OK I’m awake! Stop sending me articles about dead and injured cyclists

After yesterday’s huge Feed I had another large Feed this morning that had to be waded through and edited for content. Just so you know I don’t edit the web pages, I just choose which ones to link to. At least I don’t have more than 40 links that had to be viewed and either picked or discarded like yesterday. I can actually see a letter in the window labels in the System Tray. One letter per window with only lower case letters completely in view And that was after discarding more than half of the links because they only had a passing relation to bicycles, including a boxer that died from head trauma sustained in a fight who used to be famous for “getting on his bicycle” in the ring. Automated searches of online news reports is very thorough and also very stupid, which is why it requires a human being to make the actual judgment call of what to link in this blog. After all if it was easy then someone else would have been doing it sooner, right?

Up first in no particular order today is a report on a cyclist that tried to left hook a car. Bicyclist injured I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if you’re reading this you probably have a little bit of patience and would wait until oncoming traffic had cleared before making a left turn.

Another report on the Utah man sentenced to only 30 days in jail for assaulting cyclists with a deadly weapon. Kamas man gets 30 days in bicycle case I think I might have mistakenly reported the perp as being from Kansas instead of the UT town of Kamas in yesterday’s post so you can see I was already starting to get a little loopy from all the carnage and mayhem I had seen up to that point.

Another cyclist is hit in Chattanooga, found guilty of riding a bicycle. Chattanooga: Bicycle rider hit by car on Broad Street Right now I wouldn’t believe anything LEO in that city had to say, seriously. After that disgraceful incident where the cyclist was hit from behind and LEO refused to even write a ticket for failing to give 3 foot of clearance as per the law in TN, well Chattanooga PD could claim the sky is blue and the sun rises in the east and I wouldn’t believe them without additional expert witnesses brought in from outside the PD and photographic evidence. But assuming that the report in this case was factual, don’t drink and ride. You really need your wits about you to avoid all the people that turn their brains off when the get behind the wheel of a motor vehicle.

They found the big rig driver that hit the cyclist in LA and it turns out he did know he hit the cyclist, and also tried to hide the evidence. Truck driver arrested in hit-run fatality OK he’s lost his CDL for life for trying to cover up the wreck, when he would have been absolved of the wreck had he just remained on the scene. This is a clear case of DWS, driving while stupid. The roads will be safer when he is no longer driving a big rig on the highways.

A mountain biker gets injured out in the woods and rescuers have a heck of a time finding him even though he can’t move and is wearing a personal locater beacon. Injured mountain biker rescued from Henry Coe Park OK this is a bad one, the rider was wearing proper protective gear and crashed a little more than 2 miles from the trailhead, had a radio beacon to help people find him, had a buddy to take care of him until trained help arrived, did all the right things and it still took rescuers hours to find them. Sometimes terrain is just too much for your experience level, or for anybody’s experience level.

Another car left hooks a cyclist, cyclist ticketed. Car-bike accident sends boy to hospital I’m not 100% up on all 50 states’ cycling laws, so I can’t say they shouldn’t have ticketed the cyclist. In TX they shouldn’t have, but that wasn’t in TX…

CO appears to be passing a passing law to protect cyclists. Meyer: Bicyclists closer to being protected Hopefully the law will be better enforced in CO than it is in TN.

And in the vein of laws not being enforced we have this report. Hit a cyclist? No problem! What would be a $400 ticket when nobody was there to be hit was no problem when a cyclist is hit and injured (cyclists are almost always injured when hit by motor vehicles, I should have a macro for that 🙂 ). Once again LEO is disregarding the reason for the no right turn sign at that intersection in the first place. Would it kill them to write a ticket, would it kill us if they don’t? Well so far nobody has died there yet, but given enough time and lax enforcement somebody will die.

And yet another incident where laws were not enforced at the expense of and for cyclists/ SUV + Bicycle Incident Leaves All Parties Not-Guilty Yep the driver ran over bicycles parked in front of his vehicle and left the scene and no charges were filed in spite of the fact that there were people on those bicycles and he was trying to injure them with his vehicle. Assault with a deadly with intent and because he has a car and they were on bicycles he gets a pass. TANJ!

And in some good news someone has invented a scooter for amputees that rides much like a bike and allows more range of motion and better exercise for the patient. The GlideCycle: First Production Run Next Month This is more a scooter with a suspension harness than a bicycle, but having gone through painful rehab when I had both legs to work with anything that makes getting exercise easier for the physically challenged is great in my book, or in this case, blog. The foot hanging backwards on the harness is a little creepy though, you would think they could have found a better place or a better way to store the prosthetic limb during the rehab session. And what happens if there’s a wreck, or the rider just falls down? How does a person with only one leg and strapped into a harness stand the bike back up? Obviously this is not intended for solo rehab but for riding in a group with people that can help in case of incident. I can just see the first one of these that gets hit by an SUV… The first 9 figure personal injury lawsuit…

And I’m done for today.

Billed @$.02, Opus

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Another huge Feed, with lots of dead cyclists

The Feed was huge when I got home from the lab rat keeper’s office, with signal to noise exceeding 1 (more bicycle stories than all the others) and a large number of multiple reports on single wrecks. It was terrible.

