On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 9/1/2012
Guilty Until Proven Innocent
Oh dear, here we go again: another installment of the never-ending discussion about cars-vs-bikes. Again? Yes, again. Look, I'm just as sorry as I can be to have to revisit this old chestnut one more time. I would really rather be writing about the happy side of cycling; about the wonderful tour I just did up in Oregon or about the exciting Vuelta taking place right now. (Perhaps next month for that one.) But at this time and place--summer of 2012 in the North Bay--cars-vs-bikes is the issue of the moment, the big, bad bogeyman hogging the limelight.
In my July column, I recounted the tale of my own close encounter with a car--getting clobbered by a BMW--and then added some thoughts about the recent run of incidents in which cyclists on Sonoma and Napa County roads had been hit by cars and killed. There had been, up to that point, five fatalities in a little over a month (more bike fatalities in that one stretch than there had been in the previous five years). I'm sorry to have to report now that that hasn't been the end of it. There have recently been three more fatal collisions and two injury collisions. Normally, mere injury-level incidents wouldn't be especially newsworthy, but as you will see, each of these turns out to have been quite extraordinary and worthy of a good deal of news coverage.
In two of the most recent fatals, the scenarios are sadly, predictably similar. In both cases, the cyclists were descending, and in both cases, cars coming from the opposite direction attempted to turn left in front of them. According to the police, the drivers in each case were not drunk, nor on the phone, etc. However, in both cases, the drivers made what turned out to be the same fatal error: they failed to yield to oncoming traffic, in each case a cyclist. In the third case, it appears the cyclist was "right-hooked" by a big rig truck. That is, the truck passed the cyclist and turned right in front of him, apparently unaware that the cyclist was there.
No one wants to demonize these drivers. They're not monsters. They were just careless…not fully paying attention to the task of driving. They don't have to have been impaired by drugs or booze or by texting or eating lunch. They just have to have overlooked a key part of the world around them: an oncoming cyclist or a cyclist beside them. They will of course say that they "didn't see" the cyclists. I will have more to say about that below.
In the first of the injury cases, promising young pro racer Michael Torckler was descending Pine Flat Road when he was hit by a car heading uphill. The driver fled the scene, but not before his passenger got out of the car and stayed with the injured rider. The first report in the local paper seemed to imply that the cyclist was at least partly responsible for the collision--more about that later--but once the driver’s passenger told his story, that all changed. With his information, the driver was apprehended and has been charged with felony hit-and-run causing injury, reckless driving with injury, auto theft with a prior conviction and possession of a car allegedly stolen from his father. He also faces a misdemeanor count of driving on a suspended license and is being investigated for a possible fifth charge of drunken driving.
Apparently the driver, having stolen the car from his father, had picked up a case of beer and then gone joy riding with his pal. He was racing up the winding mountain road, well over on the wrong side in a blind corner, when he hit the cyclist. At that point, his friend decided he didn't want anything more to do with the driver and his crazy antics. He left the car and stayed to do what he could for the rider. A PG&E worker also stopped, and fortunately had a special radio that could get a signal out of that remote canyon so help could be summoned. Torckler, who went headfirst into the car's windshield, had at least 20 facial fractures, a broken arm, and terrible, deep lacerations in his head. He was lucky to be alive and, moreover, not to be brain-damaged.
The other injury case is just now the hottest topic in the cycling community and in the local media. This one requires a little back story. Some of you may recall an article I wrote in this space way back in September, 2008, about a bike trail easement through a senior citizens' development in Santa Rosa, with a follow-up item in another column a few months later. The story was about the seniors' homeowners' association trying to ban cyclists from using a path through their neighborhood. In my follow-up piece, I suggested that a resolution in the matter was coming soon. But, believe it or not, four years later, the matter remains unresolved. Neither the City of Santa Rosa nor the homeowners' association seems to want to spend the money to duke it out in court, so things are stalled in a legal limbo: the offensive and illegal NO BICYCLES signs are still in place, but cyclists routinely ignore them and ride the path anyway.
