bikes make for agile first responders

Nothing makes for an extra vigilant ride home like seeing a taxi mow down a pedestrian :( #ridereport
— Chrisman Brown (@chrismanbrown) May 17, 2014

So I was riding my bike.

I stopped at a red light, a block from the library, behind a taxi cab.

The lights ahead of us turned green. The cab hesitated a moment, and then started crawling forward, the kind of particular combination of response time and slow acceleration that can indicate a driver being on their phone, or fiddling with their GPS.

But that's not fair. I don't know what the driver was doing.

I do know that he was turning left, from one one-way street to another one-way street. I had expected this because he had had his turn signal on while we were stopped.

I had also expected, based on the slow speed at which he was cruising through the intersection, that he saw the pedestrian in the crosswalk directly in his trajectory.

I was half able to form a "I hope he sees--" thought before the cab continued sailing right through and under the man, who thud rolled up onto the hood, curling his arms and legs into his body so that he looked like a beetle on its back, then stopped just short of the windshield before rolling off to the passenger side of the car and onto the road.

The cab took a moment to pull over and park, and I was at the man's side and calling 911 as the driver was getting out of the car.

The dispatcher asked me dispatcher questions, in answer to which I struggled for an embarrassingly long time (Seconds, probably. Hopefully.) to figure out whether I was on 13th or 14th, and then to understand that I hadn't even then communicated that I wasn't at an address but was outside. "We're in the middle of the street!"

The driver moped around ineffectively. The victim was awake, with no obvious injuries. Breathing, looking around, talking, and doing people things despite--good for him--having moved not one inch since settling onto the ground.

Traffic had cycled once, and I was positioning myself while still on the phone to obstruct the lane so cars would go around when two beat cops showed. Probably three or four minutes had elapsed.

One of the cops addressed the victim and the other addressed traffic. I disconnected with 911 and gave a statement, first verbally then written, to the cop who was now addressing me.

The ambulance arrived promptly, and things proceeded business-like.

The victim continued to appear just fine and the driver just distraught.

He certainly wasn't getting any sympathy from anybody, and was in fact admonished by at least one motorist as she drove by, rolling down her window and telling him he, "needs to be careful!" (I did note the absurdity in that while she was delivering this scolding, she was in the very same crosswalk and her eyes were on us, not the road.)

I was eventually gathering myself up to leave and saw him by standing by himself, leaning against his car, hands on his face. He looked alone and miserable, and I decided to offer him some comfort if he'd have it.

I offered my hand and he took it in both of his. I asked him if he was okay, and told him I was sorry that this had happened. He kind of shrug-nodded and said, "It happened." I gave him another couple seconds, and then left.

I still can't decipher his response. I don't think that, as it may appear, that he meant, "Hey, shit happens. If you're gonna drive an omelette, you're gonna run over a few eggs." Rather, I hope that it's not taken as an inevitability that cabbies are going to hit people, other cars, or other things. I think that instead he was trying to accept what he had just done, and was grappling with what comes next. Which is something for which I have no frame of reference. Can you even still drive a taxi after hitting somebody? Did this guy just lose his job?

In the end, I don't know what he meant, or what became of him or the victim.

The rest of the way home, though, I knew for damn sure exactly where each and every car around me was.

Denver Bike Cop Hit By Truck

Cyclelicious tipped me off this afternoon to the news that a DPD officer was struck by a truck while on bicycle patrol.

Click thru to cyclelicious

I don't see tons of bike cops on Colfax, but I see them there enough to know that it's a thing: bike cops on Colfax. They're there.

I've even observed them perform the highly dubious Sidewalk Ride + Red Light Run combo.

More of the same kind of riding no doubt caused this accident.

The Denver Post—

Denver Police say two officers on bicycles were pedaling west through a crosswalk at the corner of Lafayette Street and Colfax Avenue just before 9 a.m. when the crash happened.

—strongly suggests that they were on the sidewalk and riding against automobile traffic.

9news

The Denver Cruisers claim, as I shared earlier, that uniformed officers can legally ride on the sidewalk while on duty.

And while that may be the case, I think this unfortunate incident proves that it's not a good idea.

Hit by a car

I got hit by a car last Friday on the way to work, just a couple blocks south of the house.

