A street view shows a divided commercial roadway with two lanes in each direction, and a poorly marked painted bike lane on each side.
No information has been released about the victim or how the crash occurred.
This is the 44th bicycling fatality this year, and the fifth in Riverside County.
Update: The victim has been identified as 57-year old Edward Carrothers; no word on where he lived. The occurred on Mission Trail near Sedco Blvd, which is several blocks south of where it was placed by the original report.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for Edward Carrothers and his loved ones.
The latest computer problem was solved with the painful realization that Apple’s iCloud is not your friend. Once that was mostly shut down, the problems I was having seem to have disappeared.
But while BikinginLA was down yesterday, my words were going up somewhere else.
Wes Salmon, host of the popular Seattle podcast The Group Ride, recently made the big move down to Southern California.
And for reasons known only to him, one of the first things he wanted to do after moving here was to invite me to appear on his show.
Personally, I would have gone to Disneyland instead.
Although talking to me was about a hundred dollars cheaper. And only slightly less likely to induce you to lose your lunch.
Nevertheless, yesterday he posted his full 42 minute interview with me. Which should make the perfect soundtrack to today’s post, if your ears and eyes can manage to multitask better than mine.
I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet, so let me know if I embarrassed myself.
A South Carolina writer insists helmets should be required for bikeshare users. Although it should be noted that there have been just two bikeshare fatalities anywhere in the US, with or without helmets. Which makes it seem like a solution in search of a problem.
A Thousand Oaks letter writer accuses the city of social engineering by requiring apartment builders to provide “only” an average of two parking spaces per unit, and allowing adjacent street parking to count towards that requirement. Never mind that the entire history of driving could fit that description.
Great story. One year after a South Carolina man was nearly paralyzed in a collision while riding his bike, he’ll be running in a Napa half marathon, accompanied by the surgeon who saved him — and the driver who hit him.
A Boston bike rider is led away in cuffs after she refused to stop for a bike cop who tried to pull her over for rolling a stop on a bike path; she said she kept riding as a protest against police ticketing bicyclists instead of drivers. Seriously, when a cop tries to pull you over, on two wheels or four, just stop already.
An English writer says she’s fed up with selfish, racing cyclists who only have themselves to blame for not getting hell out of the way of drivers who take up the entire road with their SUVs.
After my laptop was out of commission for ten days when the hard drive died, I finally got it back with all my data intact. Only to encounter a problem with permissions that even Apple didn’t have a clue how to solve.
Fortunately, my Mac guy was able to figure out a way to get everything working beautifully again.
Until tonight, that is.
Suddenly, programs that worked fine last night aren’t working at all, and I’m having to reboot my computer every few minutes.
So once again, I give up on posting anything today.
I’ll be back at the shop again this morning, for about the 20th time in the last two weeks. And hopefully, we’ll be back in business again tomorrow.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go beat my head against the wall.
Never mind that road diets have been shown to increase safety up to 47%. But why let a little detail like that get in the way of a good rant?
Then there’s her screed about Vision Zero coming from — gasp! — Sweden.
Common sense would tell you that traffic solutions should be developed locally without guidance from irrelevant foreign capitals, and that’s why common sense is not in the museum.
During 2016, the first full year of Vision Zero’s implementation in Los Angeles, fatalities in traffic collisions were up a horrifying 43 percent over the previous year.
Although she might have mentioned that all LA did in 2016 was develop a plan for Vision Zero. And to the best of my knowledge, talking about reducing traffic deaths has never caused a single collision.
Or that the purpose of Vision Zero is not to prevent traffic collisions, but to keep people from dying in them, by recognizing that people will always make mistakes, but better roadway designs can keep those mistakes from killing someone.
And never mind that virtually every traffic solution currently in use in LA came from somewhere else. From traffic lights and stop signs, to the billion dollar HOV lanes on the 405.
About the only innovation we can claim is the right turn on red light. Which isn’t exactly a template for safety.
But the topper is this one, where she goes out of her way to have it both ways.
Although city officials consulted extensively with community groups before turning eight-tenths of a mile of Venice Boulevard into one of Mayor Eric Garcetti’s “Great Streets,” the part of the plan that involved taking away a traffic lane in each direction wasn’t exactly displayed on street banners.
So she acknowledges that the city conducted extensive outreach. Then turns around and says it didn’t do enough outreach.
Maybe next time she should do a little basic research so she knows what the hell she’s talking about before flying off the handle.
Or wasting newsprint with uninformed drivel like this.
A Missouri man was doing 93 in a 35 mph zone — and driving on a suspended license — when he slammed into a bicyclist last year; he now faces a charge of first-degree involuntary manslaughter.
An 83-year old Michigan man faces a misdemeanor charge after killing one bicyclist and injuring another in a rear-end collision last year. Older people may depend on their cars for mobility, but we’ve got to find a way to get them off the roads before it’s too late.
Speaking in Oakland, a traffic engineer says protected bike lanes must be the new normal, and urban planners are still trying to undo the damage caused by vehicular cyclists in the 1970s and 80s.