That seniors' development is contained within an even larger seniors' community that sprawls for several miles along the eastern edge of Santa Rosa: Oakmont. For reasons stated in my original article, riding through this neighborhood is something cyclists do in their thousands and have done ever since the community was developed. It's the safest and most convenient route for heading east out of Santa Rosa. And although all of Oakmont's roads are public and paid for by all of our tax dollars, apparently some residents there cannot stand the idea of non-resident cyclists riding through their neighborhood. (I recently had a long e-mail from one of my bike club members who lives in Oakmont, advising me about how hot the feelings are running on this issue in that community.)
Now one resident there has gone ballistic with his anger. He's so torqued up about riders passing through that he has begun harassing them from his car. There had been a number of incidents reported to the police, but nothing had been done. Then, last week, he finally went too far. He started hassling a rider who was doing absolutely nothing wrong. Then he swerved and bumped the rider, at which point the rider started yelling back. That really set the driver off. The cyclist, now quite frightened, made a U-turn and rode up onto the sidewalk. The driver did the same, chasing after him. The rider took evasive action by sprinting down a cart path on the local golf course. He thought he was safe, but no: here came the driver, roaring down the fairway in his Toyota, hundreds of yards from the street now. When he caught up to the rider, he floored it and ran him down from behind. At which point, he careened off the course and fled the scene.
The rider suffered a badly broken wrist and severe road rash and bruising over much of his body, resulting in a complicated surgery and six days in the hospital. But like Torckler, he was lucky he wasn't killed. This of course made headlines in the local paper. The rider is the respected owner of a popular deli and lunch spot in downtown Santa Rosa. The case would have been significant even if the rider had been a nobody, but the fact that he is well-known and well-liked hiked up the outrage even more. When the story broke, another rider called the police and said the same guy had harassed her a few months earlier and she had been able to note down his license number on her phone. The police followed up, arrested the guy, found the car with the incriminating damage from the collision. He had his arraignment in court a couple of days ago, charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon and hit-and-run. Later, at his arraignment, after more evidence was presented, the charges against him were increased to include attempted murder. Turns out he was driving on a suspended license because of a prior road rage case on Hwy 101, and he is also implicated in at least two other cases of harassing cyclists in Oakmont. What's more, one of his golfing buddies in Oakmont said he threatened to brain him with a golf club in a dispute over a golf score! He's 81 years old and clearly has some serious anger-management issues. Naturally, his defense attorney is suggesting some sort of diminished capacity plea.
Needless to say, all of this, piled on top of the other terrible fatalities earlier in the summer, has stoked up a raging firestorm in the North Bay bike community and in the larger community as well. Every few days, our club's chat list is clogged with another thread on the topic-that-won't-go-away. Most of the posts are heavy on opinions and ranting but a little light on facts. But we're doing better than the public at large. If you read your news articles on-line, you know most of them are followed by a thread of comments from readers. This is our vibrant new world of interactive social media, for better or worse. Many of the posts to those threads range from silly to misguided to offensively ignorant or ignorantly offensive. That too is something I will address in a moment.
Having cast aspersions at other people’s opinions, I will now proceed to give you a few of my own. As I see it, there are four distinct but intertwined problems contributing to the dysfunctional aspects of the cars-vs-bikes dynamic.
1. Many drivers are driving under the influence of…whatever
I would like to think this one is a no-brainer, but actually, I have my doubts. This is not really or at least not primarily a bikes-vs-cars issue. It's an all-of-us-vs-all-of-us issue. Back in 2008, I wrote one of these columns on traffic safety in America. If you haven't read it, I wish you would. It's just about the most important issue any of us has to cope with on a daily basis. Every one of us is vulnerable to the mischance of the open road. Somewhere around the United States today--in this 24 hours--well over 100 people will die horrible, violent deaths in auto accidents. Same thing tomorrow and for every day forever, as long as we keep going on the way we are now. Name me another plague in our society that is as pandemic and as lethal as that.