Closest to home, geographically, is this monster from Houston where a cyclist apparently ran a red light. Bicyclist hit, killed by oncoming car and Bicyclist struck and killed in NW Harris County also Bicyclist struck, killed on 249 OK, don’t run red lights unless the light is busted. Busted = light won’t change. What you do in that case is treat the busted red light like a 2 way stop and wait until traffic clears in the crossing road before proceeding. According to witnesses not in the car the cyclist ran the red light without even slowing.

Two wrecks in UT near Hill AFB. Cyclists survive two auto-bike accidents One was a left cross hit-and-run, and the other was an apparent red-light runner on a bicycle. C’mon people, red means stop. Just because you already know the light isn’t going to change for your vehicle doesn’t mean you don’t have to stop and wait for traffic to clear on the crossing street. As for the hit-and-run driver, fire up the cement mixer and dig a really deep hole.

While we are in UT they actually put a driver that assaulted a cyclist (and maybe more that he wasn’t caught at) in jail. Driver who swerved at bicyclists will serve jail time The sentence is way inappropriate to the crime, only 30 days, but any jail is better than letting him walk.

Another report on that NoCal hit-and-run with the abandoned El Camino. Bicyclist in ‘grave condition’ after hit-and-run in Anaheim Same as before, when they catch this guy fire up the backhoe and the cement mixer, and maybe throw in a couple rabid wolverines and rattlesnakes for ditching the Elkie.

Another right hook gets another cyclist. Cyclist injured on Monday in collision with car Gotta watch out for right hooks, but sometimes you just don’t have time to react.

Don’t ride the wrong way on a one way street. Cyclist killed in collision with pickup truck This guy failed to be predictable by riding with traffic. Don’t you be unpredictable.

A SWCC wreck. Bicyclist critically injured after being hit by car Not enough information to actually say what happened, LEO are still investigating.

Another IA cyclist is assaulted on the road. Bike club offers reward for information on cycle crash This is another one of those that is very hard to avoid. When someone in a motor vehicle wants to hurt you on your bike dodging is going to be your only defense.

A brief respite from the death and destruction. Pedal power How to commute by bicycle in 47,000 easy steps.

Another report on the hit-and-run of a cyclist in LA CA. Bike rider killed Yeah, pretty much the same as the other 10 reports we have had since it happened. Just shoot the guy and protect the rest of us, not really but I’m getting tired and frustrated at the number of hit-and-runs.

A rider near Memphis is hit from behind. In brief: Fayette County bicycle rider struck, killed Yeah, this one is going to be swept under the rug, just like the wreck in Chattanooga. It doesn’t matter that the rider wasn’t even on the road when he was killed, it will be his fault somehow. As for how you can avoid it, this rider was already off the road and using the only available escape route…

Another respite. Heartbeats: Bike Ride for Amy breast-cancer fundraiser returns Opus says if you’re in the area do it.

Lawsuit #1. Family of Seattle cyclist killed by dump truck settles lawsuit The dumptruck driver right hooked the cyclist in the bike lane. The rider died.

Lawsuit #2. Man involved in crash that killed cyclist sues truck driver This was the overloaded truck with bad brakes, and the guy that sued was hit by the defective truck and pinballed into the bike, killing the rider.

A kid on a moped gets killed in CT. Moped accident kills boy in E.H. Why have articles about mopeds in a bicycle blog? Similar profile, speed, and weight, and they get killed the same as us on bicycles.

Last respite in the US part of the Feed. Holy something Apparently the author has never seen a pedal assisted land yacht. This was the very first product produced by the RANS company that built my Stratus and Gigi, the bike on the left in the header picture of this blog. Did I mention I love my recumbents, both the store bought and the home made? I have lost count of the home made ones, they seldom stay long, but the Stratus and Gigi have been around for a fairly long time now.

Helmet laws may kill more people than they save. Bicycle helmet laws could do more harm than good Apparently more people will die from not getting the health benefits of cycling than will die from head injury from riding bare-headed. Actually when you consider the 12.5 MPH design speed for bicycle helmets, not that many head injuries would be prevented.

A UK report with more meat than usual. Pendle cyclist killed in road collision From the report it appears the motor vehicle violated the right of way of the cyclist in the roundabout. Of course working from such limited data makes it more than likely that I have the situation interpreted wrong, but that is what it looks like at the moment

Almost done now, I can actually see letters in the window labels in the tool bar on the bottom of the screen. Here’s another UK article. Cyclist who died after a crash at West Stoke ‘lived life to the full’ This was kind of a memorial article, nothing about the actual wreck except “name, rank, and serial number” of the colliding vehicles.

European respite from dead and injured cyclists. The bicycle diaries: tracing Europe’s torrid history Cute story about the Japanese cyclist.

A multiple report story from Oz. Qld cyclist killed in hit-and-run andCrank up the cement mixer again, we got us another hit-and-run driver…

And final story is another cyclist killed by a bus driver in Manila PI. Bicycle rider sideswiped by bus dies I don’t know what it is about 3rd world countries and bus drivers hitting cyclists, but PI is not as bad about it as say India.

And I’m tired, this has gone on way too long, more in the morning.

Billed @$.02, Opus