Tricyclist Killed in Portland Suburb
 

No real meaningful details yet released by LE.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2019...e-and-car.html

And none likely to be forthcoming. Respectfully, given that you have no details as to whether this is an issue of Advocacy and/or Safety or simply a tragedy, why are you presenting this as a topic for discussion? Accidents like this happen daily. If we were to take them all up for discussion ... ... so why take any of them up for discussion?

why not? maybe a friend-relative of a reader.why the harsh reaction??? do tricyclists meet their fate daily as you say?

Why not? Because the news cycle is very short. The media has already moved on. Had the driver fled or was uncooperative, maybe there would be more. As it stands someone would really have to go out of their way to find out more. Why it does not matter: A&S is not IMO a newswire. That's all we have here. A news story put on the forum with no opinion, no anything. Just a news item for no purpose I can discern and I actually live in Portland. Let's say I lived in NYC? Pedestrians and cyclists are hit multiple times a day in the Portland Metro Area. The vast majority do not make the news. It is not a harsh reaction. Just a reaction. For all we know it could be the (tri)cyclists own fault that they were hit. What then?

The OP is from Portland.

Even in NYC there are not multiple fatalities of people on bikes or people on foot per day.

IF YOU don’t like a post, suggest you ignore.

Try it. Once?

-mr. bill

Did I say fatalities or did I say 'hit'. And I know the o.p. is from Portland. That was my point. I don't imagine that what is important to me in Portland (also) is also important to people hundreds or thousands of miles away. But I guess you are all bored and anything put on here is exciting to consider. My bad.

Maybe we will, maybe we will not. I am not holding my breath.

having "one of those days" are we.
https://cimg3.ibsrv.net/gimg/bikefor...e8606eae02.jpg

I have a personal policy of not getting into spitting matches with people. Something my father taught me. That said, many people are interested in events both in their own regions and far away. It's why we have both local and international news agencies. Basically, I disagree with almost everything you have written, but as Voltaire wisely said: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

So. @bpcyclist, is there any follow-up? Tricycling accidents seem rarely reported (though I don’t read the recumbent forum). Was this the recumbent tricycle written by an experience cyclist, or an upright tricycle (probably) perhaps written by casual rider.

Personally, I think that a tricycle is always a possibility for any cyclist, especially in the twilight their career. :50:

Anybody else read the comments? A guy who was there just after, said it was raining, VERY dark and the bike had baskets. So most likely a slow cruiser trike. This street is also a busy highway thru there. And I was actually by there on my tour last July on my way to a relative in Beaverton. Streetview shows bike lanes both sides. So unfortunately he was slow getting across. RIP
The chances it had lights are pretty low, IMO.

Ok, so 10th street is one of the main drags in Hillsboro (HWY 8), connecting Hillsboro to Beaverton/Portland.

https://www.google.com/maps/search/S.../data=!3m1!1e3

The time is also listed as 7:45 PM, so a couple hours past sundown.

Details are sparse, but it sounds like the cyclist was entering the roadway from a driveway south of Cedar. Probably from one of the malls to the East.

There is no mention of lighting nor visibility. Even if there was lighting, was it straight forward/back, or adequate side visibility?

FOG?

Unfortunately a horrible accident, probably due to inattention by both the cyclist and the driver.

Weather for Hillsboro for that time was reported as mid-40s with occasional showers. As CliffordK notes, 10th is super-busy (it's other name is the Tualatin Valley (TV) Hwy.) and two lanes each way, plus, two bike lanes. Cedar St. does not have a light with 10th--it is just a stop sign. I'm wondering if he got impatient waiting there for a break in the traffic and decided to just go for it. The driver was not felt to be either speeding or intoxicated and she was not apparently cited. As someone noted, those trikes are popular now among some of the homeless population. In my town, I have never seen one wearing a helmet. I spend little time out in Hillsboro, as it is a good twenty-five-plus minutes from me. I don't know what their homeless situation is these days. But surely, they have some.

Although I try hard to avoid it, occasionally, I do have to ride in city traffic. Not throwing my religion at anyone here, but I do always say a little prayer as I head out that I will make good traffic decisions out there. I do believe that my own choices have a ton to do with how safe it is for me to cycle. Had a close call last week, totally his fault, but I haven't been hit in over a year. Obey lights and stop signs. Signal my intentions in advance. Assume other people are trying to kill me. So on. It's the best I can do. But thinking about how busy that street would be at 8 o'clock on a Friday night, I am reminded all over again of why my usual ride starts at 430 AM during the work week. You can't get hit if there are no cars.

I find the uninformed post-mortems based on the sketchy information publicly available quite distasteful. This always degenerates into a debate over whether or not to blame the dead guy, and I don't believe anything is learned from such threads other than the extent to which people will impose facts to "prove" either that it'll never happen to them or it's always the driver's fault.

