This content was originally published by the Longmont Observer and is licensed under a Creative Commons license.
It is now legal to ride your bike across a crosswalk in the city of Longmont. On Tuesday the city council voted unanimously in favor on ordinance O-2019-41 to revise the Model Traffic Code to remove language stating that a bike rider must dismount when entering a roadway or crosswalk from a sidewalk.
The original language removed includes:
10(d) A person riding a bicycle or electrical assisted bicycle upon and along a sidewalk shall dismount before entering any roadway and, when crossing any such roadway, shall observe all the rules and regulations applicable to pedestrians.
City officials, during comments, cited that the original ordinance was not applied universally nor consistently by public authorities as a reason to pass the ordinance.
One city official also cited an anecdote about a judge who was known to count the act of stopping and putting a single foot on the curb before entering a crosswalk as a “dismount” as an example of the ineffectual nature of the original text.
