Mom of the cyclist killed by the dump truck turning on Fuhrman in September and the companion cyclist are suing the construction company and driver. This go-around is a little unusual in that enforcement is still dithering: “Seattle police are still investigating and have not yet forwarded the case to King County prosecutors.” Why on God’s green earth not? It’s hard to imagine three months after the fact what they’re going to turn up new. It’s also hard to imagine someone getting killed in a vehicle-on-vehicle accident and cause not being assessed. Inaction trivializes the incident and also makes the city appear at least partially culpable. Hopefully there’ll be some telling discovery before the thing gets settled.
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Please stop destroying the integrity of this blog.
Maybe because the bicyclist was passing a dump truck on the right after merging onto eastlake from the big ass hill he just went down at 30+mph.
But shit, let us just BBQ some guy for not seeing a pencil trying to pass him on the right. BTW, when you make a right turn, are you looking in back of you, or in front of you?
Oh yeah, the city is culpable for succumbing to political pressure and putting sharrows and bike lanes in incredibly dangerous places.
I think it was Will who blogged about about encountering fellow bicyclists downtown. When he made a comment about the danger of bicycling downtown, didn’t one of them call it the “fun part”? I guess the city(us) will be paying for “the fun part”…over and over again.
Busdrivermike: What are you… an idiot…? This is Seattle… Politically correctville. They are trying to make this the dump truck driver’s fault to make the Bat!s happy.
HOLY SHIT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Scientists have determined that THE FUCKING SUN has an effect on temps here on Planet Erf. Also turns out that your gawd Algore is full of shit about “carbon” being a “greenhouse gas”.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNat.....1211a.html
Looks like I was right all along.
Where’s MTR’s Nobel Prize?????
“We are fairly sure that what’s causing the warming are changes in the sun,” he said. “These are very subtle changes that are very difficult to observe. The sun is really a quite variable star.”
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNat.....1211a.html
But Singer said because global warming is a natural event. “There is little point to try to control emission of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, which means that all of this legislation and all of these efforts to find substitutes for fossil fuels are pointless, useless and very, very expensive,” he said.
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewNat.....1211a.html
And now it’s apparently dueling religions. Who will win?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pag.....8;ito=1490
The Pope has God on his side. You guys have ummm…. Algore…
The Pope has the bible. You guys have a really nifty powerpoint presentation…
@ 2
Yeah, that was me, but in fairness, the cyclist who said that was referring to gridlocked downtown streets and how fun it is to ride your bike through that kind of thing, and not about a high speed, downhill kind of thing that you’re referring to.
Well done Redneck. You’ve now got one unbelievably biased news site and a dozen scientists on your side while we still have….well…just about all the rest of the scientists.
And now for something on topic. I’m with busdrivermike. Not only was the cyclist riding erratically, too fast, and passing on the right…he was riding a bike with NO BRAKES…a velodrome bike. His family should be served with a moving violation by the city.
Not every traffic accident is a criminal offense, or even a citable traffic offense. For years I’ve argued that police should resist the temptation to become the judge and jury of the cause of every accident by issuing a ticket in every instance.
Perhaps the best method of determining fault in this instance is a civil jury of our peers, who can determine whether the truck driver (or the bicyclist) failed to exercise due care, and whether that failure was a proximate cause of the accident.
The cyclist got right-hooked, totally illegal and really common. I’ve had a few close calls that way.
I don’t think Al Gore ever said carbon was a greenhouse gas.
The effects of burning carbon are greenhouse gases — if that’s OK with the pope and Jesus.
BTW, when you make a right turn, are you looking in back of you, or in front of you?
That depends. Am I making a right turn through a bike lane? Because in that case, I’m keeping an eye out for bicyclists. What, is that supposed to be hard?
So last week, I drop this twenty year old kid off at the first stop in the ride-free area, First ave and Bell Southbound. He gets his fixie bike off the bus rack and starts pedaling down the sidewalk. It’s dark. As I proceed down First ave a car is backing into a parallel parking spot. I swing out into the second lane and pass and as I swing back into the right lane I see a flash of movement near the right rear of the bus. It’s the kid on the fixie bike shooting through the three foot slot between the bus and the parking car. The kid has no lights on the bike, is wearing dark clothing, no helmet, has an ipod plugged into his ears and since it’s a fixie bike-no brakes. if I had hit him Michael would say it’s my fault.
Last night I’m jaywalking across Fauntleroy Ave in West Seattle. It’s dark. A guy on a fixie bike shoots by me in the middle of the street. No helmet, dark clothes, no lights. I know all this because he does the slow down pedal thing as he almost stops at California Ave before shooting through the intersection.
