Recently, I wrote a post about people who comment on bicycle-related articles and identify themselves as cyclists to lend credence to their criticisms of cyclists. Whether these people are cyclists or not, their sentiments seem to fall in line with anti-bicycle rhetoric.
Either these people are not really cyclists or they want to side with the majority who are drivers. Without analyzing these commenters, it would be difficult to determine what their motives were.
They might want to preserve the roads for cars. They might want to punish cyclists for personal reasons. Or they might dislike other cyclists who don’t behave the way they think a cyclist should.
Now in some cases, this phenomenon goes a step further. A regular reader of my own blog, who identifies himself as a cyclist, thinks that when cyclists complain about the number of drivers who don’t face charges for killing cyclists, they are playing the “victim card.”
He wrote:
“I don’t have a problem with the punishment for the cyclist. He was reckless.But, the Alabama driver was more then reckless. At the very, very least he should had been charged with manslaughter. No matter the reason, the driver who killed the doctor was properly charged. As for the Wellesley crash I read, reread, and studied the police reports. I viewed the area on google maps. I even downloaded a photo of the crash site from a local newspaper. Everything shows that it is most likely that either the drain or the cyclist’s reaction to it caused him to fall in to the side of the trailer. Therefore, the grand jury did the only thing it could.
It is time we stop playing the victim card. In three of your examples the courts got it right. I think the one in Alabama had less to do with “anti-cycling” and more “good ole boys”. He was one of theirs and I believe the reaction would had been the same if he had hit a parked car, motorcycle,or even a nun crossing the road.”
In order to prove this, he evaluated an incident in Wellesley, Massachusetts and came up with a “theory” which none of the investigators or accident reconstruction experts involved mentioned. In fact, no one involved in the investigation or any local cyclist thought that this explanation had anything to do with the cyclist’s death.
Still, the reader insisted that from another state, he could “prove” that everyone in Massachusetts was wrong about the cause of the accident — even though they could see, and were familiar with, the accident scene. Rather than conducting an investigation at the scene, the way professionals always do, he relied on Google maps, which updates its street level photographs every few years, to reconstruct the accident.
By doing so, he picked a storm drain out of an outdated photograph of the road and claimed that the cyclist’s reaction to it was the cause of this accident. And in his mind, this exonerated the truck driver whose truck struck and killed the cyclist.
What’s interesting about this claim is that this amateur investigator didn’t have any facts other than the police report. Anyone who knows anything about accident investigations knows that there are other documents written by non-police accident investigators.
Depending upon the type of accident, all sorts of specialists can be called in to evaluate the scene and reconstruct what transpired. Their findings do not appear in the police report.
Along with numerous reports generated by the multiple state and local agencies involved in the investigation, there was video footage available to investigators showing the position of the bicycle and the truck prior to the accident. The video showed the cyclist in front of the truck prior to the impact. It was when the truck passed the cyclist that the crash occurred.
A basic knowledge of Massachusetts law would preclude the possibility of culpability on the part of the cyclist. Under the Motorist Responsibilities section of the Massachusetts General Laws (MGL Chapter 89, Section 2 and Chapter 90 Section 14) it says the following:
“Motorists must stay a safe distance to the left of a bicyclist (or any other vehicle) when passing. Motorists are also prohibited from returning to the right until safely clear of the bicyclist.
Motorists must pass at a safe distance. If the lane is too narrow to pass safely, the motorist must use another lane to pass, or, if that is also unsafe, the motorist must wait until it is safe to pass.
Motorists may not use the fact that bicyclists were riding to the right of traffic as a legal defense for causing a crash with a bicyclist.”
Clearly, even if the drain had anything to do with the cyclist’s crash, the driver of the truck was required to give him enough room to steer around it before passing. Despite this obvious condition, my reader insisted on disregarding the laws and the facts of the accident, which are all over the Internet, and which can be found in a matter of minutes, in order to blame the accident on the cyclist.
After he left this “storm drain theory” on the original post, I thought that he would do some more research on his own, whereby he would learn that all of the facts point towards the driver striking the bike. No storm drain was involved.
This didn’t stop him from leaving another comment on a more recent post about a bicyclist being charged with Assault With A Dangerous Weapon for striking and injuring a pedestrian. No U.S. driver has faced this charge when striking a bicycle. Nonetheless, my reader came by and tried to make the argument that the courts “got it right” both in not charging the truck driver with the death of the Wellesley cyclist and in charging the cyclist with assault with a deadly weapon. And he went on to claim that the Alabama incident, which I’ve covered extensively, was the result of “good ole boys,” not anti-bicycle bias. Alabama cyclists told me otherwise.
He asserted all of this, without a single fact to substantiate any of it, just to accuse cyclists who complain about inequitable treatment of using the “victim card.” Why would a cyclist go so far to blame cyclist and to accuse cyclists who blame his death on the truck driver of playing the victim card?
Now, as it turns out, the road in the Wellesley accident, which is the source of the victim card theory of cyclists being to blame for their own deaths at the hands of negligent drivers, was redesigned a couple of years ago.
I have ridden on the stretch where the cyclist was killed many times and have never had any problem with the storm drain. The reason is that it isn’t the sort of drain where the grates go in the same direction as the bike tires and it doesn’t stick out too far into the lane. So a cyclist could ride right over it without losing control of his bike.
In the photo below, you can see that the drain would not pose any problem for an experienced rider. The cyclist in question was training for a triathlon, so we know he did a lot of riding.
Another key fact which was ignored by my “cyclist” reader was that the deceased cyclist lived on the road where he was killed. What are the odds that he was taken by surprise by a drain located on the road where he lived and rode his bike daily? He could probably have ridden down that road in his sleep, with his eyes closed.
Further, the bike landed near the drain because the truck dragged it for 20 feet before it broke free. The crash was not near the drain.
All of this information could be obtained on the Internet in less than thirty minutes (which is what I did).
I find the reader’s tenacious grip on the “let’s ignore all of the facts to blame the cyclist” mindset perplexing. He’s grasping at straws and using the “card” strategy which is so often used against racial minorities, i.e. the “race card” or women, i.e. the “gender card” by white males who don’t want anyone outside of their clan to set foot on their turf.
Unless this reader wants to explain himself, I’m going to consider him an anti-cyclist in disguise, not much different from the ones who frequent comment sections, masquerading as cyclists in order to criticize cyclists.
