Originally Posted by chephy
The area around Milton, ON - a small town close to Toronto where my parents live - has a lot of recreational cyclists and a lot of extremely narrow country roads that have gotten much much busier in the last few years. Within the last few years I heard several reports of cyclists being hit from behind on those roads; at least one of those crashes resulted in death. It happened during the day, good visibility conditions: the driver of a wide truck that struck the cyclist misjudged the distance and hit the cyclist on the head with a mirror, causing him to lose balance and fall, I believe, under the wheels of the truck.
I rode on those roads a few times myself, to visit my parents. Scary stuff.
Noticing the cyclist and misjudging the distance is something else again (the typical contributory cause in these situations is the cyclist riding too far to the right, and inviting motorists to squeeze by).
I'm talking about the relative rarity of a motorist running right into the back of a cyclist who is riding right in front of him in his path, because he never noticed him, as compared to the relatively more common (or so it seems to me) type of crash where a motorist drifts into a cyclist riding in an adjacent bike lane or shoulder.