Introduction
I consider bicycling to be a reasonably safe activity.
Obviously it has its risks, and I’ve been injured a few times. Even so, by my
rough calculation, I’ve cycled close to 200,000 miles, so I’m fine with my track
record so far. There are those who think urban cycling in particular is unconscionably
dangerous, but you know what else is dangerous? Urban walking. I don’t recall
anybody trying to make the case that pedestrians should just give it up (unless you count Irvine, California where walking is so unheard of, it’s practically against the law.)
A recent article in “Berkeleyside” provides maps of where in Berkeley the reported pedestrian and cyclist
accidents occurred last year. According to the Berkeley police, 230 people were
injured across 220 accidents, and three killed. Of these, 98 involved bicycles,
with 99 injured and one dead. Here is the map of bicycle accidents:
A yellow marker indicates that the driver was at fault; blue
means it was the cyclist’s fault. So how does this break down? Police ruled
that “fault was evenly split, with drivers and cyclists each responsible 47% of
the time.”
What about the other 6% of the time (indicated with a green
icon)? In those cases, police didn’t assign blame to either party. And yet, in
three of these four accidents, the cause was “unsafe door opening.” So … would it
be that hard to ascribe blame? Let me
give you cops a hint: do bicycles have doors?
In my experience, and that of most of my cycling pals,
police are quick to assign blame to cyclists in the absence of overwhelming
evidence that the motorist was at fault. Consider my worst bike accident ever: the
driver ahead of me inexplicably swung to the right, and then cut a hard hairpin
left turn in front of me to head into her driveway. Needless to say she didn’t
look behind her, nor signal her turn. I laid down the bike trying not to T-bone
her car. Later, after the ambulance hauled me away, the cop rang her doorbell to
get her story. (She’d been hiding in her house throughout the ordeal, ignoring
my screams, which her neighbors heard a block away.) She claimed to have used
her turn signal and that she had behaved very predictably and safely. The police officer took
her word for it, even though (as detailed here) her testimony cannot have made any sense. The fact that my bicycle didn’t
actually collide with her car further exonerated her. The cop chalked it up as
my fault because I was “going too fast” (even though I was below the speed
limit). I guess he had a point: if I’d been going walking speed, I might have
been able to stop in time. So I’ll make a deal: I’ll go at walking speed from
now on, so long as motorists agree to do the same.
Bicycling (like driving) will always involve some risk, no
matter how careful we are. Just today, a friend of mine was hit by a car while
bicycling. The driver was texting. While driving. While driving, in fact, through
a roundabout. Who does that?
But yeah, I’ll confess that cycling has its dangers even when
drivers aren’t directly involved. I recently stumbled across an email to a few
friends from about six years ago, recounting my most bizarre bicycle accident
ever. What follows is about 80% gripping yarn, 20% cautionary tale.
Freak bike accident –
November 2013
Let me tell you about my crazy bike accident. Yesterday
evening I was riding home from Bart [the train station, less than a mile from
home] in the dark, around 6 p.m. I had basic lights front and rear. I was
trying to turn left on Gilman Street and thought a particular driver was going
to let me in, so I was out in the road. It’s a never-ending stream of cars at
that hour, heading towards I-80, and they’re all fricking zombies, stricken by
tunnel vision as they slog through their commute. Alas, it soon became apparent
that, eye contact notwithstanding, the driver wasn’t going to let me go ahead
of him after all. The gap he’d allowed to open ahead of his car was apparently unintentional,
for now he closed it right up, shaving precious fractions of a second off his
commute time. I guess the look he gave me was meant to convey, “I see you
there, and I don’t care.”
[Coincidentally enough, this act of non-courtesy occurred almost
exactly at the site on the map below, where—about four months ago—a driver
failed to yield while turning left, struck and injured a cyclist, and didn’t
stop.]
This guy’s attitude was shared by the whole line of drivers,
whose safety seemed assured at this speed even though unbeknownst to most of
them they were slowly dying, a withering wasting car commuter’s death, the
death of actual living that doesn’t become apparent until it’s too late. I rode
back across the (empty) left lane and hopped the curb up onto the sidewalk. My
plan was to head a short distance down to a crosswalk where I could walk my
bike across Gilman, as that’s the only way to get these rush hour motorists to
let you through.
So there I was, riding along on the sidewalk, and then
suddenly I was down. I mean, it was the weirdest thing, because normally you see
a crash coming, and in fact time seems to slow down. (This is because, as
detailed here, “your amygdala [acts] as an emergency control center that gets all the other
parts of the brain to quit mucking around with their daily tasks and
concentrate all the resources on the one, main thing that is happening.”)
