Accident-plagued Dexter is one of SDOT’s most heavily-reconfigured streets. (Photo: SDOT)
Who knew that a lack of rain would make Seattle drivers even worse? At midnight, record-keepers will be marking into the books the first all-dry July in 50 years. But along with the terrific weather has come an alarming rise in cars colliding with bikes and pedestrians.
Is it just more people taking to their bikes in the good weather? Seattle’s Department of Transportation told the Seattle Times last year that: “When more cyclists are present, motorists become more conscious of them and safety tends to improve.”
Yet the City Council’s Richard Conlin is nursing a broken shoulder blade, after a driver flipped a quick U-turn in front of him and Conlin rode into the vehicular barricade. Though the driver was cited for making an illegal U-turn, Conlin’s recap of the incident — “He wasn’t looking, I probably could have been a little more defensive” — exhibits what Sightline’s Alan Durning calls “car-head.”
Conlin could have been killed in the accident (you just have to fall the wrong way after being launched over the handlebars), but he’s equating the driver’s carelessness with a multi-ton, motor vehicle with his own responsibility to avoid being crushed by a car. It’s a transportation version of Stockholm Syndrome; Conlin later released a statement in which he reassured everyone he doesn’t “expect this accident to influence my work on transportation issues or alter my perspective on cycling.”
In Durning’s case, he’d biked right into a red Jeep Cherokee parked in the bike lane on Dexter. He was berating himself for being an inattentive idiot when he thought, Wait a minute, this is a bike lane. If the driver had parked his car in the middle of the road and walked off, and Durning had driven his car into the back of it, would he have been thinking, My god, what a klutz I am?
“Car-headed as we are in North America,” writes Durning, “we don’t enforce traffic laws in ways that hold drivers accountable for the risks they impose on cyclists and pedestrians.” The driver who sent Conlin to the emergency room will have to pay a $124 ticket.
Not everyone has Conlin’s health insurance and wherewithal. Brandon Blake also had a driver turn in front of him on Dexter, and “suffered several fractured ribs, bruising to his lungs, face fractures in several places and a concussion.” Friends and family have started an online fundraiser to help deal with the bills.
Each time Seattle Bike Blog reports on one of these major incidents, you learn of a multitude of “little” accidents that weren’t reported — each a potential fatality.
Blake, a Sounders fan, has something in common now with 33-year-old Sounders defender Taylor Graham, who tweeted on July 29th: “If you are the car that just hit a guy riding his bike on Dexter and took off, that was me.” One of the replies to that tweet was from Eric Cockrell, who had his own two bits to put in: “car hit me before the Denny light on Dexter yesterday.”
This factoid jumped out at me from the Seattle Department of Transportation’s 2010 Traffic Report. Guess what the weather was like when 71 percent of all car-bicycle collisions took place? Clear or partly cloudy. Fourteen percent of collisions occurred when it was overcast. Only twelve percent when it was rainy.
You just assume that the weather is bad, it’s slippery, there’ll be more accidents. But no. In Seattle, looking at the absolute numbers, high season for bicycle-related accidents for the past five years are the months May through September, with April and October as the shoulders. That makes sense in one way because there are simply more cyclists out and about when the weather is nice.
Image from SDOT's 2010 Traffic Report
But consider the statistics for pedestrians, who are also, you assume, out and about when the weather is nice. Seattle is flush with tourists not looking where they are going each summer. Yet the pedestrian high (-chance-of-being-hit) season is the months November through January. Again, common sense, except you might apply the same common sense to bicyclists (weather’s bad, it’s dark, can’t be seen) and be wrong.
Nor does clothing visibility seem, in this batch of statistics, to offer much of an advantage. Of the collisions where the bicyclist’s clothing was noted, 35 were wearing light or reflective clothing compared to 42 wearing dark clothing, and 122 who were wearing “mixed” light and dark clothing. The lesson seems to be to go bright or go ninja, but don’t hedge your bets.
Most dangerous day of the week? Wednesday. Least dangerous? Sunday (I would guess simply because of lower traffic volumes). Most dangerous hours of the day? 8 to 9 a.m., and 3 to 7 p.m. The leading age group for accidents is 25-34.
