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Is there a diagram of the incident somewhere? Why was stopping, walking the bike around the dumpster, and then getting back on not an option?
Less rhetorically, I can’t tell from the information provided whether this is a reasonable law, or if it’s just entitled “not-in-my-bike-lane”ism that would jack the cost of construction and services to astronomical levels if strongly enforced. Where would you have put the dumpster?
However, blockages in bike lanes, whether due to construction, parking violations, or poorly maintained lanes means that cyclists encounter obstacles like this extremely frequently. Getting on and off a bicycle, losing all momentum is enough of a pain in the ass that basically nobody does it, preferring to take the small, yet significant risk of merging into traffic to save time and effort. It's similar to the risk that basically all drivers take on when they speed slightly, or roll through stop signs.
The difference is that in the cyclists case, the risk is almost entirely taken on personally, as bikes are fragile. When motorists take on those risks, it often disproportionally endangers the pedestrians and cyclists nearby.
Maybe the cyclist made a mistake, maybe they didn't. But everybody on the road makes mistakes, and road design should take this into account. Cycling advocates want to improve road design so that mistakes are much less deadly for cyclists, and in many cases these design changes don't significantly impact motorized vehicle traffic.
As for "where does this dumpster go":
Ok, so the dumpster was brought to the site by the construction company? This makes more sense given what I see in the picture. Looks like they needed to get a street occupation permit.
My opinion on who is in the wrong here depends both on the details of the nature and urgency of the construction work being done, and on whether to permitting authority is capable of processing applications in a timely and reasonable manner.
I don't see how the permit makes any difference in the bicycle fatality. It was an enormous dumpster, clearly visible and marked with cones. If there had been a permit, the bicyclist would have had to go around it just the same.
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Maybe there are more details we are missing about the incident, but on the face of it, the uproar about it makes me less sympathetic to activist bikers. Drivers deal with unexpected construction obstacles all the time, and I don't understand why a biker would expect to have right of way when merging into the main lane to avoid an obstacle.
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Here's the dumpster in question. It doesn't seem to be in a bike lane at all, rather the right turn lane, which is probably worse. Looks like enough space to put it on the sidewalk, if that was an option.
Also plenty of room for a competent cyclist to pass inside the cones -- not to speak ill of the dead, but a lot of the cycling discourse seems to vaccilate between "Bikes are Vehicles; I'm taking the lane if I damn well please" and "Bikes are Fragile -- motorists need to yield to them as though they were pedestrians".
If you are driving your car up to some roadwork and need to merge into the adjacent lane, it's 100% on you to make sure nobody crashes into you -- including drunks and people watching tiktok. If you ride a bike on a city street (which I used to do a lot) you have even more incentive to get good navigating this -- but the moralistic aspect seems to encourage dodging the blame when you fuck it up.
But... both of those are true. There's more than one type of vehicle, you can't just force classify everything as "a car" or "not a car." Race cars, tanks, motorcycles, garbage trucks, school busses, scooters, skateboards, and bikes are all "vehicles" but they handle vastly differently and therefore have different rules. A bike is naturally faster than a perrson walking but slower and more vulnerable than a car, that's just how it is, it's pointless to get mad at them for not following some imaginary speed binary of "you must go either 3 MPH or 30, nothing in between."
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Yeah, those are the activists I can't stand. I wouldn't pass inside those cones, looks kinda tight with the dumpster overhanging. But obstacles like that are just regular city trouble for all vehicles, happens all the time.
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