A New Zealand cyclist calls for ripping out a new separated bike lane, after first assuring us he’s one of the good ones — not, he insists, a spandex clad rider on a $5,000 carbon fiber bike, or someone who insists on slowly taking the lane at rush hour.
And was told he could fish them out after the meeting — after one of the security officers dumped coffee into it.
Just another sign of how bike riders are treated in this city.
Never mind how easy it would have been for someone, anyone, to agree to hold them for him until he came back out. Or just how stupid it is to talk about encouraging bicycling, while actively discouraging bicyclists.
And never mind the kneejerk opposition he found to including bikes in the project once he finally got inside the Metro meeting.
Photo from LA Streetsblog.
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Lyft envisions a redesigned Wilshire Blvd that reduces the street’s 10 spacious lanes down to just three narrow one, along with dedicated bus lanes, to show what life could be like in a world of shared, self-driving vehicles.
The plan also includes wider, park-like sidewalks and protected bike lanes.
The company says the narrowed street could accommodate twice as many road users and carry four times as many people as it currently does.
Wilshire capacity before redesign
Wilshire capacity after redesign. Charts from CNN
No word on whether the forces attempting to roll back road diets in Mar Vista and Playa del Rey plan to recall the president of Lyft or file suit to stop the concept while it’s still in the vaporware stage.
Simon Cowell is one of us, as he goes bike riding with his family in the former Biking Black Hole of Beverly Hills, which is finally starting to show some promise.
This is why you shouldn’t chase a bike thief yourself. A pair of Visalia men nearly got shot by a bike thief after they chased him down when they saw him take a bike from their garage.
Bicycling deaths and serious injuries are down 20% since UK police began an undercover operation to catch drivers passing too close to bicyclists. Maybe that will convince the LAPD to finally give it a try.
My laptop is finally back in working order, after ten days and a hard drive-sized hole in my wallet. Which means we’re now back in business, with a lot to catch up on.
And my apologies in advance if I don’t you credit you for something you may have sent me. I’ve tried to keep track of who sent me stories while my computer was down, but may have lost a few along the way.
Like it or not, cyclists are engaged in a civil-rights battle — about whether we deserve a truly safe place on the road, whether people who kill us with cars should face the same legal consequences as people who kill with other weapons, whether hundreds of human lives represent acceptable collateral damage in a properly lubricated car-focused economy.
I love riding fondos and ogling handbuilt frames, but there is actual blood in the street and people need to decide where they stand. You have to decide where you stand.
A British Columbia lawyer who specializes in getting dangerous drivers off the hook says “arrogant cyclists” seldom obey the laws governing bicycling, and drivers should take pictures of their scofflaw behavior and report them to the police. And yet he somehow fails to see any hint of a double standard there.
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If everything went according to plan, Scottish cyclist Mark Beaumont will have set the new record for riding around the world by the time you read this, arriving in Paris in just 79 days — one day ahead of schedule.
Drivers are running over the flex posts marking what passes for protected bike lanes in Oakland. Which should come as no surprise to anyone here in Los Angeles.
If you’re going to take part in a New Orleans area charity ride, don’t leave your Corgi at home. Note to Times-Picayune: not all mass bike rides are races. And if your headline is about dogs, don’t illustrate it with a photo of meat on the grill. Seriously.
And the paper says justice isn’t found in headlines, arguing that an extreme, and extremely rare, case of a bicyclist killing a pedestrian is a poor basis to change the law.
He was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead around 3 pm.
No word on the time of the crash, or who, if anyone, was driving the unidentified vehicle. Let alone whether they remained at the scene, or whether any tickets or charges may be pending.
A street view shows a narrow two-lane roadway with a mostly gravel shoulder; it’s unclear if Frazier was on the roadway at the time of the crash.
This is the 43rd bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the ninth in San Bernardino County.
Update: According to the Victor Valley News, 23-year old Wrightwood resident Sage Aaron Jones Goodman was arrested by CHP officers for fleeing the scene just after 6 pm Friday.
He was being held on $250,000 bond on charges including gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, DUI alcohol or drugs causing bodily injury, and hit-and-run causing death or injury.
Meanwhile, a GoFundMe account has been established to help pay for Frazier’s funeral expenses; as of Wednesday it had raise $1,240 of the $20,000 goal.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for Damian Chase Frazier and all his loved ones.
The driver fled north on Brookhurst, and was last seen turning right onto Ellis.
Police are looking for a red 1990s Ford Mustang with damage to the front end. Anyone with information is urged to call the Fountain Valley Police DepartKent at 714/593-4485.
This is the 42nd bicycling fatality in Southern California this year, and the sixth in Orange County.
It’s also the second fatal hit-and-run in Fountain Valley in the last three weeks, following the death of popular Orange County runner Juan Garcia; an arrest was made in that case.
Update: According to KTLA-5, 25-year old Huntington Beach resident Justin German was arrested later the same day after a tip from someone who recognized the car. Thanks to Peter for the heads-up.
My deepest sympathy and prayers for Bihn Ngo and his loved ones.