Any dumb SOB knows that Buses stop in bus zones-AKA bus stops. Yet it is not uncommon for bicyclists to shoot past buses on the right as the bus approaches a bus zone. Anyone who rides a bus knows how much distraction bus drivers are subjected to including passengers stepping up to pay their are as the bus approaches the bus zone and in doing so blocking the driver’s view of his right side mirror.
You can conclude this for yourself.
http://www.salon.com/news/feat.....cc_report/
Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world’s top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra’s warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.
There’s a reason why so many bicyclists are smart: The stupid ones tend to die young.
I biked to work for a while, and when I rode I rode fucking scared. Not that I wasn’t having fun, but I always aware that there were these other people in two-ton metal boxes that could squish me like a possum, and I did everything I could to help ’em not do so. This meant–oh, horrors! doing everything I could to stay out of other peoples’ way, whether the law said I had to or not.
For people to go out there and ride like maniacs, on gear meant more for the velodrome than the street, and make a big fuss about how the law should give them special protection because they’re being oh-so-good and saving the planet while they’re masturbating their egos, is frankly, pure crap. All of us, whether we’re driving, pedaling, riding public transit or just burning shoe leather, should be thinking more about just getting from Point A to Point B with a minimum of fuss, not trying to show each other what swingin’ dicks we are.
Oh Paul, stop hyperventilating. Reconstructing accidents and assigning fault isn’t as easy as you think. Let the professionals do their job before you start second-guessing.
The news account you linked hardly presents a clear-cut case of criminal conduct by the dump truck. In fact, it very strongly suggests the driver never saw the cyclists. After all, why would he WANT to hit them? It’s obvious they came from the blind spot to the right rear of the vehicle. How, exactly, is the driver of a dump truck supposed to see what’s on his right? The only possibility is the passenger-side side mirror, and once the truck begins to turn, anything behind and to the right of the truck is invisible to the truck driver. So, for purposes of both criminal and civil liability, the question is whether the driver saw, or at least had the opportunity to see, the cyclists before beginning to turn. How long were they behind him? What speed were they traveling? Where did they come from? Did the truck driver signal his turn? Why didn’t the cyclists see the truck turn, and why didn’t they stop?
And what role, if any, did this fact play in the fatality: “Neither was wearing a helmet when they were struck.”
Cyclists must (if they want to survive) understand that (a) they’re extremely vulnerable, (b) in confrontations between bikes and cars, the car always wins, and (c) cyclists are very hard to see because drivers’ eyes are conditioned to look for objects the size of a vehicle.
At a minimum, cyclists must follow the traffic rules, watch the car traffic, anticipate what motorists might do, exercise common sense, and NOT ASSUME THE DRIVER SEES THEM. They also must understand that, due to laws of physics, a vehicle can’t stop in the same distance as a bike.
I simply don’t buy the notion that when a cyclist gets hurt, it’s automatically the driver’s fault. I’ve seen too many cyclists do incredibly stupid things. I’ve also seen way too cyclists who are simply aggressive and have attitudes, and even deliberately put themselves in harm’s way.
A number of years ago, my sympathy for cyclists all but vanished after I got hit by cyclists in downtown crosswalks twice in three days. In each case, I was on foot, in a crowd of pedestrians, crossing in a marked crosswalk with the “Walk” sign, and the cyclist tried to fly through the crowd at high speed — and in each case, didn’t make it, knocking several people to the ground. And, in both of those cases, the cyclist — whose behavior can only be described as reckless to the point of constituting assault — not only did not apologize but cursed out the pedestrians he had hit and, in one instance, physically pushed one of his victims. Ever since then, my attitude toward cyclists in general has been less than magnanimous.
I’m trying really hard to work with the pro-bike folks. I’m not against cyclists having their bike lanes, but how about if the cyclists stay the fuck in the bike lanes instead of intentionally blocking car traffic just to piss of motorists? I’m not even against paying taxes for the millions of dollars of bike paths and bike lanes the city is building and marking, but how about cyclists — who pay absolutely nothing in license fees or fuel taxes for all this bike infrastructure — expressing gratitude instead of hostility toward the people (car drivers) who do pay for it?
I could go on, but suffice to say, there has been (and still is) a hell of a lot of bad behavior by too damn many cyclists with chips on their shouldrs the size of an old-growth Doug Fir to buy this crap about anyone on a bike who gets hit by a car being automatically the victim.
And to bike riders who follow the rules and exercise due care, I say kudos, you have my full support (and tax dollars, as well).
What is “right hooked”?
Is that when a cyclist is overtaking on the right and gets nailed by a right turning vehicle?
