The stark reality is that bicyclists are the rodneydangerfields of the roads. If there is a fatal accident, it is automatically the cyclists fault unless there are tolstoys of evidence to the contrary. Most of the time, there are no reliable witnesses except the driver, and even though the scrapes and skidmarks might say otherwise, drivers almost always get the benefit of the doubt.
And TBH, I can understand how the grand jury ruled the way they did. I mean, most or all of them drive cars: what if they were to clip a cyclist because he was doing something stupid (because they all do stupid shit all the time), got to protect the roads and keep them safe for the motorists who, after all, have somewhere serious to go and have no spare time to diddle around on one of the bike things.
That is how it is. Most people do think that way, that the roads are the sole province of cars and trucks, anyone else uses them at their peril. AFAICT, it will continue to be that way for a while.
What information do you think you have that justifies your assessment of the Grand Jury? The tractor passed the cyclist. That tells us that there was sufficient room to pass but it doesn’t specify how much room that consists of. But in order for the trailer to close the gap the tractor has to veer to the right and the trailer has to follow until the back again lines up with the front of the trailer. It’s not instantaneous.
From the description of the rider and the distance he traveled before the accident it appears he was on a lightweight racing bike. He had to be traveling at a fairly high speed to stay ahead of the truck and this would not be a great bike for curb jumping at the last second. From my experience riding with people with racing bikes they get into trouble really quickly. tagging a curve without realizing it could easily launch the bike into the street.
Who do you blame in this situation even if you knew for a fact that is what happened? All we know is that the truck driver passed him and the cyclist is seen spitting out the back end of the trailer. We don’t know the distance from the curb of the trailer at the time of impact. Personally, I would think that if the trailer struck the bike rider it would be the side edge of the trailer hitting the arm or shoulder of the rider. This would have launched him over the curb onto the sidewalk.
But it all comes down to a lack of evidence of where the truck was in relation to the curb and how exactly the rider and bike went under the back wheels of the trailer.
I don’t know if I’d call cyclists the RD’s of the road but if you look at the area this took place at it doesn’t seem like the kind of roads with a lot of bike traffic. Just thinking back on the roads I use to ride on as a teenager I would seriously reconsider doing it today. Traffic is a lot denser then it use to be and kids just don’t ride bikes like they did in my day. Sorry to sound like an old fart but that’s the reality of it. I would suggest cyclists are more like deer in the middle of the road and people are somewhat surprised to come upon them. It’s to the point now that when I pass a bike on a busy road I pump my brakes rapidly so the guy behind me gets some kind of alert with the flashing brake lights.
I’m a cyclist. I ride outdoors in the good months, run a virtual race league in the winter, I have a moderately high-end bike, yes, I wear Lycra on the weekends (and sometimes even ride my bike), and I’ve ridden in dozens of cities around the world, big and small, including Manhattan, Tokyo and London.
And based on what I’ve seen/read from the police reports, the cyclist here is 100% in the wrong.
Because I also read the report as the cyclist tried to race the truck. The truck came up from behind the cyclist and passed the cyclist - maybe he was doing intervals and didn’t want to slow down, who knows.
Clip-in pedal bikes are scary: you can’t just put your foot down to stop/steady yourself. The last thing you want while trying to out-run an 18-wheeler coming up from behind you, is for your pedal to clip the curb, or for there to be a bit of loose gravel on the road and you wobble a bit - any number of unpleasant things could happen, and the slightest bobble could send you under the wheels of a gi-normous truck. If he slows down/stops and lets the truck pass, he goes on his merry way. Instead it seems like he tried to stay in front of the truck, with tragic results.
And I highly doubt the average weekend cyclist can or would even try to bunny-hop a curb, let alone trying to do it with a big 18-wheeler righ sitting on your left hip.
True, we never have all the information. Even the GJ didn’t have all the info. But, they had about 100X what you have. Now, if you did have at least the information on which the GJ based it’s decision, you could legitimately question it. As it is, your call of “bullshit’ is out of ignorance.
And sure you can do something. You can volunteer to sit on the GJ.
Clipless. That type of pedal is called clipless. Look it up.
And yes they are scary for about the first 5 minutes.
Personally I find clipless to be much more reassuring to ride than flat pedals. Once I an in them there is a zero chance my foot will slip off the pedal due to a bump or pothole.
Your argument that he was racing is pure bullshit. If he was under the speed limit is all that matters. If he was going 3 MPH people would argue he was going too slow.
The bottom line here is if the dead guy had been in a Smart car and had been hit and killed by that truck making that pass at that location nobody would be arguing that it was his fault. The law is that a bicycle is a vehicle just like a Smart Car. It is the legal responsibility of the overtaking vehicle to makes safe pass.
But since a bicycle is the Rodney Dangerfield of vehicles people feel free to blame the victim.
FWIW, I read the report and it seemed like 100% indictment, especially based on the driver’s shady testimony where he repeatedly denies hitting the poor bicyclist-- the normal response to a police officer telling you your truck just killed a bicyclist is surprise and horror, not such staunch, stubborn denial. The driver clearly didn’t give a fuck. The police kept telling him it wasn’t necessarily his fault, and he STILL kept denying it. IMHO, the innocent response is “Oh my god, how terrible, I had no idea!” not “Nope, sorry, that didn’t happen.”
That being said, my dad drives a motorcycle, and he’s always said that you have to be extra vigilant, even if you have the right of way. He can tell dozens of stories about cars just blowing right in front of him as if he’s not even there-- and he’s got a sizable Harley!
