As I enter this paragraph into the post I have not opened the folder that contains the Feed. In my silly way I am preserving the condition that there are no dead cyclists or even severely injured cyclists in any links I have today, that all of the links will be to happy stories about people getting together to have a first ride of the New Year right after midnight or some other time on 01/01/2012. If I keep that in my mind for the next few minutes I can keep in my Happy Place, where cars stay the heck away from bicycles and pedestrians and everybody gets to where they need or want to go without getting hurt, except by over-exertion for the non-motorized transportation people. There were no wrecks… Unfortunately the fact that there are new messages in the Feed folder makes the reality of that thought highly unlikely.
There were many links to the 5YO cyclist killed in Oz while riding in what would be called an RV park in the US. Campers witness as boy, 5, dies after hit by car in Inverloch holiday park and Car killed five-year-old boy at just 10km/h at Inverloch Holiday Park For my metric-system impaired readers, 10 km/h is 6.2 MPH. Basically what happened in this wreck was the kid went under the vehicle and suffered compression injury to the chest that prevented him from breathing. The driver was not looking at the road in front of her, but at the fireworks display, ditto the victim was also not looking for cars but at the fireworks. This was one of if not the last fatality for a cyclist in 2011.
And in this retrospective on 2011 Ottawa looks back on creating bicycle infrastructure and where the lack of that infrastructure caused a cyclist to get killed. A look back at the year Well for the bicycling citizens of Ottawa 2011 had good points and a major bad point, but that major bad point resulted in a legal review of every bicycle death in the preceding 5 years with a sharp eye towards how changes to the infrastructure could prevent a similar wreck, much like I use a wreck to determine how a cyclist could avoid a wreck in the same situation from different actions. And they even included a picture of a guy riding a bike past one of the goofier things they discussed in the article, the stadium with a mirrored geodesic dome.
And that was all the bicycle-related links in the Feed today, with no new dead cyclists! Woo-hoo! I’m still in my Happy Place!
Billed @$0.02, Opus
Witch on a Bicycle 