@14
“The kid has no lights on the bike, is wearing dark clothing, no helmet, has an ipod plugged into his ears and since it’s a fixie bike-no brakes. if I had hit him Michael would say it’s my fault.”
No, actually, I wouldn’t have.
@17
“And to bike riders who follow the rules and exercise due care, I say kudos, you have my full support (and tax dollars, as well).”
Thanks Rog.
@17
But, please take the extra 5 seconds it takes to stay behind me to make your right turns rather than zipping in front of me and then slamming on your brakes and pulling a hard right.
@14
PS. We wouldn’t allow a car with no lights or brakes on the road, I’m not sure why we allow bikes with no lights or brakes on the road.
Drivers have to wear seat belts, why should we allow cyclists to go without helmets? Sounds like Seattle needs to update some of its laws.
Mark The Redneck-Goldstein @5 & @6,
It is interesting that the December 2007 International Journal of Climatology does not list this ground breaking study in its table of contents. Either they are not aware they are suppose to have published this paper or they did not think the paper important enough to list online. I wonder which it is?
It is too bad either way. I was looking forward to reading the paper.
International Journal of Climatology
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Volume 27 Issue 15 , Pages 2017 – 2124 (December 2007)
http://www3.interscience.wiley.....4649/issue
For once agree with RR despite the verbosity.
I trust the plaintiffs in the bike death case will sue the City of Seattle for negligent design (forcing bikes to pass on the right of right turning dump trucks that can’t see the cyclists). The driver will happily blame the City, too.
The whole notion of crowding cyclists into turning traffic is dificult. By putting in the sharrows is not the City telling cyclists, “please come this way, it’s a proper design here, go ahead and pass on right even if vehicles can’t see you?”
They did not have a sign saying “watch out for turning vehicles” did they.
Usually it would be illegal for a vehicle to turn right from a center lane so it would be reasonable for the cyclist to assume….a vehicle on his left can’t turn right and come across his path.
Watch a large vehicle, tractor trailer, bus, dump truck-whatever make a right hand turn. It takes a minumum of three lanes. Either you turn right from the second lane out from the curb into a single lane or you turn from a single right lane into two lanes. A good truck driver will do his best to block his “pocket” preventing a car or bicycle from getting in between the truck and curb, but at some point in the turn is often forced to open up the pocket a little-certainly enough for a bike. The thing with this bicyclist who got killed is he was riding a bike with no brakes down a hill. Perhaps the driver seen him and felt that the bicyclist was far enough back to easily brake a little and let the truck complete his turn before passing. Perhaps he didn’t know that some dumb ass bicyclists ride down steep hills without brakes.
PS Go down to third ave during commuter hours when it is bus and bicycles only. Wait until a fixie comes by and watch how the rider controls his movement by anticipating and making assumptions about the movement of the buses. But what if he anticipates or assumes wrong. How does he stop his bike? He can’t so he is forced to take chances like accelerating between two moving vehicles or worse. Even if a vehicle does make a wrong illegal move isn’t the bicyclist responsible for riding a vehicle he can stop to avoid an accident. As a bus driver I can tell you that I never get through an entire shift without having a car run a red light near me or pass me on the left and make a right turn in front of me.
“GOD’S green earth”??? Why, you must be a theocrat!
Speaking as a 75-mile-a-week bike commuter I agree with RR and Another Bus Driver: there are ‘way too many bike riders who do not ride with due care and caution. It’s as if they were riding the closed and cleared roads of the Tour De France and they are offended if you interrupt their dreaming with your presence.
In traffic I never assume anyone can see me, particularly in the dark. I behave as much like a vehicle as I possibly can, including following the rules. If I’m in a bike lane and approaching an intersection, I’m carefully watching the traffic to my left for the guy who’s going to cut right just in front of me. I always try to make eye contact with drivers at intersections or driveways. I have a full set of lights and reflective tape all over the place.
That said, I had a bus pull out in front of me on Monday as well as a car that cut across my path when he took a right across the BGT. I keep my frigging head on a swivel and still I know I’m taking my life in my hands riding to and from work in traffic.
There is plenty of culpability to go around. I don’t know the precise circumstances of this incident but I will say that anybody who rides a fixie in traffic without a helmet is fucking stupid. Times three.
I’ve read as much about this incident as I can find in the mainstream and fringe cycling media, and yet, despite having ridden my bike through the Fuhrman and Eastlake intersection hundreds of times I don’t seem to have the certainty that all of your comments do as to what exactly happened.
Were they passing slow moving traffic on the right (in the “bike lane” – and on that road I use the term advisedly)? That’s pretty risky behavior.
Did the dump truck signal to turn at least 100 feet before the intersection? I imagine that’s the kind of question the police asked the driver and witnesses.
