Coming up on five years year anniversary of my cousin going to dinner with wife and son, after a day on the lake and in a small town of 500 people. They parked safely on a big wide 25mph street in the town center which is only 3 blocks long.
As he stepped out of his car, two losers stoned on opioids sideswiped my cousin and the car WHILE his wife and son stood on the sidewalk looking on in horror.
And then the hit-and-run losers crushed the car and buried it, straight out of a Hollywood movie. If it wasn’t for a tip they would have gotten away with murder.
Yikes! Like that woman that hit a pedestrian and drove home with them stuck in their windshield! What kind of monster would do that?! There just aren’t words. And the politician that hit a guy walking along a road, HOLY CRAP!
But this is one horrific story, and I hope the perpetrators have/had a long sentence in prison to think about their actions. Just horrifying…
I found this very interesting. One thing I took away from it is that people are generally really poor at assessing risks. I often have to do risk assessments at work because I work with students, and there we score “likelihood” against “severity”. Clearly something hat is both likely to happen and severe in outcome needs to be mitigated or avoided, but where the likelihood is low but the severity is high, the required mitigations can be much less clear (e.g. train crash). We do normally score driving or getting in cars with unknown drivers as risky activities.
And he’s up for parole next November. Wow. Due to get out September 2032. (And why concurrent? That’s not helping either!)
There was a huge car/bike accident in Kalamazoo a few years ago involving a repeat offender I read. Hope they gave that monster life.
If drunk driving brought a life sentence, mandatory, it likely wouldn’t stop drunk driving, but it would pull the repeat offenders off the roads. Tiffany was on a ‘suspended license’ too. Drunk driving I wonder? Just horrific!! I told my stupid DWI brother that I’d support throwing him in prison for life if he did it again and killed someone. No excuse. No accountability.
Not meaning to make light of all this with a little bit of humor, but when people ask me why I all but gave up riding outside, I say ‘It’s harder to fall off my bike’. and ‘No cars, people, dogs, or chipmunks’. On a damn fundraiser ride as we were riding through a rundown area, there was a house with a bunch of ‘good old boys’ sitting in the front yard guzzling beers and encouraging their Cujo to chase us as we rode by. Eventually the police were called, and the owners took the dog inside, only to let it go again a while later as the last of the riders passed. I do believe it caught and bit a rider.
Stupid People. Mean People. Mean Stupid People. And I’d bet they would sue if someone shot their four legged weapon.
All we want to do is ride… (One of the last times I rode in my hometown, a ratty truck rode up and the driver yelled out the window ‘It’s too bad that’s not a red shirt!’ as I sat at an intersection. I was wearing a Star Trek jersey. For the non-Trekkies here, in almost every episode where crew die, they have red shirts on. I did not take that as a joke) Mean stupid people are everywhere…
There is a movie called ‘Premium Rush’ that is about bike messengers, and the main character goes through those kind of calculations repeatedly in the movie. It’s a great movie for that and the bike scenes, but didn’t get rave reviews for some reason. I think it helped make me a more cautious and aware cyclist.
One of the hottest local topics in my small city is a main road that got itself a road diet. It needed something, as the amount of accidents was much higher than the state’s average for a particular road type. This is a 4/3 conversion - 4 lanes of traffic, down to 2, a center turning lane and, since there’s room - bike lanes on both sides. Everyone against this (there’s a lot of push back on this project) quotes the bike lanes being problematic, and that there’s not enough cyclists using it to justify it. Of course, they fail to admit that the bike lanes are merely a by-product of the road diet and not the driving force for the change. The amount of hate spewing from these comments is impressive; the saddest is that there are quite a few cyclists vocalizing their distaste for the plan as well. It’s quite amazing how riding a bicycle for either pleasure or transportation has gotten more politicized. Humans are proving to be quite a selfish lot.
"Cars pose an existential threat to cyclists in a way that doesn’t apply the other way around, he says: “The cyclist experiences something much more unpleasant, much more threatening and terrifying than an occupant of a vehicle. That’s why when you threaten a cyclist, they may have a massive rush of adrenaline and swear back at you. That’s why the interaction sticks in the brains of both sides in a way that other road rage doesn’t.” "
This is somewhere between being devil’s advocate and/or just a stupid question. Why the stark difference between the two? They made the same decisions and the difference in outcome is largely due to chance / whether someone is unlucky enough to cross paths with them. Going forward I’d guess that the latter would be a safer driver (assuming they’re not psychopathic, anyhow). Though I wouldn’t want either of them driving.
I am wrapping up a cycling tour in Colombia that spanned a week. We have had follow cars but sometimes the group splits up or the cars go ahead on a climb. I’ve not been angry honked at once, not spit at, not yelled at, not buzzed closely. You see all sorts of people in all sorts of modes of transportation for recreation or transportation.
I’m scared of returning home and riding my bike on the road again knowing what I’ll have to put up with.
True. 25 for DUI, and 25 to life for being in an accident. It can be argued that they both knew what they were doing at some level, so making the base penalty the same makes some sense, but the idea for a shorter sentence for just DUI hopes they change their ways in prison.
If only we ran the world? (People would be voting us out pretty quickly?) Society accepts a lot of things that many people wouldn’t if you asked them if it happened directly to them. ‘Would you be in favor of a 25 to life prison sentence if a drunk driver killed your family?’, rather then asking it in more general terms.
And, unfortunately the often (caution, generalizations) under-educated bored threatened mean angry impotent self-emasculated entitled videogame-addicted waste of skin often feels exhilarated and powerful. They seem to think threatening people on bikes is their right and they are doing society a favor. Amazing… One 70-something was terrorizing cyclists on a major bike road route north of my home. I had ridden that road many times, but never had the honor of his wrath, but he was a later afternoon terrorist. But he buzzed one line of riders too much, and the encounter was caught on a GoPro, as well as a confrontation with some of the riders. They alerted police and were given a phone number to call ‘if’ it happened again. And of course it did. He was convinced that ‘all’ bikes had to ride on the sidewalk, even though there was no sidewalk anywhere hear, and had to ride ‘off the road’ on the thin shoulder. After being FINALLY confronted by police, he stopped, but he was infamous for brushing echelons with an inch to spare. He was such a mean POS. He was enlightened: Share the road, toad… But he thought he was in the right and it was HIS right to punish ‘us’. What a world… I had a couple of encounters with what might have been his grandson on that same road. That was when I suggested ride leaders carry a concealed weapon. It seems at time that it really could get that bad. Holy crap… (That’s when I found out that it was illegal to fire a gun from a bicycle. Well, seems more like common sense? Anyway, sense isn’t very common)
And it’s just damned falling down crying that terrorizing cyclists is so widespread.
