why2not

Do you drive a large truck with convex mirrors? I'm in them every day & anyone paying attention can see someone on a bike pull up alongside their stopped vehicle. The other intresting thing about them is as objects approach, they get bigger. So if she were sitting only a few feet away, she'd be pretty apparent.

Now if she were sitting in front of the mirror, but blocked by his cab, she'd be invisible. If he has conves mirrors, then I suspect that he wasn't paying his curbside mirror much attention as she rode up & didn't see her pulling up alongside & in front of the mirror. I don't think that there is anything illegal in not watching your curbside mirrors as you're sitting at a red light.

why2not

Your lack of empahty concerning the death of a 19 YO who made a mistake is repugnant.

Carusoswi

It's so hard to be objective in re-constructing a scenario such as this in my mind. I want to be fair, especially in light of the fact that the cyclist lost her life. I have no particular love of truck drivers (although I yearn for the day when I can test drive one of those big semi-rigs - I've driven 26-foot steak bodies, nothing bigger).

I am a motorist, and I, obviously, ride many a mile on my bike, too.

I was taken by surprise once by a lady who passed me on a long downhill. I was doing 25-30, she passes me and immediately makes a turn into a parking lot, blocking my path - kaboom!

Another time, a driver made a right just as I was entering an intersection. I was able to alter my path and made a right with him to avoid a collision with almost certain serious consequences.

In both instances, I was fortunate to come away without serious injury.

So, I sit here, reading this thread, wondering to myself how savvy might have been the rider in this case.

My own wife gave up bike riding long ago - she just isn't aware enough to be out riding. She would hit curb cuts at slow speeds and odd (shallow) angles and be thrown off the bike - stuff like that.

In a car, she tends to be oblivious to pot holes, cuts across tight corners (dragging the rear wheel up, over, and across the curb), her mirrors are really useless to her - all are set with too narrow a field of vision - she only can see what is behind her - I could go on and on.

The lady who succeeded in catching me in a right hook actually told the policeman that I should not have tried to pass her - she was totally oblvious to my presence or what had happened or that it was her fault.

What point am I trying to make?

First of all, I would never pull up to a point right of a cement truck where I would get smashed if he turns right - I just wouldn't do it. Pull ahead where he has to see you, or, better, stay behind where you are out of danger.

Any rider who thinks that being in the bike lane automatically protects you needs to become better educated about the realities of riding in traffic.

If I am sitting next to a vehicle at an intersection, I make certain I know what that vehicle is doing when it begins to move before I start moving, myself.

I keep asking myself how I might have reacted in this rider's situation as I realized that a truck is turning right and I'm in its way. If, as reported, it never exceeded 4 or 5 mph, that means that, through most of that turn, it was moving at something less than 4 or 5.

So, I keep asking myself if I wouldn't have made a huge effort to get out of that truck's way.

. . . and I keep thinking to myself that this unfortunate rider might not be too much unlike my wife. The currently used term "clueless" is a bit demeaning . . . my wife isn't stupid - not by a long stretch. She has many redeeming qualities - she's an excellent parent (much more in tune and more on top of what a kid needs to get ahead than I), very organized (I'm a slob by comparison), but her connection to the mechanical world is just broken.

A car is in working order if it starts when you turn the key . . . you put oil in it when the little light comes on. If the TV doesn't come on when you push the button, call hubby, never mind checking to see if it's plugged in . . . if you want to move from the street to a parking lot on a bike, you turn into the curb cut . . . never mind the elevation change or your angle of approach.

. . . and, if you are in a bike lane at a corner, all should go well, never mind that cement truck to your left or that fact that you are blind to the driver.

I feel so bad for the lady who lost her life . . . because I know that the outcome would have been the same if it had been my wife on that bike at that corner.

"Fault" is really too strong a word. This was a human being that we're discussing here.

. . . and that truck driver, who always drove safely and had a spotless record, must feel terrible.

. . . and some of us will blame the city or the bike lanes (how would the lack of a bike lane have changed this outcome?) or the ordinances, or whatever.

You cannot design roads or write laws that will protect against every possible scenario.

. . . and a truck driver cannot wait until the possibility of an accident is eliminated before moving.

At some point, as cyclists, we simply have to assume responsibility for our own safety. I am certain this lady wasn't consciously challenging that truck, but, unfortunately, she positioned herself in a very hazardous position and probably reacted slowly to the tragic consequences as they unfolded.

It's a shame, really sad.

