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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on June 8, 2011 at 1:12pm

I've noted my displeasure with the so-called reporting in this article on the TribLocal site:

 

N. Valhalla wrote 0 seconds ago

Mr. Synett:
“The boy safely made it across the street, but time the girl struck the left front quarter panel of the vehicle…”  Ummm, that “sentence” isn’t even in English.  But even if your copy editor was struck blind and dumb all afternoon by a tainted lunchtime martini, this article lacks, for want of a better word: journalism.
You seem to blame an eight year old child for running into a moving car.  I suppose similar logic could accuse a gunshot victim for running headlong into a bullet, but I don’t think that would be either fair or accurate.  You took down the statement from the nice policeman very well–good job!–but failed to ask why the motorist was still moving at speed towards two young children attempting to cross the road. That the impact threw the child up onto the windshield is a reasonable suggestion that the car was still moving much too fast and failed to yield to two children in the road.  The fact that the boy survived, having crossed the car’s path, suggests the driver was not surprised by children darting unseen from between parked cars.  If I was driving and saw young children crossing in my path, I would be standing up on the brakes, likely pushing the pedal through the floorboard.  Blaming an eight year old for running into a moving vehicle, a car that should not have been moving at all towards the children, is a low blow. I think TribLocal readers deserve better than this half-reported article."

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Permalink Reply by Gin on June 8, 2011 at 1:24pm

This is a huge issue. I see it all the time. My least favorite word: "darted."

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Anne Alt on June 8, 2011 at 1:28pm

I agree. 

Gin said:

This is a huge issue. I see it all the time. My least favorite word: "darted."

 

 

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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on June 8, 2011 at 1:36pm

We gotta hold the media's feet to the fire when we encounter such nonsense.  And "well done!" to those on this list who are slapping around the idiot ESPN radio jerks who advocate dooring as sport.

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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on June 10, 2011 at 12:24pm

Sadly, this young girl just died.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/chibrknews-crysta...

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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on June 10, 2011 at 6:45pm

That's an interesting map of the Bay Area.  It would be interesting to see something similar that shows the accidents around Chicago.  Just out of curiosity, I looked at the raw data for the Bay map and sorted it by "hit-and-run=TRUE".  The data shows at least as many bicyclists "hit-and-ran" as car drivers, which I find somewhat hard to believe.

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Permalink Reply by Thunder Snow on June 11, 2011 at 5:55am

Thanks, H3N3.  Now I can try to plan my routes bypassing the areas that seem prone to collisions.  Good stuff, this.

H3N3 said:

Steven Vance has been working on a Chicago portal:

http://www.stevevance.net/crashportal/?page=bikecrash

I can't bear to look at it-- too close to home, so to speak.

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Permalink Reply by Bike Bloke on June 12, 2011 at 6:19am

Those percentages just sicken me. What is the matter with the relevant authorities? Why do they just take the motorist's word for it - especially when the said motorist is hardly likely to self-incriminate? If there are no third party eye witnesses why can't they leave a verdict open?

H3N3 said:

Someobody posted this to one of the lists one night recently:

http://www.baycitizen.org/data/bike-accidents/

And I got sucked in for about 1/2 an hour playing with the filters.

What I learned:

In crashes where the cyclist lived to tell about it, a little over half were deemed the cyclist's fault.

In crashes where the cyclist did not live to tell about it, almost 100% were deemed the cyclist's fault.

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Permalink Reply by Bike Bloke on June 12, 2011 at 6:53am

Further to my comment on H3N3's research, I just remembered this:

Where I come from (England) with a situation like this the Police would be forensically examining the bike, the vehicle and the impact site to determine what speed the driver was doing and whether the driver made any attempt to avoid impact, and then they compare the results with what the driver says.

Looking at the intersection concerned on Googlemaps Streetview, North Avenue is a single lane each way through road in a residential area - the kind of street that should have a 20mph speed limit. Also, and perhaps significantly, there is a sidewalk only on the south side of North Avenue (the Millard Ave side). Perhaps the children were trying to reach the safety of that sidewalk. Who knows? I know it is common for suburbs to have no sidewalks on many streets, but that is really no excuse. Crystal Lake should be sued over this.

The Trib Local report says nothing about the speed involved. Extremely poor reporting.

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