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.

Pedicab vs. Taxicab

Video streaming from a NYC Fox News site, and found on LJ Bikepirates.



Which one of these seems like a disproportionate response to you? Throwing a cup of coffee at somebody's car? Or hitting somebody with your car?

The biggest danger of engaging a motorist is that—

1. motorists have precious few avenues of communication, and
2. a motorist's car is such an extension of his body that it may feel like hitting you with the car is not that different from hitting you with his fist.

In Tom Vanderbilt's Traffic, he says that there are several thing about driving itself that predisposes drivers to frustration and anger, the biggest of them being that it severely limits our abilities to communicate.

Humans are incredibly communicative creatures who rely heavily on nonverbal signals like facial expressions, body posturing, tone of voice and volume of voice. In a car, you are deprived of all of that. Instead, you are expected to use a car horn (often used too frequently) and a turn signal (often not used enough) to express yourself and convey depth and meaning.

Which is ridiculous when you think about it.

So this taxi driver obviously felt he could not adequately express his anger through any combination of sounding car horn and blinking turn signal. It's the torture of an artist, really. Having so much to share and not being able to articulate it satisfactorily.

But when an artist dramatically hurls a canvas painting across a room in frustration, people don't die like they do when a car hurls into people.

I myself had a "failure to communicate" moment the other day during my commute home.

A pickup truck and I were approaching a four-way stop from opposite directions. The truck didn't have its blinkers on, it was in the middle of the traffic lane, and its front tires were pointing straight ahead. So I logically assumed it was going straight.

Right up until it executed a right-hand turn directly across my path.

The truck had plenty of time to complete its turn. This wasn't any kind of a near miss, but I became frustrated at the lack of communication.

I raised my right hand in the air and starting doing that thing you do when you want to tell people to turn their lights on. Repeatedly closing my fist and then spreading my fingers wide. You know, that thing.

The truck then—in a surprise move—quickly pulled over to the side of the intersecting street and the driver hollered out his window, "What?"

Surprised to suddenly find myself in a conversation, I quickly blurted, "TURN SIGNAL!"

In answer to which he called back out, "Okay! Blobby flarggin blip bloop dada!"

Or something like that. I could only make out the "Okay!" before I was too far away to make out what he was saying.

He probably said something like, "Okay! And how about next you don't run the stop sign!"

Cause I did. I idahoed it.

Two sides to every story, right?

Like in the video above.

The pedicab driver ultimately chose to engage the taxicab by throwing his cup of coffee. And then he chose later to throw a friggin trash can at the driver.

I, on the other hand, did not pause or stop to throw anything at this pick-em-up truck. Because I knew I was a little bit wrong in this encounter, and that I would soundly lose an actual confrontation.

I, instead, was pedaling quickly away and discovering my "Donotgetintoafightwithatruck" mantra.

Point is folks, ultimately, go ahead and think twice before engaging the deaf, dumb, blind, raging bull-moose cars you share the road with everyday.