Please clarify how a driver should stop beside a bike lane. On a road with one vehicle lane and one bike lane, if the driver needs to stop to drop off passengers, does the driver have the right to stop in the vehicle lane? – Mary, Toronto
To know whether you can stop on a street to drop someone off, look for the signs.
Unless there’s a “No Stopping” sign, “you would be allowed to stop, even if you’re interfering with traffic,” said Sean Shapiro, a road safety consultant and retired Toronto traffic cop. “You’re allowed to stop and people behind you are responsible for not hitting you. They can pull around you.”
On any street in Toronto, if there’s a “No Stopping” sign, then you can’t stop for any reason.
But if the sign says “No Parking” or “No Standing,” then, you can stop briefly to let someone out or pick them up, Shapiro said.
Where there’s space to move over out of the lane, you should move over. But if there isn’t – for instance, because of a bike lane or parked cars – then you can stop in the lane of traffic. But not for long, Shapiro said.
“You’re not going to make a 90-year-old walk a block because you can’t stop. You can stop momentarily, [let her out or pick her up] and continue. It’s not ideal, but you can do it,” Shapiro said. “We’re actually talking moments – not walking grandma up the street and to the building after you’ve let her out. It’s loading and unloading.”
For instance, it’s reasonable to stop the car in the lane, jump out, open the door for the passenger, help them get out, and then you get back in and drive away, Shapiro said.
But you can’t leave your car sitting in a lane of traffic without you in it – or sit there waiting to pick up someone who isn’t there yet.
Also, while you can generally stop on city streets unless stopping is specifically banned, you can’t normally stop in a lane on a highway or expressway.
How much over the speed limit can I go before getting a ticket?
“You can’t stop there and leave your car blocking the road,” Shapiro said.
The rules vary by city and province. We reached out to a few cities and didn’t immediately hear back from them all.
But Alina Cheng, associate director of parking management with the City of Vancouver, said “regardless of whether or not there is an adjacent bike lane, vehicles cannot stop where they would interfere with the normal flow of traffic.”
While you can’t just stop in a lane of traffic to pick up or drop off people in Vancouver, you can usually pull over into a parking lane to do it quickly – if there’s room to pull over – unless there is a “no stopping” sign, Cheng said in an email.
“Typically [No stopping] signage is installed when there is not enough road width to safely accommodate a parking lane, bicycle lane and a driving lane,” she said.
Flashers not required
If you do stop in traffic for a quick dropoff or pick up, you can put on your hazard lights, also known as four-way flashers, to let other drivers know you’re stopped. But you’re not required by law to turn them on, Shapiro said.
Some drivers incorrectly think that putting on their flashers will keep them from getting a ticket for illegal stopping or parking.
“People think that putting your hazard lights on means that you’re allowed to stop there [despite the signage], but it doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t give you any special privileges,” Shapiro said. “It just helps people who might be accelerating quickly toward your location know that you may not be moving.”
When you do stop next to a bike lane, make sure that you’re not actually in the bike lane, Shapiro said.
Toronto bans stopping in bike lanes with painted lines and protected bike lanes with physical barriers, although there are exceptions. The fine is now $200.
In 2022, posters appeared along Bloor Street in Toronto stating, falsely, that parking was allowed in bike lanes at certain times of the day. The city said they were fraudulent.
When cars block bike lanes, cyclists are forced into traffic, said Lanrick Bennett, a Toronto biking advocate.
“A lot of the mindset for Torontonians that maybe don’t ride a bike is that if there’s a bike lane, we should be using it,” Bennett said in an interview earlier this year. “You would be amazed at how many times utilizing that infrastructure is not necessarily the safest thing to do.”
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