I’ve been hit twice by cars while riding my bicycle; my daughter was hit by a pickup truck; and I hit a car.
The car was at a stop sign waiting to turn left. The teenage driver didn’t “see” even though I was wearing a bright red jersey and there were no obstructions. I’d thought that I’d made eye contact with the driver even. Wrong. He pulled out and I hit the left front tire. I did a 3-point landing: two hands and my head. Sure glad that I had on a helmet. That thing exploded but my head and neck were about the only thing that didn’t hurt after that bad landing.
I was riding on the far right side of the road. The driver passed me and made an immediate right turn which caused me to hit the side of the car.
My daughter had a pickup truck coming from the opposite direction make a left turn in front of her and hit the side. She was on the brakes and fortunately didn’t hit the truck all that hard.
I failed to stop quick enough and ran into the back of a car that was stopped to make a left turn. My fault!
There is an intersection in downtown Montreal that I pass through regularly on foot that seems to be set up for an accident. It is a wide one-way street with a two-way bike path to the left of the traffic. The cross street is two-way with a center divider (not really relveant). There is traffic light. Lots of cars, lot of pedestrians and lots of bikes. A car that wants to turn left onto the two-way street has to wait till the pedestrians stop, generally a few seconds before the light turns. They will tun part way and wait. Being turned part way, they certainly can’t see a bike in their rear or side view mirrors. But they are not turned enough really see what is coming up on the bike path. It is an accident waiting to happen and it was obvious to me from the first time I saw it after the bike path was established.
Here is another place that I do drive regularly. When going to concerts in the evening, I always park in a certain parking lot. The entrance is on a street that has a bike lane on the right. But the entrance isn’t far from the corner so that, although I always use my turn signal, a cyclist barreling down the street will not realize where I am turning. And once I begin to turn my mirrors are useless for the bike path. It is also somewhat downhill so bikes really came barreling down the street and cannot stop on a dime. I try to edge in slowly to signal my intentions. but I am really afraid that some bike is not going to realize this and come right into me. To complicate things there may also be pedestrians I have to wait for, not to mention impatient drivers behind me.
Yeah, I had an (a) once upon a time: driver was turning right (UK), had stopped to admire the view, carried on after a short pause and didn’t re-check that the other lane was clear - and there I was about ten yards away doing 30 mph.
The bike needed a rebuild of everything forward of the engine, but I walked away with barely a scratch.
Just to be clear, you’re talking about a motorcycle here, right?
My one collision with a car occurred while I was cycling through a cloverleaf intersection. I stayed on the border between the rightmost “going straight” lane and the exit ramp, in front of a tall freight truck that had taken the exit ramp getting ready to turn west. This truck blocked the view of a driver who had just merged onto the road from I-95, and she tried changing lanes (from the exit ramp to the “going straight” lane where I was) without noticing the slower-moving bicycle that she was about to collide with. Luckily the collision launched me into the air well clear of the oncoming traffic, so only the bike was destroyed and not the rider.
That’ll work, but it may or may not actually be legal (depending on jurisdiction, of course). In some places, bicycles are required by law to be as far to the right as possible, except when making left turns.
And the last collision I was in on my bike (fortunately minor; I was completely unhurt, though I had to replace the rear wheel) I think was due to “unintentional acceleration”: That is to say, the driver saw me and attempted to brake, but accidentally hit the wrong pedal. This isn’t actually consistent with her account of the accident, but her account was inconsistent with what I saw, and I’ve learned from years of teaching that what people say they think often isn’t what they actually think.
When the car is at fault, these are the two most common I encounter.
When the bicyclist is at fault I usually see:
running a stop sign and getting broadsided by cross traffic that didn’t have a stop sign or traffic light (very often associated with sidewalk riding).
overtaking a car on the left/right while it is making a left/right turn
The majority of times I remember seeing the motorcyclist at fault it has to do with speed and their inability to deal with normal traffic motion. Or dumbass motorcycle community stuff where The Big Dog does something that gets misinterpreted by the following riders and 10-20 go down like dominoes.
One of my co-workers was hit by a truck that overtook and cut across in front of him to make a turn. But my co-worker was in a car.
