IN PICTURES: A typically deadly commute

GUEST COMMENT

My partner rides a bicycle to and from work.

Her town bike has a basket on the front and back.

She is small, wears normal street clothes and obeys traffic rules.

This is what a ride home looks like.

She takes the long way home to get exercise.

She’s fast, right?

You might have caught two or three scary moments.

Let's look at the worst one, on what is essentially a random day — today.

Here she is nearing the top of College Hill Road. She is not very big and goes pretty quickly up hills — and enjoys passing the occasional middle aged man in lycra. She sometimes does that when those baskets are full of groceries.

Click any image to zoom.

She is approaching a carpark – and as there are no cars today she had a clear run. This is great as normally the parked cars force her into the often fast moving traffic that is chaotic due to a complex intersection ahead. This, by the way, is on the safest route she has found to get some exercise while riding home.

The cars at the front by the light are stopped, and the closest car, the red one in the car lane to the right, is slowing to a stop. There is lots of traffic so it’s pretty noisy.

With the empty carpark she has a clear run to the head of the intersection and can stay well out of the way of motorised traffic. She could alternatively choose to cross to her right to get behind the red car, but that decision would have killed her, as you will see shortly.

When cycling or motorcycling making decisions about not dying are fairly constant, with the key rule to stay the away from high speed differentials with large vehicles.

From nowhere comes a bus at high speed:

The bus is trying to cut between my partner, who is riding quickly, and the parked red car, and then take the left hand turn at the end of the street.

The green bus has a large amount of momentum and very little room for error on either side. My partner is still riding in the designated car park.

A few seconds later the bus and the bike have braked almost to a stop – but look how far it took the bus to do so.

The bus driver chose not to hit the red car from behind, and instead cut in front of the person on a bicycle, potentially fatally.

Perhaps it would have been safer to graze or hit the car than to risk squashing an unprotected rider – a potential judgement call that should be discussed in an incident investigation, but clearly won’t be because this incident is a sadly regular occurrence for both buses and cyclists, and they are never investigated as far as I can tell.

Luckily my partner, riding the bicycle, braked very hard, and a tragedy was averted. However once again I get to greet a distraught partner when she arrived home.

There really was no room for error if she had continued.

But the bus made it through, the car was untouched and the my partner got to come home physically unscathed tonight — and I am grateful for that. But for the sake of about 3 seconds of time, the bus driver’s dangerous driving was exposing the driver of the red car to an accident and injury, and the cyclist to a potentially fatal accident.

That’s not worth it, and the driver should instead have slowed down to follow the bicycle.

Let’s look at it all in real time speed. What would you have done? Are you confident enough to stop safely? How about if your bike was full of groceries?

This sort of incident is, tragically, quite usual for Auckland roads. While every cycling day is packed with the normal dangers to avoid, most days also see specific dangerous driving actions like this one, and that’s what we have to stop.

Our worst story
One reason my partner gets distraught at these sorts of near misses is that she was knocked off her bike in late 2012 by a woman who works for an insurance company. That person dangerously crossed a busy road by driving her car illegally through a stop sign from one side street to another. My partner was descending and the car hit her, knocking her off her bike and she slid for quite some time, luckily avoiding hitting anything. Even more luckily she had just avoided a perhaps fatal T-bone accident, and escaped “only” with lacerations, bruising, swelling and a couple of trips to the doctor. She was also very shaken up.

Strangely, for someone I discovered to be a communications professional, the driver, provided only her first name (Michelle) and phone number. As a victim my partner wanted as little as possible to do with the driver or her insurer company, but I was glad to  help. Even then, while my Google foo was strong enough to find the driver, I had to ask her quite firmly to formally identify herself so that we could settle accounts. I also actually enjoyed jousting with her insurance company (which was not her employer), who as always are not exactly there to meet your full costs unless you fight. Incidentally — if something like this happens to you there are people out there who really enjoy negotiating with insurance companies — so don’t be afraid to ask around.

We did report the incident to the police, who were wonderful. However we were later disgusted to find that  the end result was not a loss of license or worse for what was clearly careless or dangerous driving, but essentially a traffic ticket. My partner had had enough, and didn’t feel she could handle a court case, and so we let it slide, as victims often do. I’m certain that this is very common, and it’s just sad that dangerous driving against cyclists seems to be treated as irrelevant.

What we did
The first thing we did afterwards was to purchase Go Pro cameras for riding. They provide great evidence of dangerous driving, and I highly recommend riding or driving with a camera to everyone. If in doubt, search for “Russian driving video” or similar.

I did not write about the incident at the time, also because my partner did not feel she could cope with it. Overall I do not feel that there was natural justice, and feel that at the very least the driver should be compelled to go through some sort of remedial course.

However, as with all accidents, it was not all the fault of one person. The real fault is the design of the road where vehicles have to cross a large road with cars traveling at high speeds. The side roads should either be closed, for example, or some sort of traffic control put in place. There should be no surprise to learn that nothing has happened yet, but we did go to the Ponsonby Road Masterplan public hearing.

What can we do?
Do buy a camera and use it to name and shame, but most of all to show other road users that their behaviour will not go unobserved.

Please do respond, and drown out, the vocal minority of selfish commenters on a variety of forums who seem to think it’s okay to mow down people with their car.

Please consider riding a bike yourself – as the more people on bicycles commuting to work, the faster we will change behaviour.

Please ask your local and national politicians what they are doing to stop the killing of cyclists and to make Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch and all of New Zealand have vibrant life-filled streets and the best urban and rural cycleways in the world.

Let’s make it happen.

Entrepreneur Lance Wiggs posts at LanceWiggs.com.