Many, many of those deaths can be laid at the door of drivers who were not paying attention to their driving. I don't need to itemize the myriad ways in which drivers can be either distracted or impaired, and anyway, if I started, where would I stop? The possibilities are endless. But, as a brief aside, did you see the recent survey results where 75% of all teen drivers admitted to texting while driving? The most inexperienced, immature bloc of drivers out there, and three out of four of them are also distracted? As for cell phone use, we have all been bombarded with media and law enforcement blitzes about how bad it is. We have laws that supposedly will nail your ass to the wall for doing it. And yet you cannot drive (or ride) one block without seeing someone with a hand-held unit glued to their ear. And that's not counting the people with the phone in their laps, looking down, trying to read the number of the party who just called them….etc.
Well…as long as I'm into this rant, one more thing: if you talk on the phone while driving or text while driving or spend time fiddling with your on-board nav system or your complicated sound system or…or whatever…please read this column by Road & Track's premier writer, Peter Egan. He says it better than I can, or at least with a little better sense of humor. Then, if you're still willing to hang in there with me, read this further report from the same magazine. Both of them are about multi-tasking while driving. Finally, if you are still with me, watch the video at the end of that article. In fact, if you are a multi-tasking driver, I DARE you to watch the video. If you can watch it and then blithely go back to the bad habits of distracted driving, then I don't know what else to say. You are a lost cause, and all of us around you are at grave risk.
For a thousand different reasons, drivers simply are not taking the responsibility of driving seriously. As I noted in my traffic safety article, this is a terrible problem that many other countries have tackled head-on, with broad-based programs to turn the public's mindset around. And the programs have worked, with dramatically reduced rates of crashes. But not in this country. Here, it's still heavy metal mayhem as usual.
2. Many drivers don't understand cyclists
All of us make thousands of decisions a day based on our past experiences. When it comes to driving, some of those decisions are made on a split-second basis, while we are under stress. We make them subconsciously or nearly so. Our brains and our muscle-memory simply do the tasks for us, based on the data set we have accumulated over the years. Normally, most people are pretty good at this. But it's a garbage-in-garbage-out protocol: if the data set is faulty, the decisions may be wrong.
Almost all adult cyclists are drivers. We see both sides of each interaction between a bike and a car because we have occupied both of those roles. Our data sets are complete. But not all drivers are cyclists. For many drivers, their experience-derived data set on cycling stops about the time they hang up their kiddie bike and go for their Learner's Permit. Or perhaps they own a bike as a grown-up, but their only experience with it is riding along a bike path with their kids at 10 mph. These drivers, and in this category I include the majority of American drivers, simply do not have sufficient experiential data to properly understand what to do around adult cyclists. For one thing, they don't understand how fast adult road riders can go. Working with that 10 or 15-mph data set, they fail to process the possibility that a rider might be going 30 or 40 or even over 50 mph.
When a driver drills a cyclist, they almost always say: “I didn't SEE him!" In many cases, I don't think that is literally true. I'm guessing a more complete and accurate assessment would be something like: "I saw him, but I had no idea he could get from where he was to where I hit him so fast." Of course they don't say that because they don't really even think it…not up in the fronts of their brains. It's just how their split-second data processing handled it, based on insufficient data.
Drivers without the full deck of cards vis a vis riders also fail to notice many little bits of body english displayed by riders. Other riders would pick up on these telltale signs immediately, but the drivers? Not always. I'll give you an example of what I mean…
Two of the fatalities this summer involve riders who--according to the drivers--suddenly turned in front of them and that they--the drivers--didn't see it coming and had no time for taking avoiding action. At this point of course, we only have the drivers' accounts to go by. The cyclists are dead and can't tell us their versions of what happened. I have no desire whatsoever to cause any additional pain or anguish or even second-guessing for either of those drivers, both of whom probably feel terrible about having played a part in the deaths of two human beings. So let's accept their versions of events as true…honest and sincere.
However, let's take the scenario and turn it into a hypothetical: a car is approaching a rider from behind, getting ready to pass him; the rider is on the right shoulder but suddenly, without signaling or looking back, he pulls across the lane to turn left onto a side road. A few weeks ago, I found myself in exactly that same situation, as a driver. I saw the cyclist riding on the right shoulder. I was thinking about passing him. But because I'm a cyclist and understand cycling, I was watching him and was prepared for anything he might do. In fact I suspected he was going to try for that left turn: he wasn't signaling for it, but I could see he was looking at the road on the left. I put myself on a sort of amber alert and sat back to wait and watch… And sure enough, he swung across suddenly, with no signal, right in front of me. But because I possess the full cycling data set, I was wise to his loose-cannon behavior. I was prepared and had plenty of time to brake…to not hit him. Yes, he was at fault for making a bonehead move, but he didn't have to get drilled by a car because of it.
