hotbike

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/te...accidents.html

Quote:
"....Footage from these cameras has begun to play an invaluable role in police investigations of a small number of hit-and-runs and other incidents around the country, local authorities say. Lawyers who specialize in representing bicyclists say they expect the use of cameras for this purpose to increase as awareness of the devices goes up ..."

This is from the New York Times. I think this article is the best yet, on the topic of Bike-Mounted Cameras. A veritable Black Box! That's a good analogy.

ckaspar

I would not say a Black Box per se but more of an independent 3rd party witness but it is good to see the word spreading for camera use for cyclists in my opinion. It has served me well on a few occasions.

genec

Yeah, but that we have to wear such devices says a lot (not in a good way) for this society of motorists and the legal system that supports them.

unterhausen

we seem to have gone from the idea that it is a vehicle operator's responsibility to control their vehicle to a situation where everyone better stay out of the way if a car is coming. On July 8, there was a collision near Portland where a motorist drove onto the shoulder and struck a cyclist. Reports are that the cyclist was to the far right of a fairly wide shoulder. Oregon has a vulnerable road user's law that was intended to cover situations like this. The cops cited the driver for failing to drive in the lane, but did not cite under the vulnerable road user law because the motorist didn't demonstrate carelessness. Hard for me to imagine how more careless you can get in this situation. Discussion can be found here

sauerwald

I'm not quite so pessimistic. I commute with a camera, and I post some of the bonehead moves that I encounter on youtube, but I think that it is effective because the vast majority of motorists are careful, considerate and law abiding. If I try to tell my wife or my sister about some motorists how is honking at me and then purposely bumps me as they drive past, they can't believe that such things would happen. The video camera provides evidence of such bad behaviour, and it is my hope that it will make it less socially acceptable and eventually lead to safer roads for us all.

If idiot motorists were more common, the camera would serve little purpose other than as entertainment.

johnny99

Not just black boxes. In the case of a hit-and-run, a camera can accurately capture a license plate number. There was a case near me (Berkeley, California) where 2 bicyclists were hit from behind and the driver fled. Their handlebar camera caught the license plate number and vehicle description and the cops tracked down and arrested the driver within a couple of days. Without the camera, the cops won't put much effort into cases like this unless the victims are killed.

Sooner Rider

If you want 1,000 Russian car crashes recorded on dash cams - and have 90 minutes to kill - here's your link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iemD6QVx2Mw

krobinson103

We run a 'black box' in our car. Its a tiny unit that does everything with no intervention so its a good 'fit and forget' item. I don't use one on my bikes though. It just seems more gear to drag around.

genec

I am that pessimistic... according to local cops, 1 out of 4 people driving is using a cell phone... that is NOT "careful, considerate and law abiding" in my book.

ckaspar

Driving or riding I see drivers do stupid things. The fact that I am more vulnerable on a bike is one of the reasons I run a camera. I have several other reasons that pertain more to me than to the other drivers on the road.

009jim

If your bike has a camera, make sure you tell someone. I'd suspect if you were the victim in an accident, the person in the wrong may find your camera and dispose of it if no-one is watching.

alhedges

It's always been this way in the 30+ years I've been biking for transportation. The difference is that the camera gives you a way to fight back.

ckaspar

Good point. I may need to add that to my Road ID interactive thingy under the notes.

dynodonn 

The last two motorists that I reported, would have got away completely with their dangerous/aggressive driving if I had not had high resolution cameras equipped on my bike. My main goal is still not to be hit by a motorist in the first place, with cameras being only on board for information gathering on incidents in that I can personally give to law enforcement, and hopefully not as a "black box" where the video is extracted by someone else.

dynodonn 

The one thing about cameras, is that I no longer have to chase down a motorist to get a vehicle/motorist description and vehicle license number, plus I generally can collect all the needed info in less than a second, without the motorist even having a clue that I even gathered it in the first place.