The leading reason a driver hit a bicyclist (142 times) was given as failure to grant the right of way. But before cyclists get their chamois-padded bike briefs in a twist, consider this: in 66 collisions, the bicyclist failed to grant the right of way to a pedestrian. The collision was most likely to happen at an intersection (60 percent), and another surprise, more likely to happen when bicyclists were riding with traffic (32 percent) than entering or crossing traffic (18 percent).
That said, SDOT’s data can be surprisingly incomplete. In the last instance, 45 percent of the time, no one knew or wrote down what the cyclist was doing–a startling omission given that these are car vs. bike collisions. The age of the bicylist was undetermined 21 percent of the time. 45 percent of the time the “facility type” (e.g., roadway, bike route) was missing.
I would also take issue with SDOT’s assertion that “the citywide count showed a decline in bicycling” of 15 percent. A one-day count is really only useful for establishing the presence of something. Whatever else is true, citywide, some 3,961 people biked around Seattle on a particular day in 2010. But you can’t be sure, by comparison solely to previous one-day counts, whether you’re really seeing an increase or decrease. That’s true as well of the 20 percent “uptick” in bike commuters to downtown, of 3,251. Maybe it is an increase. But really, it’s more important to know that 3,251 people biked to downtown. So when people tell you how impossible it is to commute to downtown on a bike, you have 3,251 comebacks.
Vivace’s Brian Fairbrother crashed on some hard-to-see steps near 1177 Fairview Avenue North around 6 p.m. on August 30, 2011. He was removed from life support on September 8.
Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop detail from the City's map
But Michael Hoffman, a 31-year-old scientist at the University of Washington, provided Seattlepi.com and The SunBreak with an email he sent to the City of Seattle’s Parks Department in 2008, after he rode the newly completed Cheshiahud Lake Union Loop.
Some commenters on my earlier post (“Did a Bike Path Just Kill a Seattle Cyclist?“) took issue with the term “bike path,” since the stretch in question is clearly a sidewalk with no particular work done to make it more or less safer for bikes. But the City publicizes it as part of a “multi-use loop” and if you look closely at the map of the loop, those are little blue bicycles riding along…a sidewalk. Clearly, the map is not the territory.
As the Parks Department had put up a sign soliciting feedback, Hoffman responded with an alarming prescience:
It was nice ride in general but there were a few places that were a bit confusing or even dangerous for an unfamiliar rider. I’m not sure if the loop is considered finished yet but I thought these comments might be helpful. […] There is a bit on the east side where the trail seems to go down a lot of steps and then back up. It is not apparent until you are near the steps that they are actually steps rather than a ramp. I think this is dangerous currently. I would strongly recommend some warning signs here. If cyclists are meant to instead travel on the nearby road against the traffic flow, the trail needs signage and road markings to indicate this.
David Graves, a senior planner with Seattle Parks & Recreation, wrote back, saying: “Due to the traffic flow, the counter clockwise direction is more challenging to navigate on a bicycle than clockwise! As we work on drafting a Master plan for the loop, we will keep your comments in mind.”
When I first asked Seattle Department of Transportation spokesperson to comment on this, she referred me to Parks spokesperson Dewey Potter. Potter confirmed via email that Hoffman’s comments had been received and shared with SDOT:
It was one of many comments received during that process. Parks did share it with SDOT, as the planning team included staff from both departments. It is my understanding that SDOT intends to install signage at the site next week…
Signage is better than the nothing SDOT provided for the past three years, but if the City is going to prompt cyclists to ride on a sidewalk, there are also safety gates that let pedestrians pass but prevent bicycles from riding into danger zones. (It probably wouldn’t hurt to slow down runners and inline skaters as well.)
One of the odd disconnects that still separates car drivers from cyclists appeared in comments on my original post. Was Fairbrother wearing a helmet? (He was.) Was perhaps a 50-year-old man on a road bike trying to jump a flight of stairs? (It seems unlikely.) Why wasn’t he paying closer attention? (This is a question Buddha has asked all of us. I ask it every single day of car drivers on their cell phones.)
The disconnect is how easy it is to use bikes to get around, as a form of urban transportation, rather than a slow and sweaty way to annoy car drivers in a hurry. When you bike to get from Point A to Point B, you often just put your head down and go. That being the case, cyclists, just like any other human being, tend to rely on infrastructure’s coherence for safety.
