Although the fact that they were riding against traffic wouldn’t matter if the impatient driver hadn’t decided to use the bike lane as an illegal traffic bypass lane.
The victims, identified only as a 41-year old man and a 33-year old woman, both from Upland, were riding in the bike lane on Foothill Blvd and Etiwanda Ave around 8:20 pm.
That’s when 23-year old Fontana resident Robert Gubany allegedly swerved into the bike lane to bypass backed-up traffic, apparently without checking to make sure it was clear, and slammed head-on into the two victims.
The woman died at scene; her companion died after being taken to a local hospital.
According to The Daily Bulletin both victims were homeless; the paper also reports that the woman is 42-years old, rather than 33.
Gabney continued driving without stopping, until he was involved in another crash later that night.
He was arrested at the scene of the second crash on suspicion of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and driving under the influence of alcohol.
Hopefully, prosecutors will add a charge of felony hit-and-run resulting in death.
Anyone with information is urged to call San Bernardino County Sheriff’s investigators at 909/477-2800.
This is just the second and third bicycling fatalities in Southern California this year, and the first two that I’m aware of in San Bernardino County.
They’re also the first two bike riders killed by a hit-and-run driver in Southern California in 2023.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for the victims and all their loved ones.
At least until you reach the bottom of the story, by which time most Times readers have already moved on to Marmaduke.
Instead of reporting objectively, the paper settles for reprinting the long list of complaints from Orange County’s anti-ebike crowd, who seem to consider them the worst tech advance since Elon Musk bought Twitter.
Here’s how the paper frames the story, starting with a longtime Newport Beach resident who compares the local boardwalk to the 405 Freeway.
Three decades ago, Levine moved to what some refer to as the city’s “war zone,” a nickname given not because of crime but for the reputation of summertime rowdiness along the boardwalk, which now includes an abundance of electric bicycles. The strip’s 8 mph speed limit means nothing to some of these people, he said.
He’s watched people get mowed down, dogs hit and too many near misses to count, he said. City leaders for years have studied how to manage the proliferation of e-bikes along the route but have stopped short of banning them.
It’s been a war zone for decades. But ebikes have somehow ruined everything.
Sure, that makes sense.
Then the paper moves on to repeating the same tired and previously discredited stats we’ve been hearing for months from PR staffers at the local hospital trying to fan the flames of an anti-ebike pyre.
During the first 10 months of last year, staffers at Providence Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo documented 198 e-bike injuries. Doctors saw 113 injuries in 2021 and just 34 in 2020, according to data provided by the hospital.
Between January and October of last year, 78 of the 198 people who suffered an injury on an e-bike were not wearing helmets and 99 suffered some type of head injury, data show.
“My feeling about the whole situation with e-bikes is that we got a device a little bit too fast, and the culture is not completely set for it,” said Tetsuya Takeuchi, the trauma medical director at Providence Mission Hospital…
Where to begin.
Evidently, some people who got injured riding ebikes weren’t wearing bike helmets. But most were.
And half of the people who were injured riding an ebike suffered a head injury. Which may or may not have been the 40% who weren’t wearing helmets.
It may come as a shock to the kind and caring people at Providence that some people who ride regular bikes don’t wear helmets, either. And some of them get hurt, too, though not always with head injuries.
Which is just one of the great, inexplicable mysteries of bicycling, that some people who don’t wear bike helmets don’t suffer head injuries, and some who do, do.
Then there’s the exponential increase in ebike injuries. Which just happens to coincide with the exponential increase in ebikes.
That doesn’t mean ebikes are dangerous. Just that a lot of people are using them now.
In fact, I’d consider 198 injuries a relatively small amount, given the untold thousands of Orange County residents who’ve adopted them.
Lastly, let’s consider the question of speed, which has apparently gotten “a little bit too fast.”
Under California law, which has been copied in most states, Class 1 and 2 ebikes, whether ped-assist or throttle-driven, are limited to 20 mph.
Which virtually anyone could top with a decent effort on a decent road bike. Never mind today’s lightweight, technological marvels engineered for every higher speeds.
The bikes, I mean, not the riders. Though some of them have been engineered for speed, too.
Yet somehow, those bikes aren’t considered too fast. And no one has banned 27 speed carbon-fiber bikes or their spandex-clad riders from the boardwalk.
And just wait until the good doctors at Providence learn how fast cars can go, and the damage they cause.
In fact, my stats show 12 people were killed by drivers while riding bikes in Orange County last year, a drop from the obscene 17 killed in 2021.
Ebike riders killed somewhere around zero in Orange County over that same time period, to the best of my knowledge.
So which of these is actually dangerous?
Then there’s the way the paper takes about halfway through the story, after fanning the flames of ebike haters, to even mention that there are different categories of ebikes, and dozens of different types.
And even then, fails to mention that the faster Class 3 ebikes are banned from bike trails that aren’t attached to roadways, beachfront or otherwise.