So that rule must go double for bikes, as unfortunate as it is. Semi tucks have tremendous blind spots that make me wary of them-- even when I’m in a car I feel uncomfortable alongside them.
The GJ didn’t rule or even consider ‘fault”. The ‘fault” may be entirely the truckers. What they decided is if there is enuf evidence to go forward with CRIMINAL charges. There wasn’t.
they make it difficult to pull your foot out quickly. I had a friend riding in front of me go down on his bike while crossing diagonally on greasy railroad tracks. I was able to jump off my bike pick it up and step over him. Had I been using a clip pedal it would have been a tangled mess of bikes and body parts.
It’s not pure bullshit. He outran a truck for the first 350 feet. Witness #1 said the truck was moving fast. If you don’t like the semantics of the word consider that the cyclist couldn’t keep that pace up for any length of time. That’s why we’re saying he was racing the truck.
The bottom line is that he’s dead and it was something easily foreseeable and avoidable. If you saw your child riding in the same scenario you would absolute tell them to get off the road. The law doesn’t mean fuck when you’re dead. Big truck + narrowing road = deadly situation for cyclist.
I ride pretty regularly, and in scary traffic. So my sympathies are with the cyclist in most situations.
But if the accident happened 350’ from where we saw the truck beginning the overtaking manouvere I’d have to say the cyclist here was being a dumb fuck of some sort or another.
You don’t pace a 40’ rig on a narrowing road. Simple as that. Don’t care if you have the right of way or not. It’s not something you do if you want a long life.
I’ve put in over 2000km cycling each year for over a decade, Marmotte and l’etape 3 times each. I hardly need a vocabularly lesson from you. 90% of the general population, and even gasp! some cyclists, call them clip-in pedals. Look it up. So one big :rolleyes: right back at you.
Thanks for completely missing the point. Sure, cyclists find them reassuring because we’re trying to maximize pedaling efficiency. But no, they are not ‘less scary’ when racing an 18-wheeler on a gradually narrowing road, because that bump or pothole that otherwise just makes your foot come off the pedal’ means you -are- going to crash.
Who said anything about his absolute speed? It’s the relative speed we’re talking about. He tried to stay in front of a big-ass truck on a narrow road.
:rolleyes:
Go take your cycling insecurity / inferiority complexes somewhere else, the grownups here are trying to talk.
For inexperienced riders, yes it can. But I can get my feet out of clipless pedals pretty much at will, and they keep my feet on the pedals when I hit bumps or rough roads. Clipless aren’t a significant factor in this accident, IMO.
maybe, maybe not. I’ve run the scenario through my head from both POV’s and what I come up with is an “aw fuck” moment when both realize the space available for the cyclist is small. From the trucker’s POV he managed to clear the cyclist and he keeps going. from the cyclist’s POV a very large truck is going by inches away. He’s going to be hugging the edge of the road. If he glances at the truck at all the natural reaction is to veer to the right. Even if that is only a few inches it means striking the curb. At that point a lot happens in the fraction of a second. I can’t say the pedal clips added to the situation but it wouldn’t take much of a delay for it to matter.
You misunderstand. It is not about an “inferiority complex”, it is how cyclists are treated by the system. Just about everyone uses cars, the number that do not is vanishingly small. So, bicycles are a nuisance, not to mention dangerous*, when they are involved in an accident, it is rare that the motorist gets blamed. People want to drive around at will without being inconvenienced by those crazy guys in neon lycra, they tend to have little tolerance for the antics that get those guys pizzaed.
*The reality is that there are more pedestrian fatalities per year than cyclist fatalities. Bicycling is not as dangerous as we think, and, in fact, very few bicycles get rear-ended from riding in the road. It seems as though everything we believe is just wrong
I’m going to accept the premise you’re going for. A cyclist on a country road is not a nuisance. In my experience drivers don’t abide by the 3 foot rule but instead give a wider berth which involves taking part of the opposing lane. I don’t know about other drivers but I do it under the possibility that the cyclist may go off the road and hit gravel or a curb and fall back into the road. The dynamic of this changes when cyclists take to roads that don’t provide comfortable clearances. They are now in the way and disrupt traffic flow. If traffic isn’t solid in both directions there is generally cooperation from drivers in both lanes. Both will move away from the cyclist. If traffic is solid in both lanes than the driver behind the cyclist has to make an estimation of the minimum space available. By law a car has to give way to a bicycle. I’d hate to guess at the number of laws broken on roadways on any given day whether intentionally or by accident.
So to summarize, I can see where a cyclist is considered a nuisance on some level particularly on a busy road. That aside it’s still prudent on the part of the cyclist to minimize the risk factor while riding. I can’t imagine putting myself in the position this cyclist did. I would have taken the sidewalk or stopped. I do this ALL THE TIME while I’m riding. It’s not like I don’t do reckless things in life. I just weigh the outcome first. I was lucky enough to strike a moving car and walk away as a kid.
For the dozenth time, the cyclist is NOT getting “blamed” here. Very likely the truck driver will get sued and have to pay up, the “blame” is likely his.
BUT, the GJ simply said there was not enough evidence to charge him with a serious crime. Nothing whatsoever to do with “blame”.
As a pedestrian, I find more and more cyclists are using the sidewalks, and many of them don’t show any more courtesy for pedestrians than drivers show for them.
Over 2000Km per year, and you don’t use clipless pedals? If this is true you will be the first person I have met in my life that rides even half that far without clipless.
No one has yet to answer the question I asked in post 68. If the dead guy had been in a car and got run over by that truck would you still be blaming the victim? If so why? If not why not?