Some motorcyclists say legalizing lane filtering would improve road safety
Illustration by Sage Blackwell.
Commuting by motorcycle is affordable, space-efficient, and fun — but for UVic students like Nathyn Sutton, outdated laws and rising congestion are making motorcycle commuting riskier than it should be.
“It’s just faster, I think, and it’s cheaper in different ways than cars. Actually getting around on campus — it’s a lot easier because there’s more spots open than with cars,” Sutton said.
Each day, Sutton rides just a few minutes to campus along McKenzie Avenue, slipping through the city’s increasingly congested roads. While Victoria celebrates its climate-focused overhaul of transportation infrastructure, with more bus lanes, bike paths, and pedestrian corridors, student motorcyclists like Sutton say they’re being left out of the conversation.
Jamie Chartrand of TractionWerks, a high-performance motorcycle training school, echoed Sutton’s sentiment. He believes that despite their practicality, motorcycles continue to be excluded from the province’s transportation priorities.
“I think we’re the forgotten mode of transport,” Chartrand said.
Under the province’s current traffic laws, riders wearing full safety gear risk discomfort and potentially heat exhaustion when forced to remain stationary in traffic during hot weather — something that advocates say could be mitigated by legalizing lane filtering: the practice of motorcycles moving slowly between stopped or slow-moving cars, rather than remaining stationary.
“Staying moving is going to cool you down,” Chartrand said. Victoria motorcyclist Shane Michael O’Leary added that riding “even five kilometres an hour … with a visor cracked [is better] than sitting in 30°C heat with the visor all the way open.”
“If it’s a hot day, you don’t want to be wearing a whole leather jacket — way too hot, way too uncomfortable,” Sutton said, “And it can honestly make it more dangerous because you’re more focused on being too hot than on the road.”
That’s where lane filtering comes into focus. In many locations worldwide, including California, France, and Australia, lane filtering is legal and widely credited with reducing collisions, especially the rear-end crashes that can seriously injure stopped motorcyclists. But in B.C., the practice remains banned.
“If you’re sitting in traffic and you’re at the end of the line, cars are coming up real fast behind you and if they’re [not paying attention] — you can get sandwiched between two [cars],” Sutton said. “It’s not a fun feeling.”
Sutton is far from alone. O’Leary was rear-ended while sitting stationary on Blanshard Street, despite taking all the right precautions.
O’Leary said he was checking his mirrors “constantly,” and doing everything by the book. When he was rear-ended, he said he had “less than one” second to react. Luckily, he was in full protective gear, but that didn’t stop him from sustaining soft tissue damage and bruising down his left side.
He said he believes legalizing lane filtering “100 per cent” would have prevented his crash.
O’Leary pointed to B.C.’s Vision Zero road safety initiative — which declares that no deaths on the road are acceptable — and criticized the province’s inaction on traffic laws that would otherwise protect motorcyclists.
“I think it’s ignorant,” he said. “Zero deaths on a road … there are so many other things that play into that kind of a goal that [aren’t] realistic that it just seems silly to say –– ‘we want zero deaths, but we don’t want lane filtering, though.’ That’s not cool.”
Ron Cronk, an instructor with the Vancouver Island Safety Council, took a more cautious position on the topic.
“Lane filtering has its place,” Cronk said, “[but] I don’t know how it’s going to look in British Columbia. We’re having a hard time figuring out [how] bicycles fit into our world as vulnerable road users.”
Cronk said that there are other changes that could be made to reduce rear-end collisions, such as ensuring motorcyclists leave enough space between them and the car ahead of them, so they can “find an escape route” if necessary.
“I don’t think the motoring public is ready for [lane filtering]…. It may be safe and effective, [as per] the recommendations of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation … [but] it should only be done when the cars are moving at something like [30 kilometers] per hour…. So it really limits what you can do [and] I don’t know if there’s a benefit.”
For riders like O’Leary, the choice to legalize lane filtering seems obvious. However, for the Ministry of Transportation, the situation isn’t black and white.
In a written statement, the ministry emphasized that its top priority is the safety of all road users. In June 2024, motorcyclists were formally added to the province’s legal definition of a “vulnerable road user,” alongside pedestrians, cyclists, and mobility devices.
The ministry acknowledged that motorcyclists faced an elevated risk on the road –– particularly in intersections and stop-and-go traffic –– but also maintained its opposition to legalizing lane filtering.
“Based on the findings from previous research, and with safety as the highest consideration, the ministry does not currently permit this practice in British Columbia and has no plans to permit it at this time,” the statement reads.
To riders like Sutton and O’Leary, that position feels disconnected from both reality and evidence.
The ministry’s message highlights crucial safety concerns, such as the importance of wearing full protective gear, and that there is an elevated risk of collisions at intersections and stopped traffic. However, it does not currently offer structural or legislative measures — such as permitting lane filtering — to address those and other risks.
Riders are advised to exercise caution, but existing laws limit the actions they can legally take to avoid potential hazards.
For UVic students and other riders who rely on motorcycles as an affordable, space-efficient way to navigate the city, the gap between policy and lived experience continues to widen. As Victoria pushes ahead with its sustainability goals and infrastructure overhauls, it seems to some riders like Sutton and O’Leary that it’s time the province caught up — not just with global safety data, but with the realities of life on two wheels.