This part of the loop is missing the equivalent of a Wrong Way – Do Not Enter sign. That’s all there is to it. But the larger lesson is that our current infrastructure promotes a cage-match atmosphere. Every time a cyclist is directed by sharrow to “take the lane” on a thin uphill street, car drivers line up fuming behind.
You could ask the drivers exactly how much time they’re losing over a single block, moving at 5 mph instead of 30, but that, while perhaps of rational interest, is not the issue. That infrastructure is creating a problem where there wasn’t one. No one drives an arterial to go slower than on a regular city street. If, because of hills, bikes are going to slow traffic dramatically, SDOT can’t simply throw paint at the problem–you can’t paint over anger and frustration, and its tendency to fasten onto a nearby visible object.
Seattle Transit Blog, calling for bike boulevards, cuts right to the heart of the problem:
Seattle is killing people on bikes at the rate of 1 per month, and we seem more interested in discussing the behavioral problems of people driving and cycling rather than addressing the structural problem, the underlying safety of our transportation network. Given the fallibility of human behavior and the assurance of operator errors, we would be wise to reduce structural risk rather than rely on educational campaigns.
In his post on improving road safety, Mayor McGinn echoes the sentiment:
It’s time to stop finding fault with each other, and to start finding a remedy. There has been a lot of overheated rhetoric about cars versus bikes or bikes versus cars, and it’s not helping make our roads any safer. It’s not even accurate. Most people who ride a bicycle also own a car. Drivers will also park and walk across the street or on a sidewalk to get to their destination.
Seattle Bike Blog argues, simply, “We have reached a turning point in Seattle bicycle safety.” I certainly won’t begrudge anyone who’s lost someone in an accident their righteous anger, but I empathize more with Tom Fucoloro’s faith that “we can do better.”
This summer’s disturbing cyclist death toll is notable for the ways in which our new bicycling infrastructure has failed us–all of us. I can’t imagine what a driver feels replaying that instant a cyclist seemed to come out of nowhere. This leaves everyone on edge. So let’s not delay rethinking what is proving to be a dangerous and divisive primary mode: putting bikes in the road with cars, with bike lanes, sharrows, and taking a lane appearing as options willy-nilly.
As Seattle Transit Blog’s Zach Shaner writes, “In Seattle we may lack many things, but we have an abundance of quiet, low-traffic streets directly adjacent to our busiest arterials. We should put them to better use and save a few lives.”
Amid all the grief and remembrances of Vivace’s Brian Fairbrother, who suffered a tragic cycling accident in late August and sustained brain damage that has led to his removal from life support, there is the nagging question of how such an experienced, helmet-wearing cyclist crashed so catastrophically. As I read the account–that Fairbrother wiped out on some dirt near the bike path, but was found on nearby stairs–I couldn’t wrap my head around it.
Then I was sent these photos of the “bike path” in question.
As you can see, it’s not apparent (or even reasonable to assume) that the bike path veers suddenly into the street against oncoming car traffic (and oncoming cyclists, even if you do make the mental adjustment). Nor can you see that there are stairs ahead until right upon them.
I heard about Brian’s accident (like many, many others on Capitol Hill, I knew him from his 20 years of work for Vivace Espresso) not long after writing this post: “The Economist to Seattle: Car Speed Kills,” about failures of Seattle’s biking infrastructure. As it happens, I had just met the cyclist killed in that incident about three weeks before he was hit by a car. These accidents are beginning to feel less and less truly accidental.
Photo can’t testify in court, but this one testifies publicly to the danger bicyclists are often put in as they make their gerrymandered way around the city.
UPDATE: This comment from Barry felt worth bringing up to the body of the post:
So sorry so many of us ride this route every day and didn’t take the time to point out the dangers and prevent this. It would have only taken one of us to stop and report this. Let’s all be aware of other dangers we see every day and get them reported and/or put up a marker ourselves to protect our bike community. Paint and chalk are cheap.
Several people have mentioned an interest in doing something to improve the signage in this spot. I will check with SDOT about the possibility of making improvements, and whether funding is needed. Stay tuned.