If we want to do debriefs on our own accidents, fine, I might do that if I'm trying to figure out how I could've handled the situation differently. But let's face it, these threads don't produce any knowledge, they're just water cooler arguments over corpses and maimed cyclists.

Good point; they must be read with some skepticism. I only contest opinions I disagree with, not fault-finding, but I have posted:As always, FWIW.

It would be nice to have a full detailed police investigation file and accident reconstruction for each accident. Do you wish to get that much detail?

But, I believe there is some that can be learned from every accident. Yes, we probably get some details wrong. But, there are general things that are included. Place where it occurred, time of day, directions, etc. So, looking up information on the streets, light/dark/etc.

There has been debate about the term "accident" which conveys a lack of intent. What was traffic like? Speeds? Lights? Side reflectors/lighting? Was the guy crossing the road to the other side (perpendicular to traffic)? Etc? Whether or not those were all factors, they are important factors for us all to consider in hopes of modifying the variables that we can to make our cycling experience safer.

I think we're rerunning an argument we've had here before. We already know those are risk factors, how does knowing the details of any given incident tell me something about lighting, for example, that I don't already know? We're not the NTSB, we're not going to have the resources to do the kind of discussion that might actually uncover some sort of subtle point.

"Look both ways before you cross a street".... ingrained in most of us since childhood, but still worth reminding people, especially if failing to do so means getting flattened.

90% of us also know that trucks making a right turn is bad news. But, it never hurts to remind that remaining 10% that the rear wheels don't track with the front wheels. Simply stopping next to a turning truck can be deadly.

Anyway, I think one of the reasons to have these accident reports in A&S is to allow us to consider situations, and what we can do as road users to be safer ourselves, or potentially safety advocacy with community governments for safer infrastructure or safety awareness.

Not blaming the cyclist. Not blaming the driver. But, considering a set of circumstances that came together to create a deadly accident. Alter a few factors, and the cyclist might be alive today.

Somebody didn't get the memo.

Sorry, but I don't think that's how any of this works. I just got hit by a car a couple weeks ago. I really don't remember actually getting hit, but nearest I can paste it together, the sun got in my eyes so I didn't see a stop sign and ran smack into a car driving through the intersection with the right of way. Definitely a lapse in judgment on my part, and I make no excuses. But I'm quite sure that whether or not you or anyone else had posted "don't proceed into an intersection if your vision is impaired" would not have had any effect on whether or not I would have caught myself before making that mistake. I know that's the rule, for some reason I was just tired or distracted enough not to follow it.

Ahhh, so nothing to learn from riding into an intersection blind.

Or considering that if you can't see, then the cars behind you also can't see.

Thanks, Clifford for refreshing my memory of Hillsboro's streets. Yes, that roughly 8 block section of 10th Ave is a busy 4 lane state highway. There is a lot for drivers to be looking out for. I'd only ride that section at night with full lighting, etc. There are no side streets on northbound 10th Ave there, so if the cyclist was entering the road, he was doing it from a parking lot or driveway. I can assure you that good drivers will have most of their attention focused elsewhere driving that stretch.

I've ridden that section, but only in daytime and in full "this is real" mode. (In other words, if I don't pay attention, I don't live.) Worst section of the 8-10 mile stretch of Highway 8 from Beaverton to Hillsboro by quite a lot. There are a lot of ways to bypass it and I would at night as a matter of course. That cyclist could have ridden 11th Ave and one block of sidewalk. (I'm pretty sure that sidewalk is plenty wide for a trike.)

Ben

I've been on Beaverton Hillsdale HWY too many times.

The section between Oleson Rd and Beaverton has (or had) no bike path.

That is one advantage of doing group rides... finding safe routes where other cyclists ride, and a few shortcuts. :thumb:

I don't mind a busy street with a good bike path, although I fear the above accident was a cyclist trying to cross a busy street starting from a driveway.

Like you say, it never hurts to hunt for equivalent parallel routes on much less busy streets.

I don't think I learned anything I didn't already know, thank you. Since I can't really remember the incident, it's a bit hard to know what was going through my head, but yes I have been aware since childhood that lighting conditions affect perception and how. For all I know, I might have been checking behind me and that's how I got distracted from what was ahead of me. No way of telling without that few seconds of memory.

This actually illustrates why imperfect information renders the whole exercise useless, btw. I was there, and I can't tell you what caused me to make the mistake. The sun angle really is just an educated guess made by observing its position after I got up from the fall and before I was put in the ambulance, and even then I don't know why I didn't handle it better.

You may as well put the subject poster on ignore then, 'cause if he can't get into a pissing contest, he ain't happy.