

The statute creates an exception from certain traffic laws for a person operating a bicycle, in either a general or specific manner.

Most often this is done by referencing a chapter, title, or subsection that includes certain rules that the state has decided should not apply to bicycles. These may be laws related to intoxication offenses, insurance requirements, licensing requirements, or other laws that the state has decided to specifically exempt bicyclists from. These exceptions may also be implicit by a state specifying that only a particular chapter applies to bicyclists, with the implication that any other chapters that otherwise apply to vehicles do not.

The statute specifies alternative rules that conflict with other traffic laws, and generally are more restrictive than other traffic laws.

Bicycle-specific laws are often in conflict with other vehicle laws. Often they are more restrictive, requiring a bicyclist to ride to the right hand side of a roadway or use a bicycle lane where one is provided. A “rights and duties” statute usually specifies that a person riding a bicycle must follow bicycle-specific laws by making an exception to the grant of “rights and duties.” This format also affords the possibility of the creation of greater, or at least different, rights as can be seen in sidewalk riding laws (where vehicles are prohibited from using sidewalks, but bicycles are not).

The statute provides a catch-all exception for traffic laws that “by their nature can have no application” or alternative language that provides an undefined exception.

As discussed in my article on Bicycling Under the Influence, courts generally do not look for differences in the nature of bicycles and motor vehicles and instead look to the language of statutes and legislative intent when deciding whether a traffic law applies to a person riding a bicycle. One notable exception from case law is New York State Appellate Court, Secor v. Kohl, 67 A.D.2d 358 at 362-3 (1979) which found that a bicyclist was not required to continuously signal before a turn due to the differences in the nature of bicycles and motor vehicles.

Another example of this provision being used can be seen in Schallenberger v. Rudd, 767 P. 2d 841 - Kansas Supreme Court (1989), which held that the “rights and duties” statute did not prohibit bicyclists from using sidewalks where bicycle were not defined as vehicles under Kansas law. Since this case Kansas has not enacted a law to clarify the rights and duties of bicyclists on sidewalks, although a more recent case, Kendrick v. Manda, 174 P. 3d 432 (2008) expanded upon Schallenberger to say that bicyclists in crosswalks have the rights and duties of pedestrians.

The statute applies only to a person operating a bicycle, and people riding on a bicycle or attached to a bicycle are not discussed.

This is common and reflects the background of the “rights and duties” law, which focused on “duties” which govern the behavior of people who bike. However, it may make it unclear how the law should treat passengers on bicycles.