Originally Posted by John C. Ratliff
No, that's not what happened at all. I described it in detail a number of years ago, I was signaling a left turn from a bike lane, looking back. From what I've been able to put together, a car from a parking lot on my right decided to swerve in front of me, and I ended up returning to consciousness about 40 minutes later.
So as you were approaching an intersection with a parking lot driveway, while riding in the bike lane stripe-demarcated margin (off to the side from where drivers are more likely to look for traffic), you were looking backwards? I'm sorry, but...
Had I been using a mirror, I could have monitored both in front of me and behind for oncoming traffic. I did not swerve in front of another car, and so far as I know, never initiated the turn out of the bike lane that I was trying to move away from for a left turn at the bottam of the hill (two hundred yards or so away when I began my turn sequence. With the mirror, I would simply have slowed down, yielded to the car, and gone to the bottom of the hill in the bike lane. From there I would have used the signal to cross as an alternative.
I dunno. It sounds to me like you waited too long to plan your merge left. Maybe if you had a mirror and you weren't looking back, you would have noticed the guy coming out of the parking lot sooner. Maybe not.
While a mirror makes it easier to monitor to the rear quickly, not having one is not an excuse for looking back for too long at the wrong time.
When I asked John Forester about the mirror, he said my mistake was not getting into the far left lane way up the road. But to do that, I would be riding for about half a mile in the far left lane.
I don't understand. Aren't there about 2500 feet between a half a mile back from where you were to where you were? Wouldn't a better place to begin your merge left have been somewhere between those two points?
That is why I stated above that, using VC techniques of clearing myself by looking back (not using a mirror) for an extended time (I was still in the bike lane, and could stay there if I wanted--I can go in a straight line, you know), I set myself up for being hit by a car coming from my right (blind-sided, as they say).
Dude, you were looking backwards "for an extended time" while moving forward in the relatively obscure margin of the road
as you were approaching an intersection! What would Homer Simpson say?
By the way, my trauma doc said, on a subsequent visit to remove fluid from my hip, that "If you had not been wearing a helmet, and had been unlucky that day, you would have lived."
So, you're dead?
I think he must have said "you would have NOT lived", or "you would have died".
I, for one, am really glad you're still here to tell us about it.