About two and a half years ago, I moved from Michigan to California. The city to which I relocated has a large number of bicycle lanes. To me, in my limited set of experience with cities in the United States, this is pretty unusual. Many of the bike lanes are so wide that you can fit an entire car in them. When I first moved out here, I noticed that several cars pulled into the bike lane when they approached intersections and went to turn right. Essentially, they were treating the bike lane as a makeshift right turn lane.

At a glance, this seems inconsiderate or opportunistic, doesn't it? I'm not even a bike rider, but the state sets aside some concrete for people out biking, and cars use it to make right turns a little faster.

But it wasn't just a few people that did it. Several people did. It seemed to be the rules instead of the exception put forth by a few inconsiderate perpetrators. So, I started to do it too. It was certainly less awkward than attempting to turn right from what was, in effect, the middle lane.

Later, I went to take the test to get my California driver's license. Turns out that pulling into the bike lane before turning right is exactly what you're supposed to do, so long as there's room and you're not going to run over a bike rider. Lesson learned; I was a little too quick to judge.

But initially, I didn't start doing it because I knew it was the legal thing to do...I did it just because that's what everyone else was doing. Most of the time, we can't know everything, so we fall back on imitating others. Behavior is contagious.