If he had been on a bicycle, the truck driver would have been saying “I didn’t see you, you came up on the inside”. But since he was in a car, the truck driver was saying “I didn’t see you, you came up on the inside”…
From what I know from riding a bicycle for decades, in Ontario (and the rest of Canada, AFAIK) a bicycle is considered a slow-moving vehicle, but a vehicle - as such it must obey all traffic laws but has the right, like any vehicle, to occupy the (right-most) lane. It’s no different than farmer John on his tractor, it is the responsibility of overtaking traffic to pass in a safe and responsible manner.
Oh, and even in the 60’s when I was a kid, it was known that you could not ride on the sidewalk if the bike had greater than 20-inch(?) tires, but I never have heard of anyone getting an actual ticket for it in all this time. I suppose if you drove stupid enough they might ticket you.
One reason why car drivers simply do not see a bike bearing down on them is “saccades”. “When you move your head and eyes to scan a scene, your eyes are incapable of moving smoothly across it and seeing everything. Instead, you see in the image in a series of very quick jumps with very short pauses (called fixations) and it is only during the pauses that an image is processed.”
Your brain fills in the gaps with a combination of peripheral vision and an assumption that what is in the gaps must be the same as what you see during the pauses.
Read this and use the technique to improve your driving.
In most US states, bicycles are required by law to be as far right is practicable. This is very different from “far right as physically possible.” It means you can use your judgment and decide how far right you can safely ride.
Gus ol’ buddy … I think he meant that the causes he lists cover most of the accidents where motorcyclists are at fault. But he also means that accidents in total are rarely the motorcyclists’ fault.
One of the factors that led me to stop riding my bike to work years ago was the number of times a car passed me with their right turn signal on. One particularly clueless asshole passed me and then stopped and waited for me to pass him again on the right before making his turn.
Motorcyclists seem like they are VERY aware of being near death pretty much all the time and they drive accordingly. When I’m lucky enough to be able to take a statement from one they usually get into the technicalities of what they did, what they were responding to, and what they saw going on around them that led them to rule out certain actions and decide to take some other. They know what happened.
Bicyclists…refuse to entertain the possibility they may have contributed to the accident, or explain why they did anything. They had a right to be where they were and how dare I question them. They have no clue what happened, it’s just the car’s fault for hitting them. Makes me nuts.
ETA: Not saying ALL cyclists are clueless, just the ones who manage to get hit by cars.
If you passed him 30 feet from the intersection it was probably you that was wrong. You are not supposed to pass vehicles that close to an intersection.
Also, did you move to the left lane to pass and then cut back into the right lane in from of him? That accident would be your fault.
Did you edge over to the side but stay in the right lane as you passed him? That accident would also be your fault
**On a second read, I take this back, IF the was on the sidewalk, which you seem unsure of. But if you did all this with a bike that was on the street, it was all on you. **
LSL & TGSJ, I seem to have misread or miss understood the post.
I still think the terms speed and their inability to deal with normal traffic motion means stupid kids doing wheelies while splitting lanes, etc. and **The Big Dog does something that gets misinterpreted by the following riders and 10-20 go down like dominoes. ** is just prejudice against any one on an HD.
I say many things that people misinterpret so I am sure to do the same thing. Sorry. My bad.
My theory isn’t that the car driver doesn’t see the bicyclist or recognize them, it’s that a bicycle is automatically classified as a ‘almost stationary’ object, like a pedestrian. I’ve been riding down the street, looked a driver on a side street/driveway right in the eye long enough to be sure they saw me, and then they try to pull out when I’m 15 yards away (going 15-20 mph).
Naw man, you’re good. Friggin text-only speak invites misunderstanding. My only critique is–not prejudiced against HD folk (although I freely admit I understand them only with an anthropologist’s perspective), as much as motorcyclists who have an affinity for groupride: left/right staggered formation with essentially no sense of following distance and all the subtle rules that make it possible to do without ensuring maximum lethality every time. Generally it is awe-inspiring and cringe-inducing at the same time for a 4-wheeler like me, but it seems to float their boats. Until (actual claim statement here) someone up front pokes his arm out to signal a left turn, and someone further back thinks he’s pointing at a deer and so looks into the treeline to his left while everyone else is braking…and a year later I’m paying for a knee replacement and shoulder reconstruction.