In countries like Holland and Italy and France, where many more people ride bikes and where they have done so in their legions for over a hundred years, drivers understand bikes. They all come fully equipped with that cycling data set, even if they don't ride themselves. We may eventually get to that point in this country, but we're not there yet.
In the hand-wringing and finger-pointing that follow along behind each of these new fatalities, we inevitably see some self-appointed smart person saying we need more bike lanes or, better yet, separate bike trails to get those toy bicycles off the cars' roads. There was another one in this morning's paper. Okay, I like a nice bike trail. They can be wonderful. But most of the time, bikes belong on the roads, with or without bike lanes or wide shoulders. We cannot build ourselves out of this dysfunctional situation. Throwing more expensive infrastructure at it is not the answer. We all have to simply learn more about how the other folks are using the roads. Sharing the road means more than just passing with room to spare. It means having a fully functional and competent understanding of what the other guy is likely to be doing…and right now, a whole lot of motorists do not have that cycling data set in their driver's tool box.
3. Some drivers hate cyclists
This is about so-called road rage, as in the recent Oakmont case. I don't really want to get into this one too deeply today. It's an ugly topic and one that I already--somewhat reluctantly--addressed in another column a couple of years ago. That essay examined the phenomenon fairly comprehensively. If you want to get into it, it's there for the reading. I don't have much to add now, except to say the Oakmont marauder seems to represent an almost classic example of the pattern. As noted above, he has been charged with assault with a deadly weapon and hit and run. All well and good. Although his lawyer is going to plead for some slap on the wrist, based on the notion that he's old and senile and demented, I hope they throw the book at him. The maximum sentence for what he's accused of is over 12 years in the state pen. For an 81-year old, that just might represent the rest of his life, and if it comes to that, I won't feel sorry for him.
In fact, if it were up to me, I would argue for whatever enhanced penalties are laid on for a hate crime. For that's exactly what this is. An entirely innocent and blameless cyclist, doing not one single thing wrong, was hunted down and run over by a crazed maniac, not for anything he had done, but for who he is: a cyclist. That is no different than a lynching or a gay-bashing. It's no different than shooting up a mosque or a synagogue or a Sikh temple. It's prejudice and bigotry and the casual, callous violence that goes with it. It's vile and despicable.
Outside the courthouse at the first hearing for the Oakmont road rage case, the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition announced plans to propose a new law that would make it easier for cyclists and pedestrians to seek redress in civil court in cases of road rage harassment and assault. Civil cases can be easier to pursue than criminal cases but can be equally painful for those convicted. Their proposal is modeled on one that was passed last year in Los Angeles. If the county and the various cities within the county get on board, it will be a step in the right direction.
I seriously doubt that the average person in our community--the average non-cyclist--has any idea how much abuse is visited upon cyclists out there on the roads. I want to believe that most people would be appalled and would want it stopped, if it could be stopped. But, amazingly--to me, anyway--even in this case of what must be one of the most flagrant, egregious, repugnant examples of hateful violence against a cyclist we have ever seen, there are still quite a few people out there who are willing to say the cyclist had it coming to him. Which brings me to my final problem…
4. Cyclists are guilty until proven innocent
This is a complex issue, and I don't want to oversimplify it. So I'll start out by saying I may be too thin-skinned on this issue, too defensive, even paranoid. But it seems to me, in many cases, when motorists and cyclists come into conflict, the motorists are held to be innocent until proven guilty, but the cyclists are held to be guilty until proven innocent. A few examples…
Recall the Michael Torckler case: a young pro racer was descending a remote mountain road when he was hit head-on in a blind corner by an out-of-control, probably drunk, reckless driver in a stolen car. And then the driver left the scene, with the seriously injured rider on the ground. Got that? So in the first report on the incident to appear in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, the reporter claimed, without any facts to back it up, that the cyclist was descending "at a high rate of speed." Nothing at all about the driver's behavior, except for the fact of the hit-and-run. To me, "high rate of speed" in this context, implies a subtext of reckless abandon, pushing the envelope and being a crazy risk-taker, endangering oneself and everyone else on the road. At that point, they had no facts about the actions of either the driver or the cyclist, and yet, in spite of the culpability implicit in the driver's hit-and-run, they chose to put the onus on the cyclist.
