Three Abreast, a Bike Lane Queue-Jump, and a Dead Light
At 4:30 p.m. on a Saturday you and two friends are northbound on a three-lane one-way downtown street. You are first at a red light in the left lane; your friends pull up until the three bikes are abreast across the 12-foot lane, their mirrors overlapping. To your right is a marked bicycle lane, then a right-turn lane. The signal is actuated; painted on the pavement just past the stop line is a small motorcycle detector stencil, but you stopped about 15 feet short of it. The light has not changed in 90 seconds. Cross traffic is heavy and continuous. Your right-hand friend revs and points at the bike lane, signaling that he intends to ride up it to the front of the queue. On the far right corner, a 'NO TURN ON RED' sign faces your direction.
1. Evaluate the three-abreast lineup. What does Michigan permit, and what needs to change?
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Michigan allows motorcycles to be ridden two abreast in a single lane. It does not allow three. So the formation is already unlawful before anyone moves, and it is also tactically bad: with mirrors overlapping you have no lateral escape, no room to swerve for a pothole or a car door, and you are occupying the entire width of the lane in the dark spot where a turning driver's eye expects one narrow vehicle.
Fix it in the queue, not at speed. The third bike should drop back to form a second row behind you, staggering left and right with a two-second gap, or the group should go single file if the lane is narrow. Then, while stopped, talk about the pattern for the rest of the ride: two abreast is a maximum for open road with good sight lines, and it collapses to single file in curves, in construction, at night, and any time someone needs the whole lane. Also check that no rider is sitting on the painted stop line - that makes you invisible to cross traffic that creeps forward.
2. Your friend wants to use the bicycle lane to reach the front. Explain the legal and practical problems, and what you would say to him.
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Legally, a bicycle lane is reserved for bicycles (and, where state law allows, electric bicycles). A motorcycle is a motor vehicle, so entering it is a lane violation on its own, and using it to move up alongside a stopped queue is filtering or lane splitting, which Michigan does not authorize for motorcycles. Being first at the light does not create an exception.
Practically, it is worse than a ticket. A bicycle lane puts you in the right-hook zone: a driver in the right-turn lane who has looked left for cross traffic and never right for a bike will turn across you the instant the light changes. You are also riding in the debris and glass strip, past car doors that open without warning, and past pedestrians who step off the curb between stopped cars. And you would be doing it while hidden behind the vehicles in the queue, so no cross traffic sees you coming.
The answer is one sentence: you are already in a legal lane, the light will not change faster because you are at the front, and being first into an intersection that nobody can see you enter is not an advantage.
3. The light still has not changed. What are your lawful and safe options from here?
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First, fix the obvious: roll forward and stop directly over the painted motorcycle stencil, which marks where the detector loop is buried. A 15-foot shortfall is the most common reason a bike does not get detected, and repositioning is legal and immediate.
Then wait through at least one full signal cycle to confirm the detector is not responding. Michigan does not give motorcyclists a general license to treat a red light as a stop sign. If the detector genuinely will not pick you up, treat the signal as malfunctioning: yield to all cross traffic, confirm - not assume - that the way is clear, and proceed cautiously only when it is safe, with the expectation that you may have to explain the decision.
Note the constraints here: the 'NO TURN ON RED' sign removes the usual right-turn-and-U-turn escape at this corner, and the heavy continuous cross traffic means there is no gap to exploit anyway. Realistic options are to wait through another cycle with a car behind you triggering the loop, or to reroute by continuing straight to the next corner. Neither is worth a collision with a crossing vehicle that has a green light.