October 28, 2021 /
bikinginla / Comments Off on Driver flees on foot after hitting salmon scooter rider in DTLA, and Long Beach teen rideout marred by shoplifting
LA’s hit-and-run plague just keeps on going.
The LAPD is looking for a shirtless driver who ran off on foot after crashing into a woman riding an e-scooter in DTLA.
The victim was riding against traffic when she was struck, which means the driver probably wouldn’t have faced any consequences if he’d just stuck around.
Instead, he abandoned his car and fled on the sidewalk, for reasons known only to him at this point. It could be that he was drunk or stoned, the car was stolen, or possibly he was in the country illegally and feared deportation.
Or any one of a number of other possible explanations.
Meanwhile, the victim was hospitalized with a head wound, which means there is an automatic $25,000 reward for the arrest and conviction of the suspect.
An Arizona driver who ran a red light and slammed into a Flagstaff bike parade last March, killing one woman and injuring several other people, now faces multiple felony charges for kiddie porn after police discovered thousands of images on his phone when they got a search warrant to determine whether he was distracted at the time of the crash.
This is the cost of traffic violence. A Minnesota man whose license had been revoked faces a charge of criminal vehicular homicide after killing a 73-year old Catholic priest who was riding his bike on the shoulder of a highway; the 26-year old driver has 10 previous convictions for driving with a revoked license in just the last three and a half years. Just one more example of keeping a dangerous driver on the roads until it’s too late. He should have been jailed and his car confiscated after the second offense.
Talk about a rough year. A celebrity chef has filed suit against the NYPD alleging he was brutally beaten for violating a curfew when he attempted to deliver a pizza for a bicycle delivery service, after losing his restaurant when he caught Covid-19.
No bias here. After a Louisiana bike rider was injured in a collision, police bent over backward to blame the victim, while the story fails to mention that the pickup that hit him even had a driver.
International
No surprise here, as data from around the world shows that bikeshare usage goes up with warmer temperatures until it gets too hot, and wet weather discourages people from riding. In other news, water is wet, the pope is Catholic, and bears defecate in wooded areas.
Bicycling injuries rose nearly 31% at an Orange County trauma center, while almost tripling in Portland.
Researchers explained the jump by noting the increase in bicycling rates resulting from the bike boom, as more people took to their bikes for exercise and to break the boredom of being stuck at home.
Although another problem, as we’ve noted before, is the increased severity of bike injuries as drivers took advantage of the emptier streets to put their foot down on the gas pedal.
The same study showed gun-related injuries jumped nearly 25% during the same period.
I missed Streets For All’s Mobility Debate among the candidates to replace pseudo-environmentalist Paul Koretz in CD5 while I was down for the count the past couple days.
Fortunately, LA’s one and only mobility PAC has posted the full debate online.
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Interesting take on the climate change debate, as 44% of Republicans express a willingness to walk and bike more, compared to just 39% who are willing to drive less.
Sadly, this is who we share the road with, too. A speeding 18-year old driver faces a possible murder count for slamming into a Van Nuys building that was hosting a popup Halloween event, killing one woman and injuring several others; the man was reportedly fleeing after police broke up a street takeover.
A 53-year old Santa Barbara man died in his own bathroom, hours after he brushed against a fellow moped rider and fell into the street. While this involves a moped, which is capable of higher speeds than a traditional bike or ped-assist ebike, it’s a reminder to always get checked out by a doctor after a hard fall, because some injuries don’t become apparent until hours later.
Fremont is one of the all-too-rare examples of a city that has actually made Vision Zero work, reducing traffic deaths to an average of just 2.1 per 100,000 residents each year, compared to an average of 9.1 per 100,000 in California, and 11.0 in the US. That also compares to Los Angeles, where Vision Zero has become an afterthought, with city leaders too afraid of angering motoring voters to make the hard choices needed to save lives.
San Francisco began a belated effort to fix southbound Polk street and prepare it for a protected bike lane, five months after a woman was killed and a man seriously injured when a driver used the painted bike lane to bypass a line of stalled traffic, blowing through a red light at twice the speed limit; the other side of the street already has one of the city’s best protected lanes.
DC’s mayor got an earful from both sides, as residents of an affluent neighborhood complained about sacrificing parking spaces to build a protected bike lane, even though only 40% of the city’s residents own cars. The question is how many have driveways or garages they could use instead of free street parking.
Tennery faces just four years behind bars when she’s sentenced for misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter and felony hit-and-run, and will likely serve less than half of that.
Just one more example of California’s failure to take hit-and-run seriously.
This year so far, 21,450 people have died in motor vehicle accidents, up 17 percent from 2019, according to preliminary estimates by the National Safety Council released last month. More than 2.4 million have been injured seriously enough to require medical attention. Usually when millions of Americans are being killed or injured at these rates, it triggers public outcry, even widespread movements. But when it comes to car accidents, we’ve mostly shrugged our shoulders and accepted the carnage as an unavoidable fact of life.