I fired off a short letter to the paper, asking the reporter to justify his use of that phrase. They declined to print my letter. But they chose to print other letters from folks claiming that cyclists bring their misfortune upon themselves by all of their risky, scofflaw behavior. And they printed no less than three letters from misguided imbeciles asserting that cyclists should ride facing oncoming traffic. To be fair, they also printed a couple of letters debunking that moronic assertion.
Once the full facts became public in the Torckler case--about the driver's bad behavior--they quickly backpedaled and wrote a warm and fuzzy piece about Torckler's miraculous recovery; about his parents flying in from New Zealand and about all the support the family received from the local cycling tribe. But they never retracted that "high rate of speed" characterization. So let's be clear about this one: he was not traveling at a right rate of speed. He was in the area training with the Bissell pro team, which is based here, and was set to join the team for their next big race, the Cascade Classic, beginning the weekend after his crash. As any good pro should, he undoubtedly knows how to descend fast, but in the days leading up to his first major pro contract and his first major race, and riding a new road for the first time…? No. And yet that was the paper's immediate, knee-jerk assumption.
Then, in one of the two most recent fatalities, the paper's reporter repeatedly stressed that the cyclist was probably going at or near the speed limit on the downhill. Perhaps again I am being overly sensitive to nuance here, but the way it was phrased seemed to imply that it was somehow wrong for the rider to be going that fast and that he therefor was at least partly to blame for the collision that took his life. You can almost read between the lines: if the cyclist is going faster than the driver's experience allows for, then it's the cyclist's fault, not the driver's.
In midst of all the sturm und drang about cars and bikes, they chose to print a full-column editorial under the inflammatory headline "Fear, bike racing on Sonoma County roads." (Let the record show: no one in any of these collisions was racing.) This fatuous bit of claptrap was written by someone whose expertise on the subject of cycling was summed up in one sentence: "I've been cycling for about a year." Well, of course, with those bona fides, he must be an expert! The first thing he states, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is that all of the recent fatalities were the result of rider error. He somewhat begrudgingly allowed that the death of Professor Steve Norwick "appears to have been" the driver's fault, but that the driver "appears to have been physically and mentally impaired," as if that somehow makes it not so bad…not quite so fatal. (This was the horrific case where the driver drifted his pick-up onto the shoulder and slaughtered Norwick, then never even slowed down, claiming later he didn't stop because he was late for work.) The author of the editorial even asserted that Torckler "was probably going too fast." Based on no facts, how did he arrive at this conclusion? Because he knows someone who lives on Pine Flat and this guy says cyclists always ride too fast on his road.
Geez…I'm rereading his knuckleheaded bloviating now and can hardly believe it, it's so off-the-wall…one cockeyed piece of crap after another: "A lot of hard-core riders are into it for the power and speed. Pro riders can sprint up to 35 mph for up 20 miles." "I have found that most motorists are very cautious around riders. I have only been buzzed once and yelled at once." He states that the county should paint white stripes on the sides of all its remote country roads, as if this will solve the problem of car-bike collisions. Never mind that the county has not one thin dime to spare in its road budget, nor the fact that all of the fatalities have occurred on roads that sport not only white stripes but also wide shoulders.
It would be embarrassing and merely laughable except for the fact that the biggest newspaper in the North Bay chose to feature it as the definitive editorial on the subject. Mind you, this was not a staff writer. This was a local citizen being given a marquee space to ostensibly summarize this hot-button issue. They could have offered that space to any number of highly qualified representatives from the local bike community, from the head of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition to the President of the Santa Rosa Cycling Club to the directors of any of the pro or amateur race teams based in Santa Rosa. Or even to me! (I am on their short list of people to call when they're looking for quotes on bike topics.) But no: the only person who got that big space was this clueless bozo. Just yesterday, I was sent a copy of correspondence between an irate cyclist and the Editor of the paper about this piece. The Editor could have said: "You're right: we made a mistake." But he didn't. He defended the piece and said the writer made some good points. The only point the writer made is that he's an idiot.