Normally, there’s an opportunity for evasive action or at least to think, “Oh,
shit!” But not this time. I just suddenly realized I was no longer in control,
was no longer moving, and was somehow in great pain. Given the suddenness of this
situation, and the astonishing force of it—suddenly, everything hurt—I automatically assumed a car must have been
involved.
And yet, the weirdest thing was, I wasn’t actually on the
ground. The bike was down and I was tangled up with it, but I’d landed on my
feet. “Landed?” you may well ask. “What do you mean landed? Like, from where?” I know, it makes no sense. Somehow I
went from biking to landing with seemingly nothing in between. I immediately
dreaded having to tell my wife about the crash, and the whole situation was so
horrifying I found myself yelling, “NO! NO! NO! NO! NO!”
And then I thought, wait, if I’m not actually down on the ground, then I haven’t really crashed. This was a bit of a relief because I was wearing a
nice suit and it’d have been ruined. But it wasn’t much of a relief because I
was in so dang much pain. My back hurt, my neck, my groin, but especially my
head. My head? WTF!? Why would my head hurt when it was nowhere near the
ground?
My mind raced, trying to make sense of the situation. With
no car involved, and my head far from the ground, I figured somebody must have
bashed me with a baseball bat or something. Or maybe I’d been shot? I staggered
around, taking in the scene. And then I finally put it together: there’s a tree
planted in the median with a big stout bare branch, with very dark bark,
sticking out over the sidewalk. I never saw it and I’d simply run headfirst
into that bad boy—it was a bit like being clotheslined. I wasn’t going all that
fast, but this was nevertheless a terrible way to be (mostly) separated from my
bike.
Man, it was horrible. I righted the bike, was amazed to see
the chain hadn’t even fallen off, and remounted, but I was in so, so much pain.
My head, man, it was just killing me. And my groin, it felt like somebody very
strong had tried really hard to rip my leg off. My shoulder hurt , my neck
hurt, my back, my legs ... I just moaned and groaned the rest of the way home
(only a couple blocks). I got into the garage, flipped on the light, and
inspected my helmet. I’m so, so glad I was wearing it. Sure enough, the foam
was compressed and cracked ... totally unsurprising given that my head felt
like it had taken a hit from a bolt gun. This was a big burly Bell helmet, my
commuting helmet, and I though I’m sad to see it go, it obviously served me
well.
I hobbled into the house, and my 12-year-old daughter saw me
and gasped: “Oh my gosh, Dad!”
I thought, oh no, I must be missing some memory of this
thing—maybe I did hit the ground,
maybe I’m all bloody or ripped up or something! But I tried to play it cool. “What?” I asked faux-innocently. Alexa
said, “Well, it’s just ... I’ve never seen you in a suit before!” Man, what a
relief. She didn’t suspect a thing.
I went upstairs and it hurt just taking my suit off. I
crawled into bed to rest a bit. It hurt to move so I just lay there on my back.
I just wanted to lie there the whole night, but of course there was dinner to
prepare and kids to deal with, and actually I knew in the back of my mind that
it would probably be a good idea to stay awake for a few more hours and make
sure I didn’t get dizzy, or hurl, or look in the mirror and see my eyes dilated
or spinning like pinwheels or whatever happens when you have a concussion. [If,
back then, I’d had the concussion protocol training I’ve since received as a
high school mountain bike coach, I’d have had myself checked out far more thoroughly, believe me.]
So I stuck it out, finished out the evening, cleaned the kitchen, read to my younger
daughter, stayed up until 10 or 10:30, took like four Advil and some beer, and
got to bed. I woke up this morning feeling really sore and stiff, and I can
barely walk. My head hurt most of the day but it’s better now. (I took a
two-hour online training on RFID technology and passed the test, so my brain
does still seem to work.) Mainly my groin hurts, but also my neck, like I can barely turn my
head. Riding is pretty much out of the question. It’s horrible.
Anyway, the funny thing is, when I was heading out yesterday
morning, I actually thought about not wearing my helmet. I had fresh gel in my
hair, for one thing; plus, a guy in a suit wearing a helmet on his commuter
bike is just so nerdy. But I only paused for a second before doing the right
thing and putting on the ol’ brain bucket. So what if I have reactivated hair gel
and helmet-head for my big meeting ... vanity is for weenies, right? Right. Man,
oh man, I’m so glad I was wearing that thing. If I hadn’t, I might be a corpse now,
or an extremist political pundit with his own radio show.
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