Or that even people on regular bikes struggle to meet those ridiculously low 8 mph speed limits without falling over.
But once again, no one is seriously suggesting that regular should be banned.
The key, as they finally get around to mentioning just before the end of the story, is behavior.
Someone who is a jerk in a car — or on a skateboard, or with a shopping cart — is just as likely to be a jerk on an ebike.
And a kid who has never been taught to ride a bike safely — electric or otherwise — is going to ride a bike or bike like a, well, kid.
Just what they’re riding doesn’t have a damn thing to do with it.
So let’s put away the torches and pitchforks, and learn to live with all those scary ebike monsters. Because really, they’re not bad, just new and different.
If you’re a pedestrian or cyclist in Los Angeles, you’re probably used to hearing about traffic fatalities in our community. But 2022 was a record-breaking year — in the worst way. Last year, there were 309 traffic fatalities in LA, breaking the 300 mark for the first time in more than twenty years. This is a staggering increase of almost 30% from 2020.
These statistics are tragedies in and of themselves, but they’re made even worse by the fact that pedestrians and cyclists are impacted the most by every measure. Cyclist fatalities alone went up 40% between 2020 and 2022.
We can’t keep living like this. Join us on the steps of City Hall on Saturday, January 21st at 9:30am for a die-in protest. It’s time for our electeds to start paying attention.
They make the same argument I’ve been making for years — bike helmets are designed to protect against relatively low speed falls, not high impact crashes with motor vehicles.
Which is not to say you shouldn’t wear one.
The overwhelming majority of bicycling injuries result from falls, not crashes. Which is exactly what they’re made for.
I still credit my helmet with saving my grey matter, and possibly my life, during the Infamous Beachfront Bee Incident, and never ride without one.
But they should always be considered the last line of defense when everything else fails.
You’re a lot better off not getting hit by a car and its driver in the first place, rather than count on your helmet to save your life if you do.
Even though watermelons smash much easier that teenage skulls, and most heads aren’t filled with seeds.
And yes, I said most.
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Ted Faber finds a pothole that could be the gaping maw of the gates of Hell.
Instagram post
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This is who we share the road with.
An alleged drunk driver in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood backs through a crowd of people trying to stop him from getting behind the wheel, then takes off, leaving injured bystanders strewn in his wake.
Twitter post
Thanks to How the West Was Woke for the heads-up.
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This is who we share the road with, part two.
An South LA man apparently angry about his pending divorce decided to take it out on his wife’s house, and all the cars in the neighborhood.
Apparently, not even Congresspeople are safe from traffic violence, as Oregon Representative Suzanne Bonamici and her husband were struck by a driver as they were crossing a Portland street Friday evening. Although CNN somehow manages to get through the entire story without mentioning that there was someone behind the wheel.
This is who we share the country with. Wyoming, the state where even Liz Cheney wasn’t considered conservative enough, continued its race to the bottom when state legislators proposed banning electric vehicles in a childish tantrum to protect the gas and oil industries.
Young Miami bike riders conducted their annual MLK Day Wheels Up Guns Down ride. But somehow, all the local press could focus on was the usual heavy-handed police response, and the 58 felony and 11 misdemeanor arrests — not the hundreds, if not thousands, of peaceful riders and their message of hope.
Sad news from the Netherlands, where 40-year old retired Dutch pro Lieuwe Westra was found dead, after suffering from depression for several years; nicknamed The Beast, Westra won stages at Paris-Nice, the Tour of California and Critérium du Dauphiné, as well as winning the Tour of Denmark and Driedaagse De Panne.
UCI is telling team cars to back off, instead of giving their riders an extra boost during time trials by changing the airflow behind the rider.
Former Team Sky and British Cycling doctor Richard Freeman has formally lost his medical license as a result of his involvement in a doping scandal, when he was caught ordering testosterone gel for an unnamed male cyclist.
January 13, 2023 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on 38-year Maria Estrada killed riding a bike in unincorporated Nuevo Thursday night, first SoCal bike death this year
It took less than two weeks for the year’s first person to lose their life riding a bicycle on the mean streets of Southern California.
Although how or why seems to be unclear at this time.
Thirty-eight-year old Perris resident Maria Estrada was riding with another person when she was apparently run down by a motorist around 7 pm last night.
Luis Varela was just crossing street at Wilshire Boulevard and Park View Street around 7 pm on Nov. 11th when he was run down by the driver of a dark-colored SUV.
As usual, there is a $25,000 reward for any hit-and-run resulting in serious injury. That will rise to $50,000 if he dies of his injuries.
Meanwhile, a crowdfunding campaign started by Varela’s brother has raised just $1,325 of the $100,000 goal to help pay his medical expenses, and bring his mother in from out of the country to care for him.
The driver who left him there to die should be responsible for that.
And should get locked up for a lot longer than California’s lenient hit-and-run laws will allow.