The last aggressive motorist that I manually gathered info on, with the motorist personally seeing me in the process of doing it, the whole incident became even uglier.

toddles

I see a lot of joy using this baby to bait cars into bad behavior. I'll teach 'em to mess w/ me.

dynodonn 

No bait needed, I let motorists act naturally, with the really dumb ones jumping right into the boat and floundering on the deck. My very last reported motorist decided to "teach me a lesson" by missing me by three inches, at a 40 mph "differential", while I was in a gutter bike lane.

My cameras captured him looking straight at me through the windshield of his vehicle, then at me through his side mirror after he passed me.

bikecrate

I’ve debated getting a camera since I was left hook broadsided by a car a couple of months ago. The driver told her insurance company that I hit her! So what I thought would be an easy process to get my bike replaced took over 6 weeks. Fortunately, I had the police report and a witness on my side. However, if I didn’t have witnesses I would have been screwed.

Sooner Rider

That gets captured too, as does verbally taunting motorists, riding erratically, riding three abreast in groups, etc. The judge isn't going to accept an edited copy of your video - he wants the whole thing starting when you left the driveway.

contango 

Hard to see how telling someone you had a camera would help. A camera is an expensive piece of kit so I'd expect it to have a facility to remove it quickly and easily for security. So your careless/reckless motorist who just ran you down takes the camera off the bike leaving just the mount, drops it down a street drain, and at a stroke there's no evidence that the camera was on the bike at the time of the crash.

If it doesn't have quick release he smashes it off the bike, drops it down a street drain and flees. After all, if he hit you hard enough to knock you off the bike and kill you the bike being badly damaged is to be expected, and so people are hunting for a camera that "must have broken off in the impact" that isn't there any more.

Neither situation helps identify the motorist.

dynodonn 

From my personal experiences, plus the many videos that I've viewed, a cyclist just riding predictably and according to the rules of the road is enough to set a number of motorists into a rage. I also seriously doubt that a judge worth his salt is going to throw out any claim I may have against an offending motorist on the pretense that I may have rolled a stop sign on a quiet back street, two miles earlier.

wsbob

Oregon's so called 'vulnerable road user law is actually, only a clause within a statute titled, 'Careless Driving'. Word is from the Oregon State Police PIO, that the reason the person driving and involved in the collision on Hwy 101 didn't get a cite for careless driving is that the responding police officer didn't find indications that careless driving was the cause of the collision. At present, reports have been that the cause of the collision hasn't been determined. The county DA email corresponded with one of bikeportland's readers, expressing that investigation into whether there is criminal action on the part of the driver that may have contributed to the cause of the collision, is being conducted.

Would cameras, either bike mounted or mounted on the vehicle of the person driving, have helped to determine the cause of the Hwy 101 collision? There's no dispute that the vehicle hit the person on the bike. The question yet unanswered, is 'why', and if the cause was careless driving or some other cause that, for the purpose of the discussion on this thread here...a bike cam or car camera would have been able to document. To date, an account of only one witness to the collision has been reported. That account doesn't describe any extraordinary movement of the vehicle other than the single movement of the vehicle from the main lane to the road's shoulder and into the person on the bike.

It's not clear then that a bike cam would have helped figure out why the Hwy 101 collision occurred, but for plenty of other traffic situations that routinely occur on the road, vehicle cameras could be a great help in sorting out what the causes were, and possibly in getting people to make greater efforts to use the roads safely.

dynodonn 

During the daytime, and if the sun is shining and at the proper angle to highlight the motorist, I can get some great video shots of motorists with my rear cam. If the cyclist, that was injured, was able to get a video shot of the motorist looking down, away, or talking on a cell phone, then maybe the state's vulnerable road user law would have come into effect.

unterhausen

I really don't see how a motorist that rear-ends a vehicle on the shoulder could be considered to be driving in any other way than "carelessly." They certainly aren't driving carefully. In some situations like that, the motorist gets away with saying that the cyclist swerved. Cameras would spike that argument.

dynodonn 

Looks like "failure to stay in the lane" isn't "carelessly" enough in the eyes of the LEO issuing the ticket. In the discussion in the link that you provided, it seems that non vulnerable roadway users tend to set the bar high in what is to be considered "careless driving".