I was riding my scooter and not my bicycle, but I intend to make a few bicycle related comments by the time I’m done.

First of all, I’m okay. Couple scratches, scrapes and bruises. I’m pretty stiff and sore, but uninjured.

Secondly, this was my first accident. As a rider of a scooter and a rider of a bicycle, I considered it largely inevitable that I would eventually encounter traffic, that I would at some point gain corporal knowledge of it. And with that in mind, assuming that it is something that had to have happened at some point, it really happened the best of all possible ways it could have.

I was going down a little two-lane residential street, and a big Mitsubishi SUV started pulling out of an alley to my right. (I can’t be positive about this, but I am of the impression that she was on her cell phone. I seem to recall her hand up by her face, and seeing her mouth moving.) She appeared to slow down. I really thought we had made eye contact, and that sh was stopping so I could pass. So I thought she had seen me and I kept going, but then she started inching out. She wasn’t inching out in an aggressive kind of way, but more in a manner that said she anxious to get out on the road once I had passed. Nonetheless, I noted that she was inching out, and I moved over to the middle of the road and kept an eye on her. And then she lurched forward.

I honked at her and swerved farther away, but couldn’t swerve too far out because a big Toyota Tacoma was parked on the other side of the road. At this point, I had almost cleared the length of the front of her SUV, gotten all the way passed and around her. But then she swerved, and unfortunately, she swerved right into me. Her passenger side headlight connected with the paneling over my rear wheel and engine. That panel flew off, and the rear of my scooter bounced off the car, knocking me over onto my right side and flinging me across the road.

The scooter continued to slide across the road until it slid underneath the Tacoma. (Good clearance on that truck.) The front of the scooter stopped against the rear drivers side wheel, shattering the front of the scoot and cracking the column almost clear around. I rolled off before that impact, skidded out into the street, away from both the Mitsubishi and the Tacoma.

The point at which I might have been seriously injured, and my most lucid memory of the whole event, is the moment when my head bounced off the ground. There are a couple good dents in my helmet. There are so my cyclists who don’t wear helmets, and even more scooterists who don’t wear helmets. Those dents and punctures on my helmet would be in my head right now had I not been wearing mine.

Please, everybody, please wear your helmet.

Total damages to my person:

• Scrape on my right ankle, sprained right foot.
• Small road rash across my left thigh.
• Small hole in my right pants leg, and tearing in my jacket along the right arm and on the back of my right shoulder.
• Cracked camera lens on my cell phone. (I think it rubbed on the ground, making the hole in my pants leg.)

The damages to myself were pretty superficial. The collision took place at very low speeds. All in all, I’m very lucky. The scooter will likely total out, which is fine; I’ll just get a new one.

I got on my bicycle and rode to work the next day, which is something that was very important to me; I wanted badly to be able to get back out on the road right away.

In the time that has elapsed since the accident, I’ve come to believe that it wouldn’t have happened if I was on my bike. There is of course the fact that had I been on my bike, I would have left 20 minutes earlier, and there is the fact that I can stop quicker on my bike, and so would have avoided her in that regard. But I’m also toying with the idea that cyclists (at least in Denver) are more visible than scooterists.

Well, maybe not more visible. In fact, they are probably just as equally visible, but cycles are arguably more appropriately visible.

During the six months that I have been biking in Denver, and during the three months that I have been scooting in Denver, I have had more conflicts with traffic on my scooter than on my bike.

Despite many cyclists’ objections, most drivers view bicycles as inferior vehicles, and to varying degrees they treat them accordingly. They’ll leave the shoulder for them, give them passing room, and otherwise tolerate them for the few moments that they interact with them, or for as long as it takes to pass them.

I believe that many drivers also view scooters as inferior vehicles, and mentally ascribe to them the qualities — speed and size — of a bicycle. I have had cars box me out of lanes, pass me in inappropriate lanes (crossing the double yellow line into the other lane), and otherwise resent my presence on the roar, all while on the scooter. Many drivers, if they see two wheels and it doesn’t look like a Harley or a Japanese crotch rocket, then it is a bicycle. And that is what, perhaps, happened.

I don’t know. It’s a half baked notion. But I am of the impression that motorists react more appropriately to seeing a bicycle than a scooter. I’ll keep thinking on it.