But won’t be.
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There are now seven people officially qualified to run in the special election to replace former City Council President Nury Martinez, who resigned following the public leak of the racist and otherwise offensive recording she was heard on, along with two other councilmembers.
Which serves as a reminder that the lone remaining councilmember heard on the recording, CD14’s Kevin de León, still won’t do the right thing and resign.
This is the cost of traffic violence, too. After a Georgia bike rider was struck by a driver, a group of bystanders gathered around him to pray. Then just when he started to breathe again, another driver plowed into the group, sending six people to the hospital, with one in critical condition. And we can probably guess who that one is.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
A 75-year old London letter writer complains about “rogue” bicyclists who refuse to use bike lanes when there is a more convenient, but less legal, option available, writing “If people keep on demanding cycle lanes, then why do they not use the damn things?” Because it’s human nature to use a short cut when you find one.
The LA Times agrees with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to reduce spending to close a projected $22.5 billion budget deficit, but argues the state will need to make up for the $6 billion cut in climate change funding, including investments in public transit, bike and pedestrian projects.
Shades of Nipper. Your next throttle-controlled, dirt bike-style ebike could be distracted by listening to its master’s voice, as RCA makes a leap into electric bikes. Let’s hope its better than their electronics have been in recent decades.
Salt Lake City announced plans to join the national Vision Zero Network in the face of rising traffic deaths and injuries. Let’s hope they actually fund and implement the program, unlike a certain SoCal megalopolis we could name.
Police in Durango, Colorado have charged a pair of football players from the local college as co-defendants in an alleged drunken hit-and-run that took the life of a firefighter; the two are accused of helping a third man flee the scene, leaving his car behind with the victim still lodged in the car’s windshield, and his bike stuck underneath.
No surprise here, unfortunately, as a Dutch study has shown a high prevalence of low bone density in the pro cycling peloton. If bicycling is your primary form of exercise, you should think about adding weight training and/or high impact exercises.
It looks like we finally have a winner for all those Tour de France titles Lance unwillingly vacated.
The highway has been closed for the past 45 years following “massive mud and rock slides caused by heavy rains and floods.”
Greenspon writes that the closed roadway has long been a popular bucket list ride for many area bicyclists, and part of the more than 90-mile “Circle of Doom” loop.
The choices presented by Caltrans include a no build option, as well as options for emergency vehicles only, or active transportation use. Other choices include a full reopening, building a separate viaduct, or a single travel lane through the currently closed section.
Depending on the final decision, the rebuild could cost anywhere from $175-$325 million.
The question is why the road should be reopened at all, since the past nearly five decades have shown it isn’t really needed.
Do the absolute minimum to make it safer for hiking and biking, and leave it the hell alone.
I’m not sure where I found today’s generic mountain biking photo, but here it is anyway.
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Here’s your chance to make a real difference for active transportation in the San Gabriel Valley, with one of SoCal’s most effective advocacy groups.
The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps on going.
Good question. The Guardian’s Peter Walker wonders why plans to reduce traffic attract so many conspiracy theorists, as a project in Oxford, England is attacked as a global plot to strip people of their fundamental rights and personal possessions in the name of the environment.
But sometimes, it’s the people on two wheels behaving badly.
No bias here. A bike-riding Karen goes ballistic, apparently because a man was walking his dog in a bike lane. Then a New York councilmember displays her own ugly prejudice by painting all bike riders with the same brush. Thanks to Ravener for the heads-up.
Bad news from Modesto, where a man riding a BMX bike was killed in a head-on collision, after allegedly riding onto the wrong side of the road to pass a slow moving semi. The CHP naturally saw that as an opportunity to remind bike riders to wear a helmet, as if a thin plastic beanie could protect someone from a head-on crash with a motor vehicle. And yes, I believe in using a bike helmet, but they were designed to protect against slow speed falls, not crashes with cars.
This is what’s possible, Los Angeles. The company that operates the arena that’s home to Portland’s NBA team and dozens of other events is opposing a new offramp that could make a dangerous nearby intersection even worse, especially since half of their guests arrive by bicycle or on foot. There’s no reason The Crypt or the Coliseum couldn’t do the same with better infrastructure.
CityLabexamines the world’s most congested cities, where motor vehicle traffic grinds to a halt on a regular basis. Surprisingly, Los Angeles doesn’t even make the top ten, though Chicago, New York, Philly and Boston do. Neither does Mexico City, which consistently makes, if not tops, other similar lists.
The New York Times says sales of electric vehicles are booming around the world. But you have to get down to the last paragraph before learning that Americans bought twice as many ebikes as e-cars in 2020 — and there are ten times as many electric scooters, mopeds and motorcycles on the world’s roads than there are electric cars.
Speaking of Prince Harry and his “todger,” Britain’s naked cross-country bicyclist says there’s no better place to lose your virginity than an open field, as the young prince says he did.