Caruso

StrangeWill

They are great and SHOULD be used. I'm just saying that depending on distance and curvature of the convex mirror, that distance causes detail drop off rapidly, and that a convex mirror may have not been an auto-fix to the problem, especially in the case as you pointed out, where she could not only be in front of, but below most convex mirrors on the nose of trucks (which I generally have to reach up if I wanted to touch them on most newer model trucks it seems).

Mos6502

I don't think ignorance of physical presence is any way to justify the driver getting off the hook. Just because the driver was ignorant of reality makes him innocent?
By that logic if somebody doesn't see a stop sign or red light and runs it, a police officer has no right to write them a ticket for running a sign or light they didn't see. That's a wholly inane idea.
A driver has to be reasonably cautious, if for instance you're driving and you don't see a speed limit sign - it's not reasonable to assume then that there is no speed limit! Just because he didn't see her - he had no reason to assume that nobody could be in his blind spot. He's a trucker by occupation - he should know that there was a possibility of somebody being there. It's part of his job to know that that possibility exists. Even more so because there is a bike lane on that street - and thus the likely possibility of a bike or bikes being to his right!

Sounds like Portland wants to go out of their way to protect the hammers from the eggs.

BarracksSi

So what should he have done, then?

How long does a truck have to wait until the bike lane might be clear, even if nobody appeared to be in it?

What would YOU have done if you were driving that truck and saw nobody?

BarracksSi

Carusoswi said it nicely, and I'll say it like an ******* -- she probably had no clue about how to really ride safely, and unfortunately, she lost her life.

If the outcome were only a bent bike wheel instead, I'd still think the same thing -- "Man, that was stupid of her..." The difference would have been that she would be luckier.

It's really hard to blame the truck driver when the cyclist was being stupid.

BarracksSi

Can we agree on at least one thing:

Blind spots are dangerous, and we should stay the **** out of them.

Good enough? Is that a lesson worth learning?

Mos6502

For one, if I was turning right, and I knew there was bike lane there - I'd have been watching my right window and mirror for any approaching bikes. Two, had I not seen any, or been distracted by anything else (looking up to check the light for instance) I would have waited a couple seconds before starting my turn - to see if anybody I couldn't see is moving ahead - for instance a pedestrian on the crosswalk, or a cyclist (the presence of a bike lane making the presence of a biker fairly likely). This is pretty standard practice for school bus drivers. If the truck driver in this instance had acted in this manner, he may have likely seen the girl move out into the intersection instead of obliterating her under his wheels.

I think the presence of a bike lane makes it all the more unreasonable for him to assume nobody was to his right.

BarracksSi

Three, you're gonna go to heaven since you're such a ****ing genius and do no wrong in this world, ever.

Okay -- so you sat there at the light, checked your mirrors, watched for somebody who might run the red in front of you, and saw that you were clear. So you also wait a few seconds while you get your bigass cement truck into gear, and eventually start moving.

But you didn't see the girl who was right next to your front wheel AND is trying to start pedaling, moves a couple feet along, and slips one foot off her pedal and comes to a stop.

You're still gonna kill her. Sorry, dude, guess you're going to hell instead.

Mos6502

So you think he's not at fault for not seeing her?

BarracksSi

Not completely, no. He did what he could, saw that nobody was in his mirrors, etc. He could have been glancing down when she finally rode up past his cab, but you know as well as I do that being visible for a second or two does not guarantee that someone will actually see you.

It's certainly not a case for murder as some of these A&S jackasses would like to have it.

Mos6502

The way I see it, the driver is more at fault than the cyclist was in this instance. However what gets me the most, is that legally the cyclist was doing nothing wrong, so if the DA decides now that the driver was also not at fault - we are still faced that as a consequence of what happened, somebody ended up dead. So if the law (which is written to protect people) is functioning perfectly, and niether person involved in the collision is at fault - but the result of their interaction was a death - then something is seriously wrong.

Technically, regardless of either human being's decision making at the intersection, the law is that the turning vehicle has to yield to the vehicle traveling straight. There is no law saying that the cyclist is at fault for being next to a big truck, although it may be good sense not to be there anyway.
Legally the only person at fault here would be the driver, no matter how much easier it is for the DA to write off the accident on a dead person who cannot contest the facts of the matter.

And there it is. That's what gets me. Although plainly both people could have made better decisions and avoided that accident, the DA is insinuating that the cyclist is purely at fault by making the driver innocent of any wrong doing - which he is not. The law doesn't mean anything if nobody is going to be held to it.