Some myths have mysterious origins. This is not one of them. In 2015, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) published a reportabout vehicle crashes that stated “the critical reason, which is the last event in the crash causal chain, was assigned to the driver in 94 percent of the crashes.” That figure, often stripped of its context, has had a long shelf life, particularly among transportation agencies. For instance, in 2019, the North Dakota Department of Transportation published a report claiming that “94% of motor vehicle crashes can be attributed to a preventable human behavior.” Autonomous-vehicle companies frequently cite the statistic — as Waymo does on its FAQ webpage — when touting the supposed safety benefits of their technology.
But laying blame on the driver lets many other parties off the hook — such as transportation engineers who could have created a safer road. For instance, slip lanes at intersections are intended to allow drivers to maintain speed while making right turns. That design can work well in rural areas, but in cities it often places too much onus on a driver, who must monitor her speed, watch for traffic while merging and yield to pedestrians crossing the slip lane at a crosswalk. If a collision ensues, police will find the driver to be at fault, ignoring the engineers who placed her in a dangerous situation…
The 19-year old driver claims he was avoiding a tractor-trailer that swerved into his lane when he crashed into the victim, who has not been publicly identified.
Just one more example of a driver crashing into the soft, squishy person instead of a big, hard machine.
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While we’re on the subject of SoCal bike crashes, I was forwarded a notice of a man apparently run down from behind while riding in a bike lane on Palos Verdes Drive North in Rolling Hills Estates on Saturday.
Initial reports are he seemed to be okay, but let’s keep our fingers crossed anyway.
And maybe push for a protected bike lane on a dangerous corridor where this crap happens all too often.
Residents of the Mott Haven neighborhood of the Bronx rallied to protest plans for a bike lane that would require removing 150 parking spaces in what they claim is a parking-poor area, arguing that they’ll have to park their cars in dangerous areas, and that no one would use it from October to April. So they’d rather make people on bicycles ride on dangerous streets. And maybe they haven’t noticed that many New Yorkers ride their bikes year round.
The victim was riding with a group of bicyclists on the city’s Rickenbacker Causeway when the officer pulled the patrol car out from the shoulder ahead of the group with red lights flashing, then cut right across the bike lane without warning.
While police say the officer was trying to pull over a bike rider ahead of the group, there’s no sign of that as he turned onto the shoulder and drove back up the other way on the grass.
So here’s my take. And feel free to disagree.
The cop was careless in entering the roadway in front of the group of bike riders, and made no effort to ascertain whether it was safe to turn in front of them.
And if he knew he was going to turn off onto the shoulder, he should have driven on the bike lane, safely following any riders ahead of him, to ensure he did not endanger the riders behind him.
But the people on the bikes also bear responsibility, since they should have maintained their distance while a patrol car had its red lights flashing, rather than closing in behind it.
Now the victim is hospitalized with a broken pelvis.
And the police department is looking at a lawsuit.
While such provisions may sound inconsequential, some of the Manual’s provisions have far-reaching, even deadly, consequences. They prioritize vehicular speed over public safety, mobility over other uses of public space, and driving over other modes of mobility. With these car-centric priorities, the Manual has helped generate a nearly constant and fast-moving stream of vehicle traffic that renders road users like pedestrians, wheelchair users, and cyclists vulnerable. Moreover, by giving preference to driving over other modes of transportation, the Manual has indirectly facilitated a rise in transportation-related greenhouse gas emissions that are the single largest contributor to climate change…
This Essay explains how the Manual biases transportation behavior in dangerous and inequitable ways. It urges the FHWA to use its emergency powers to rescind its most damaging provision — the so-called 85th Percentile Rule, which legalizes dangerously high speeds of traffic — and to undertake a complete rewrite that follows a scientifically sound, evidence-based approach; prioritizes safety, access, equity, climate action, and prosperity; and incorporates feedback from diverse stakeholders.
As you’d expect, it’s not exactly light reading.
But if you care about safety on our streets, it matters.
How to instantly turn one parking spot into eight.
Twitter post
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The war on cars may be a myth, but the war on bikes just keeps going on.
Guardian Angels founder and New York mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa vows to end the city’s entirely imaginary war on vehicles by removing bike lanes and speed cams. So if there’s a war on cars, why are the only victims on the other side?
He gets it. A Boston Globe columnist takes “cranky” Providence RI to task over complaints that bike lanes are “destroying the fabric of the city, ruining small businesses, and terrorizing innocent walkers who just want to take selfies on the pedestrian bridge without getting run over by Mayor Jorge Elorza on his Huffy.”
We may have to deal with dangerous LA drivers, but at least we don’t have to worry about hungry lions, after a Zimbabwean woman disappeared while riding her bicycle, and was later found after apparently becoming a lion’s dinner.
Sometimes, the explanation stinks as much as the project.
