$1000 for dooring

Much as the idea of being doored is a biking nightmare (the idea, let alone the even worse nightmare of the reality), I can't say I am any more reassured by the $1000 fine car drivers will have to pay.  For starters, $1000 seems like a huge amount of money for a poor family - and not all that much for a wealthy one.  I am skeptical that fining will make much difference.  For starters, we are supposed to bike in relatively thin strips of space to the left of most parked cars (Dearborn, etc, excluded) - a door arc is likely to take up most of that space anyway.  I see bikers all the time biking super close to the cars.  Just now I zipped north up Broadway just past Belmont and there were all these recreational bikers who did not have a clue, they were clearly oblivious to dooring.  As for me, I kept a good 3 feet to the left, as I am properly paranoid of the possibility.  I don't want to blame the victim here, but surely bikers must take some responsibility.  When you have a car you realize that while you can see bikers coming in the mirror or from a quick look around, the strategy is not fool proof.  At the point in time of an accident, a biker is presumably in one's blind spot.  Also, fining so much for an accident has a certain perverse quality in my mind.  Yes, if you are a drunk driver that is a different story (as it is anyway by law when he or she hits anybody or anything) but accidents are accidents after all, no matter how ugly their occasional consequence. 

I am not saying car drivers should not look for bikers before exiting their stinking polluters - of course they should.  BUT if there is no intention to harm, surely the accident is as much the biker's fault as the car driver's?  I must embarrassingly fess up to the fact that as a kid growing up in London I was in a car as a kid when my mom opened the car door and a biker crashed into it, breaking numerous bones.  He was in the hospital for many days.  My mother felt awful and did a great deal to help him financially, including buying him a $2000 Peugeot bike upon his release from the hospital as his prior bike had been irreparably damaged, but the biker felt an equal sense of responsibility and a good sense of humor about it, and they stayed in friendly terms with each other for several years, sending Xmas presents or cards to each other (no, nosy ones, the relationship stayed Platonic!) - an accident is after all an accident.  That is the part I keep thinking about here.

Reducing the event to an injury against the state tends to remove the nature of an unintentional injury against a person or a community into an impersonal act, a fine, a fine for what is an accident.  Does anyone have statistics on a) amount of people in Chicago doored; b) amount of those not injured; c) amount of those seriously injured but not mortally; d) amount of those mortally injured.  I also want to know how many bikers there are in Chicago each year or estimated commutes would be better.  I would love to compare those statistics to see how much more dangerous driving a car is to driving a bike, even including dooring incidents.  I am not apologetic of people ignorantly opening their doors without looking, one of our prime sources of psychological anxiety on the road (but not the only one - whose zooming up behind me now is just as big a one!) - but I don't think we should be smugly content by the state fining people more money when there is much more we can do to maintain our safety NOW with EXISTING limitations (like drive further to the left of parked cards - in fact does that act alone reduce dooring accidents by 100% compared to whatever the reduced rate is now for an existing $500 fine? - surely that is the big, scientific, question that should be answered to solve the dooring problem or reduce it further), and with better road design, education, and so on.