Originally Posted by TRaffic Jammer
no no I wasn't going there slvoid, I mean how is the path separated / marked differently from the roadway?
Trying to thing how damned blind drunk you'd have to be to head down the path.
In this case, the path is really clearly separated from the roadway. There's a physical barrier between West Street (a major north-south traffic artery in Manhattan) and the bike path. What happened, as far as I can tell, was that the driver was leaving a facility on one side of the path, and would have had to cross the path to get to West Street. Instead of crossing the path and turning south on West Street, he simply turned south on the bike path and drove for quite some distance until he struck the cyclist.
At most of the intersections along the bike path, there are lights and fairly clear markings. The West Side Greenway is pretty well laid out, and it's really hard to mistake the bike path for the roadway. The driver must have been pretty hammered.
Originally Posted by TRaffic Jammer
IMHO if you get behind the wheel drunk and get caught there should be a serious damned charge. We have a serial drunk driver as well in the courts, suspended licence and still he gets loaded and behind the wheel. Shameful..... and the perps are young too, they've been listening the warning since they were babies. If I'm driving I might have a glass of wine with dinner, but that's it. Just boogles my mind.
I believe that there are serious charges available to the District Attorney in cases like this. Vehicular manslaughter comes to mind. If there's a conviction (or a plea), serious jail time is a real possibility (as it should be, of course). I'm guessing the driver hasn't been charged yet because (a) there has to be an investigation and (b) this happened late on Friday night, so the courts were closed and nothing could be done until Monday anyway.