Tag Archives: collision

News, Transportation

Seattle Drivers Not Sure if They Have Hit Everyone Yet

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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.”

News, Transportation

The Surprising Truth About Bicycling in Seattle

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(Photo: Great_Beyond, from our Flickr pool)

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.