Juha

Sigh. I don't have an English source for this, but just yesterday a 31 year old guy got killed in a dooring "accident" in Helsinki. He was riding on a narrow residential street when a driver in a parked car opened door at the worst possible moment. Cyclist hit the door, was flung to his forward and left, straight in the front panel of an oncoming bus and then under the bus. He was pronounced dead on the scene.

Apparently he was so occupied with navigating between the oncoming bus and parked cars, he never realised the risk of being doored. Worst possible timing. And the parked car driver broke the law, no question about that. Not that it matters much.

Reactions are, well, tasteless. Local newspaper pointed out he had a helmet, but remembered to acknowledge it didn't help much. Comments include such as "Darwin claimed his own", "don't blame the car driver, he will have to live with this for the rest of his life" as well as wild speculation about cyclist's speed ("they all ride recklessly and too fast") etc.

Local cyclists had a memorial ride yesterday evening to the site of the accident, sadly I could not attend.

--J

genec

Justification for more and better paths like Oulu, perhaps?

Dan The Man

Why was he squeezing between oncoming traffic and parked cars? Sounds like riding on the wrong side or on a one way street.

Bob N.

Narrow European streets I'm guessing.

dougmc

It does matter in the inevitable lawsuit. (At least over here it would be inevitable. Over there things may be different.)

Note that "doorings are legally the fault of the person opening the door" isn't universal. Some places in the US place the onus for avoiding opening doors on the vehicle driving/riding by, not on the opener of the door. I certainly hope there's so such laws in Europe ...

Seattle Forrest

I wonder if posting about each and every cyclist's death will encourage more people to get on bikes?

mnemia

It's useful if it helps us to understand how these things happen and avoid them in the future, or to press for better infrastructure, education, etc. Does it discourage people from driving cars when the news media reports on car accidents?

genec

Car collisions are so common that they are rarely reported.

mnemia

I see them reported all the time, especially if there are fatalities.

vol

One way to reduce fatal dooring accident may be to ride slowly whenever there is possibility of dooring around you. If someone opens door unexpectedly and you don't stop in time, hopefully the driver is just stepping out of the car and be hit by you, with less injury to yourself (the driver serves as a cushion between the door and you/your bike). Don't try to veer to the side to risk being hit by vehicles. Say sorry to the dooring driver and tell him he shouldn't have opened the door.

Seattle Forrest

What have you learned from this post that will help you avoid a similar fate? ( Stuff you didn't already know, please. )

You seem to have missed the point about instilling fear into the people who won't ride bikes because they perceive too much danger in cycling.

mnemia

I already know how to avoid most dooring incidents, correct. But clearly not everyone does, or it wouldn't ever happen.

As for fear of cycling, I agree that there is a lot of unreasonable fear of it out there among the non-cycling population. However, I don't believe the reason for this is primarily because of the media reporting on cycling deaths, as the media reports on motor vehicle deaths all the time and people aren't unreasonably afraid of driving. I believe the main reason for the fear is that cycling on most U.S. roadways genuinely IS scary in a sort of primal way for most people who aren't used to doing it. And it breaks cultural taboos that are quite deeply rooted in this country about speed and the way that we achieve transportation safety. Most Americans believe that the primary thing that protects them from injury on the roads is safety that is passively engineered into their cars: this is why they feel safe texting while driving, driving drunk, etc. They tend to discount the role of behavior in safety, and thus conclude that a bicycle is insanely dangerous because it lacks almost all the engineered-in safety that a car or truck has. Again, this is in large part due to marketing of cars, cultural taboos, etc, not because the media reports on cyclist deaths. By contrast, because we as cyclists are acutely aware of how behavior is involved in safety, we tend to have a different perspective.

vol

Knowledge of accidents is always good. Just because you don't mention them on this forum doesn't mean people will not hear about them. It would be worse if many accidents happened but you are unaware of them. This is especially true for those accident-prone areas.

gcottay

In working with novice cyclists I've found that they learn most safety practices rather readily. Avoiding the door zone, simple as it is, is not one of them.

genec

Right, fatalities, and unusual situations are often reported... But collisions themselves, rarely. For instance I was just on a jury trial involving 3 vehicles crashing... and the police didn't even bother to respond. If a collision doesn't involve major damage and injury, it isn't even covered by police, much less media.

genec

You have to be cycling at basically a jogging pace to be able to stop quick enough... rather reduces the utility of cycling if you have to do it at that speed.

unterhausen

I don't know how you teach it. I was doored once, and I just can't force myself to ride that close to cars any more

CB HI

Are you sure there is even one location in the USA that the doored victim is considered at fault?

I do not have time to look up the thread or city, but the last cyclist that I heard of getting doored and then getting a ticket in the hospital for not avoiding the dooring, raised such an outcry that the law was changed. (Chicago or one of it's burbs maybe)

If there are still locations anyone is aware of that ticket the doored person, let's please start a list.

unterhausen

that incident was in Madison, Wisconsin.

I wonder if the bus was out in the middle of the lane because it was avoiding the door zone on the other side. There are roads like that in Washington, D.C. where they are nominally two-way, but to pass, both cars would have to drive right next to the parked cars. So when there is no oncoming traffic, cars go down the middle of the road without a lot of room on either side.

Seattle Forrest

That's true. On the other hand, A&S is pretty indulgent about them. Almost every cyclist who ever died has a thread here. Three of the threads on the front page explicitly mention death in their titles; several more are about road rage, collisions, hatred and threats directed at cyclists, "war" between drivers and cyclists, and how to crash properly. If any new cyclist (or a person thinking about commuting by bike) made the mistake of coming here, they'd be given a wrong impression of what cycling is like and scared straight. A&S is more than a little obsessed with this.

dougmc

That seems unlikely. About 600 cyclists die a year in the US alone, and I don't see 1.6 new threads (on average) about a specific cyclist death appearing here each day. And then there's a lot more cyclists that die elsewhere ...

But certainly, a significant number of them do get threads here.

Digital_Cowboy

Even sadder is that it takes something really "spectacular" i.e. "car crashes into living room," or "car uses drive-thru window," where no drive-thru previously existed. Before it gets reported in the media.

CB HI

Car collisions are so common, that many states do not even want you to call the cops unless someone needs an ambulance or the property damage exceeds $3,000.

Juha

Here's a snapshot from Google Street View. I don't know the exact location of the accident, but this gives you an idea of the two-way street in question. Cars to the left are parked, a sidewalk runs on both sides of the street.

As far as I understand, this would be the bus driver's point of view in the situation, if the crash happened in this location. The cyclist would have biked towards us on his lane (left lane in this pic), along the parked cars. Our traffic code states that because the parked cars are on his lane, he has the obligation to yield to oncoming traffic when he passes them. The fact that we're a bus leaves him with two options, either ride closer to the cars, or stop behind the cars and let the bus pass first. (Third option would be to dismount and walk the bike on the sidewalk past parked cars, but that's not very practical).

We have a specific paragraph about doors: it's the driver's responsibility to check he can open the door safely in traffic. I can understand he didn't see the bike (not that it's any excuse, but I can see how that would happen), but he most certainly could not have missed seeing the bus. There couldn't have been much room left between his opened door and the bus in these conditions, so why he did not wait until the bus had passed is beyond me.

dynodonn 

As Seattle has mentioned, seems that only the cyclists that have died seem to get noticed here on A and S , and nothing about the cyclists that get injured and live to tell the tale.

Here's a thread on the Commuting Forum:

https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread...I-got-doored..