And the location.
Anyone who ever drove the 605 Freeway through Baldwin Park and the City of Industry in years past noticed the stench of the duck farm long before it came into sight.
And it lingered long after, making you wonder if the odor was still wafting through the air, or burned into your olfactory nerve.
It’s been 20 years since work began to turn the poultry farm into a park. Although you have to wonder if even that is long enough to get the stink off the land.
But now the stench is wafting from the Metro boardroom, instead.
What’s depressing is how inexorably these small freeway expansion projects continue to advance. And the Metro gaslighting that now promotes polluting auto-focused freeway expansion as good for equity and for active transportation.
He goes on to note that Caltrans bizarrely certified that the project would have no negative environmental impact.
Because apparently, induced demand isn’t a thing anymore.
Equally bizarre, though, is Metro’s attempts at greenwashing the project by touting its extremely limited benefits to alternative transpiration.
Again, from Linton’s Streetsblog piece —
Caltrans and Metro tout the project as benefiting alternative transportation. The environmental documents assert that the project would “enhance bicyclist and pedestrian safety” and “help reduce GHG [greenhouse gas] emissions” by supporting alternative modes of transportation: biking and walking.
All of the non-car features of the project are:
Adding a sidewalk where it is currently missing on the north side of Valley Boulevard – including ADA-mandated features such as wheelchair ramps.
Adding “a widened shoulder to provide a future bike lane along Eastbound Valley Boulevard up to the northbound loop on-ramp.” Installing this 1,400-feet length of bike lanes does not appear to be actually included in the project, but the margin for potential future bike lanes is nonetheless noted as helping reduce GHG emissions.
Reducing the curve radius of the northbound loop on-ramp from eastbound Valley Boulevard; this “would be reduced to slow entering traffic to enhance safety for bicyclists and pedestrians and support use of these alternative modes.” Note that the reason the turning radius is being narrowed is to accommodate a second lane on the current one-lane on-ramp (without taking out the business next door). Caltrans asserts that an upcoming curve radius would slow Southern California drivers entering the on-ramp, and that this would encourage bicycling. Really.
All the extra bike riding this project would inspire wouldn’t begin to offset the environmental and climate damage it would cause.
Then again, it’s hard to offset anything when the bike and pedestrian side of the equation is virtually nil.
Unless you think a possible, noncommittal quarter-mile bike lane that may never be built is enough to offset what would undoubtedly be a major increase in traffic and emissions.
Or that safety for people on foot and bicycles can really be enhanced by adding a second onramp lane.
Admittedly, I’m not lawyer. But it seems like it wouldn’t take a very big cannon to shoot holes in the environmental report for this project.
Or a water pistol, for that matter.
So let’s be honest.
Every member of the Planning Committee who voted in favor of this project — which is all of them — should be ashamed.
Because whatever benefits this freeway widening project may or may not offer, their efforts to bikewash it with negligible benefits to bike riders and pedestrians stinks every bit as much as the duck farm did.
And it will take years to wash that stench off them, too.
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Nice to see an effort by LA Councilmembers Mike Bonin, Paul Krekorian and Paul Koretz to use newly signed state laws to improve safety on our streets.
Twitter post
Then again, Koretz has always been in favor of safety improvements, as long as they’re in someone else’s district.
Instead, it’s about kids as young as six years old being handcuffed and arrested by police — including brutal use-of-force incidents — the overwhelming majority of whom are Black, brown or other people of color.
Here’s just one example they cite.
About 165 miles due south, in the rural hamlet of Paris, Illinois, 15-year-old Skyler Davis was riding his bike near his house when he ran afoul of a local ordinance that prohibited biking and skateboarding in the business district — a law that was rarely enforced, if ever.
But on that day, according to Skyler’s father, Aaron Davis, police officers followed his mentally disabled son in their squad car and chased his bike up over a curb and across the grass.
Officers pursued Skyler into his house and threw him to the floor, handcuffing him and slamming him against a wall, his father said. Davis arrived to see police pulling Skyler — 5 feet tall and barely 80 pounds, with a “pure look of terror” on his face — toward the squad car.
“He’s just a happy kid, riding his bike down the road,” Davis said, “And 30 to 45 seconds later, you see him basically pedaling for his life.”
Seriously, there’s no damn excuse for targeting kids like this, unless they somehow pose a direct threat.
And that’s pretty hard to imagine for a six-year old.
Or an unarmed 15-year old just out for a bike ride.
While it may seem like an obnoxious prank, it should be treated as an assault with a deadly weapon, which could have severe consequences for anyone with allergies or breathing problems.
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Who needs a bike car in the train when you’ve got one in front of it?
Good news and bad news. Bay Area bike riders are happy to learn the hard-won bike lane on the Richmond-San Raphael Bridge won’t have to be closed for construction of a proposed water pipeline. But the approach leading to the bridge will be.