Suppose for a second, that they did place the driver, or even the design of the truck as being partially responsible. What would happen? Would truckers become more conscious of dangers at intersections? Would they have to mandate better mirrors, or even mandate cab forward designs that give better curbside and frontal vision?

What if they decided the design of the bike lane was at fault? Would they improve intersections to make them safer?

They'll never have to deal with the question, because the driver is not at fault, and supposedly the laws are all working fine and being followed, even though deaths have resulted, so clearly there is a problem with the laws as they are.
It's the cyclist fault, for not breaking any laws but somehow managing to die anyway.

BarracksSi

Right, which goes back to what's been said here earlier about bike lanes creating a false sense of security. Yes, she was legally correct by being in the bike lane, but as I keep saying, some piece of municipal code is not going to make you invincible -- you HAVE to make safety the top priority. No dead person gets money from a settlement; no crippled person can walk any better after getting a million dollars, either.

Which, IMO, further illustrates the need for even better education. The odds are pretty good that the trucker received more training than the cyclist did.

There's a thread (or few) about requiring licenses for cyclists. One positive spin would be saying that a license is a "certificate of education", that its holder has been instructed in the safe operation of whatever class of vehicle is noted on the license. CDL licenses have different tests & requirements than the rest of ours; same with motorcycles.

I have not been instructed about how to ride a bike in traffic. I've heard pointers and followed suggestions, but I've never read a manual, nor have I taken a class. I try to remember what drivers tend to see, what they can't see, what their limitations are -- and what cyclists tend to do when they stop traffic, hit things, or get themselves killed. All I can do is stack the odds in my favor.

Mos6502

However the legal code should still be workable. In this instance, there is no law which the cyclist broke, but there is a law that the truck driver broke. And even though the law requiring motorists to yield to bikes does not contain any "unless not seen" loophole, the DA will excuse him from having to be held to the law for this. In essence the DA is just pulling a way out for the driver out of his imagination and having no regard for the law as it is currently written - which basically makes the DA something akin to a hole through which excrement is squeezed in my opinion. It has nothing to do with this occurrence in particular, just a general disgust that a DA would treat the law with so little regard.

Further that the DA would go out of his way to persecute cyclists as regards making a left turn (an action that left nobody dead) but is unwilling to follow the law as regards a vehicle making a right turn (and resulting in a death) betrays his stance as either a complete clod, or as having an anti-cyclist bias.

BarracksSi

I'm going to contend that this legal code is NOT workable, and is getting the lack of respect that it deserves.

Fred Smedley

Truck Driver was first to the intersection, Truck driver therefore had the right of way, cyclist was sadly at fault.

Mos6502

They were both stopped on the same side of a red light - not a stop sign. Aside from that, bicycles going straight in a bike lane have right of way over turning vehicles in Portland.

Fred Smedley

If either of your statements were true the truck driver would of been cited.

JusticeZero

Both are true; in Portland you have to use the bike lane if it's there, regardless of conscientious lane choices. That was a major factor in this accident.

BarracksSi

The other major factor was how far up the cyclist parked herself at the light.

She could have stayed in the bike lane and still stayed back far enough to be seen easily in the truck's mirrors and/or through the side window (that is, if his passenger door had a low-mounted window). She also could have stayed back far enough to stay clear of the truck's wheels as it was turning.

JusticeZero

Yes, she could have. that no doubt contributed to it, more than merely putting a straight lane to the right of a right turning lane did. Nonetheless, Portland puts through lanes to the right of right turn lanes and writes tickets for not using them.

BarracksSi

Which is exactly why this law is so stupid -- it puts people unnecessarily at risk. The law effectively contributed to her feeling safe in an unsafe position.

It's like telling someone to stand next to a building demolition site and telling him/her to not worry because the workers "aren't supposed to drop bricks on you."

Cars never have thru lanes outboard of turning lanes, and cyclists are told to behave like cars at times; so how does a cyclist's car-like "behavior mode" apply to such bike lanes?

Fred Smedley

A better position would of been forward near the front of the truck. Mirrors get dirty, and relying on the driver seeing you through a dirty six or eight inch mirror is stupid. A car can be hard to see in that blind spot let alone a cyclist. The dead cyclist supports my argument

BarracksSi

She would've had to be FAR forward of the truck; being near the wheel, as she was, was the worst place possible (next to being crouched low in front of the bumper).

Nobody here wants to believe that blind spots exist, though.