This was another “fun” day to do the Filtering. There is still just so much death and destruction even in simple physical infrastructure articles, and it’s 10 times worse in legal infrastructure articles because every change in the legal infrastructure is in response to one or more (usually more) dead cyclists, ones that I usually have covered in detail in this blog. I had to take several breaks during the filtering process, most for links that will never get posted to this blog. Sadly while I don’t post an analyse wreck links any more, I still get a mess of them in the Feed. I tried changing search settings to prevent this, but as I said earlier most physical and every legal infrastructure change has been in response to a dead or crippled cyclist, sometimes several dead and injured cyclists. Removing search terms for dead or injured cyclists prevented me from finding links to those infrastructure articles. The good news is this has become much less of a PTSD trigger and the attacks have gotten much less severe since I stopped writing about wrecks until legal proceedings against the driver are proceeding. The bad news is that means I have gone from 4 or 5 PTSD attacks a day down to one or two, not zero. And I am more than a decade out from my wreck…
Up first a driver in GA rammed a building and injured a store employee there. Woman imprisoned for ramming car into Dollar General 12 years in prison and another 8 on probation, or at least 20 years under state supervision for a non-fatal wreck in a parking lot.
Now compare and contrast this fatal wreck in NYC. Throw away the keys: Driver who killed cyclist loses license for six months Yes that’s right, 20 years state supervision for hitting a building and injuring someone inside, compared to 6 months license suspension for a fatal hit-and-run. And we all know how much of an imposition it is to not have a license to drive when you have already ignored laws against leaving the scene of a wreck. Absolutely none.
This report is on a wreck that I covered here a couple of years ago, the guy that hit a group of cyclists on the sidewalk and proceeded to knock a building off its foundation a few feet further on. Biddeford man charged in fatal bicycle crash sentenced to 10 years in prison Still less than the woman that hit the building in GA by a binary order of magnitude, but an uncountable improvement over the utterly symbolic “punishment” given to the driver that killed the NYC cyclist.
A little closer to home in LA an extremely drunk driver gets 25 years in prison with all but 7.5 suspended for hitting two cyclists and killing one and permanently injuring the other. Branch gets 7.5 years for killing cyclist The lax sentence was at the request of the surviving victim and the deceased victim’s survivors, so I can see some of this. I would really like to see a lifetime ban on driving with a mandatory prison sentence appropriate to illegal possession of weapon if caught driving.
After all that cheerful news, here’s today’s Daily Ted. Morning Links: Westwood BID considers Westwood Blvd bike lanes, South LA cyclist critical after collision
The relatives of a cyclist killed on the road in the UK discover that they had been lied to concerning prosecution of the driver that killed the cyclist. Family of cyclist killed in road crash hits out at police who gave ‘false hope’ of prosecution Now they are rushing to pay for a private prosecution that has to be started soon to prevent dismissal for failure to prosecute before expiration of the statute of limitations in the case.
And in Oz, the driver who used his motor vehicle as a weapon is given a slight fine for the infraction. Fine for driver who knocked down cyclist The difference between murder and assault with a deadly weapon is fractions of an inch, or the choice of deadly weapon.
Why don’t more people in the US ride a bike in spite of so many that want to? It’s the stupid infrastructure. Here’s what keeps people from riding a bike If I’m reading that right, what is keeping the US from having a 54% participation share for bikes (54% regularly riding at some point during the week) is crappy drivers, followed closely by even crappier infrastructure that does nothing to protect cyclists from crappy drivers. Most urban trips in the US could easily be done on a bicycle if the riders felt safe to do so.
And here is why we have crappy infrastructure. Two perfect examples of the attitude Vision Zero is supposed to change As is pointed out in the comments, looking at roads a tenth of a mile at a time does not show where an entire road is unsafe because you could get 10 fatal wrecks per mile and not get any clusters that would indicate bad design in that particular 0.1 mile segment. But nobody outside of that engineering study would agree that this was a safe road.
Put a crazy person who hates bicycles in charge of regulating off-road bicycle infrastructure and guess what you get? In letter to Mayor Hales and commissioners, national orgs ‘object’ to River View decision If you guessed “less off-road bicycle infrastructure” give yourself a cookie. The city bought an existing network of privately maintained MTB trails and 3 years later banned people from riding those trails, without citing a reason and going against their science and technical advisory committee’s recommendations. And when pressed have given a changing palette of “reasons” that were easily refuted by facts, which resulted in no reasons at all.
Conflicting realities in Oz. Cyclists in Sydney need a ticket to ride and one based in our world 18 reasons why registering bicycles is a bad idea The first link is a meandering collection of unsupported opinions masquerading as “fact”, the second is a collection of real facts with links to government sources supporting them.
And I’m out of both links and patience, thank [$DEITY] I ran out of the first prior to running out of the second.
Billed @€0.02, Opus the Poet
Witch on a Bicycle 