But I haven’t seen it reported. So I’m going to withhold judgment. Were they wearing helmets? Irrelevant. (Though I point out that Seattle has had a mandatory helmet law for cyclists since Summer of 2003.)
Do some cyclists do stupid illegal things in traffic? yes. Do some motorists? Of course. Do more cyclists break the traffic laws than motorists? You don’t know. If you think you know then you have a misunderstanding about what knowledge is.
It happens.
@25
“isn’t the bicyclist responsible for riding a vehicle he can stop to avoid an accident.”
I my book yes, but that doesn’t mean that the cyclist caused the accident.
And again as far as I’m concerned if you want ride your bike on the street that bike should have brakes (brakeless fixies are for track riding) and lights and the rider should have a helmet on.
@28
“Speaking as a 75-mile-a-week bike commuter I agree with RR and Another Bus Driver: there are ‘way too many bike riders who do not ride with due care and caution.”
Yeah, I’m with ya on that one too.
Ekim: Which issue were you looking at again?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/re.....101623.htm
“This research, published online in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology, raises new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming.
“The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth’s climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic,” said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. “Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? “It seems that the answer is no.”
Scientists from Rochester, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the University of Virginia compared the climate change “forecasts” from the 22 most widely-cited global circulation models with tropical temperature data collected by surface, satellite and balloon sensors. The models predicted that the lower atmosphere should warm significantly more than it actually did.”
Fair use claws and copyleft from link above.
Ekim: Thanks for playing.
Posting in multiples like Pelletizer (TM).
Puddy:
the data is from one site. When they do 100 sites and find the same results – then check back in with your overbloated assumptions and incorrect science.
right now the scientific consensus is clear from thousands of published articles. One new article is interesting – but hardly the formation of a new theory.
Let’s see if this holds up in five years – I doubt it – but who knows. Scientists – unlike republicans – have an open mind.
Remember the dump truck hit the bicyclists because of global warming and CO2 emissions.
There you go again NEvercorrectandstillnotright. First, not peer reviewed. If it’s peer reviewed, then not enough scientists. If enough scientists then only one site.
What is left to do with you guys?
Nevercorrectandstillnotright: Many of these “articles” are just rehashes of the same data. Now we are reading about scientists who say the models don’t work. Well if the models don’t work how does the data fit?
Oops… kind of like the glove don’t fit you must acquit!
@21 There’s way too much bad behavior by too damn many car drivers, too.
To tell you the truth, if I’m going to get hit in a crosswalk, I’d rather be hit by a bike than a car. That’s not much of a choice; but if I have to choose between the two …
What’s a “fixie”? Am I to understand there are people who actually, intentionally and knowingly, ride bikes in traffic WITHOUT BRAKES? Were they dropped on their heads by their mothers as infants? Do they bang their heads against walls for fun?
Anyone who rides a bike in traffic with no brakes has a death wish.
Isn’t that against the law? Against about thirty laws? Is this permitted? If it is, why? What is the city thinking?
Personally, I think all bicycles ridden on public streets (sidewalks) should be required to have license plates and liability insurance, just like cars.
I seem to remember an entry on this blog regarding this gentleman.
Why now follow-up guys?
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=3982079
Oh no right wing propaganda!
@40
I’d gladly pay 30 bucks a year to license my bike as long as the money went to pay for bike stuff. People under 18 shouldn’t have to pay.
Fixie= Fixed gear bike. They have no freewheel so your legs are the brakes. They started out as track bikes raced in velodromes and with the addition of a least a front brake are fine on the road, but without that brake you can’t do any form of emergency stop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fixed-gear_bicycle
fixed wheel bicycle, is any bicycle without a freewheel and usually only one gear ratio. The sprocket is screwed directly on to the hub. A reverse-thread lockring is usually fitted to prevent the sprocket from unscrewing.[1]
Because there is no freewheel mechanism, fixed gear bicycles cannot coast. Whenever the rear wheel is turning, the pedals turn in the same direction.[2] By resisting the forward motion of the pedals, a rider is able to slow the bike to a stop, without the aid of a brake.[1] A fixed gear bicycle can also be ridden in reverse – a stunt more than a practical technique.
Alot of bike riders dont obey stop signs or crossings or
get out of my fucking way but what is up when two or three
or four guys all wearing the same outfit while they ride.
Are they Senators? Pedalphiles? Ha. My answer is to
not allow democrats to buy gas or electricity since they
are against all methods of obtaining these comforts.
Global warming solved. Traffic congestion solved. Fuel
prices solved.
You all have no idea…..
“Drinking While Racing – Bike Messengers Race Baltimore”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gBGXS5ZC58