The point I am trying to make is that there is this more-or-less persistent and pervasive theme running underneath all of the conversations about cyclists being hit and killed or even simply harassed while out riding: that it was their own fault; that they had it coming. It isn't just our local paper that exhibits this bias. The bike haters are all over it, of course. But so too, in many cases, are many cyclists. They piously opine about how we have to be fair; how we have to recall all the bad things that cyclists do, like running stop signs and riding two abreast. (Gasp! The horror!) Everyone agrees that some cyclists do bad things some of the time. We all understand that. We work hard to educate and browbeat bad riders. But many motorists do bad things too. Frankly, all in all, I suspect they do more bad things than cyclists do, especially if you count all the ways they are not paying attention while driving. Perhaps they are not as visible as the bad things cyclists do because they do them inside their cars. But when an innocent motorist or pedestrian is killed by a drunk or distracted driver, you never see letters to the paper saying the innocent driver or pedestrian had it coming. Why do we always hear that about cyclists? Why is it that every discussion about car and bike interaction begins with the cyclist down in a hole in the ground and the motorist occupying the moral high ground?
I tell ya, I'm getting pretty fed up with it. I have been an apologist and a scold about bad bike behavior for years. I wrote a fairly strongly worded piece in this space about it a few years back and have written others in other spaces, to the point of sounding like a broken record. But I don't really think the relatively minor sins of some cyclists are the crux of the matter here. Yes, we could all do better. But even if we were all perfect, all the time, that still wouldn't be enough for a large percentage of motorists. We are never going to please them, no matter how hard we try. That doesn't mean we should stop trying to do better, but it does mean we should never allow ourselves to be treated as second-class citizens on the road, just because some small-minded motorists don't understand us.
Just in the past few days, we have seen a bit of a turnaround in the local paper on these matters. Since the Oakmont attack hit the newsstands, the editorial staff has been pro-bike or at least anti-road rage. They printed a big editorial condemning the Oakmont marauder and saying that attacking cyclists is never acceptable. I give them full marks for that. But they could hardly do otherwise in this case, as it's so blatant, so flagrant. Today, Chris Smith, one of their two local columnists, lead off with a long piece on the assailant and what a menace he is to society (he's now out on bail). Chris Coursey, their other columnist, wrote a really fired up piece on this topic and, by extension, the whole topic of bikes-vs-cars. It's the best piece I've seen in the local, mainstream press. Finally, we hear a voice with some real outrage in it. It's about time. You can find the editorial in his personal archive.
These are hopeful signs, and they go some way to balancing out the prevailing blame-the-cyclist mindset we have seen for so long. But it took an outrageously over-the-top act of bully-boy violence to finally rouse them up to righteous indignation. And meanwhile, the anti-bike grouches are still out there, still complaining that the bikers are the problem. I don't expect that to change any sooner than any of the other problems on my list. Distracted, inattentive drivers are going to be with us for a long time. So are drivers who don't know how to interact with cyclists. We get that. It's part of what we have to allow for when we head out the door on our little pedal-powered toys.
Finally, a personal note. Two months ago, I reported that the injuries from my collision with the BMW were healing well. That's true insofar as being able to ride a bike is concerned. I can do that, and in fact, riding a bike seems to be about the best therapy I've found for feeling better…less stiff and sore. But stiff and sore is what I am most of the time. The twisted neck, the broken back, and the hammered pelvis still hurt every day, after almost four months. If I don't keep popping Tylenol and Advil, the pain gangs up on me and life becomes a misery. Getting old and creaky brings enough aches and pains with it in the normal course of events. Getting whacked by a two-ton baseball bat takes it to a whole other level.
My personal jury is still out on who was to blame in my collision. I could have seen that car better and the driver could have seen me better. I guess I'm just going to have to leave it at that and move on, with--I hope--a little less pain every day.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net