prj71

It's Chicago. Have you ever been there? **** like this happens all the time in the concrete jungle. And it's not just directed at cyclists.

livedarklions

So you think the fact that we take this for granted is a less important topic than "did the cyclist screw up"? Cool story, bro.

livedarklions

Like I said, the purpose of these threads appears to be to allow people like this to reassure themselves they are immune from getting hit by a motor vehicle.

prj71

The cyclists didn't get hit by a motor vehicle. The cyclist hit a stopped motor vehicle.

Clyde1820

When I was younger, I used to fly by a line of cars parked overnight down a lonely stretch of road on the way to the pier to go fishing. But that was at 4am and the likelihood of getting "doored" was practically nil. Would never have attempted the same thing during normal hours.

Dangerous stuff, when folks don't look before they "leap." Painful, too, when going on the assumption everyone's going to behave reasonably and with forethought. Hopefully both learned a valuable lesson, in the OP encounter.

livedarklions

By all accounts the door was moving, but please feel free to quibble irrelevantly.

CliffordK

The video clip I saw was very short, and doesn't show the car or passenger leaving. Plus it lacks audio.

The cyclist did get back up on his 2 feet while the car was there. Hopefully the everything was dragged off of the road while the car was still blocking the lane for safety./Beyond that we don't know everything that transpired.

Beyond that we don't know everything that transpired. And, at this point only have one side of the story.

Did the cyclist tell the driver that he was OK?

The license plate isn't clear in the video, but I have to think it was intentionally obscured by the news agency. There has to be video processing equipment that can take an unmoving 5 minute video clip and clean up the resolution 1000 times. If it was a LYFT driver and passenger, then the company knows the ID.

It has been another week, and no followup stories? Did the driver file a DMV report?

CliffordK

Precisely... Defensive Cycling.

Other than blaming all the worlds woes on drivers (which many of us also drive), this is one thing we can take from this forum is how can we make our own cycling safer?

And, many of us have encountered similar situations in riding. How do we handle it without getting clobbered?

For example, we've already discussed slowing down, look back, assess the road situation, then pass on the left.

livedarklions

Seriously, the only alternatives are critiquing someone else's cycling technique or "blaming all the worlds woes on drivers"?

C'mon.

prj71

Or living in some alternate universe like you do?

I-Like-To-Bike

There is always the alternative of assuming that this incident is unique to rideshare drivers discharging passengers on city streets and blaming this incident on ride share corporation policies or some sort of failure of Chicago b-crats to inform the rideshare companies and the public about how to identify a bike lane, even if they do not exist on the street in question.

livedarklions

Or writing completely straw man versions of anything I've been saying like a troll would do.

How you doing?

livedarklions

Are we going to personal insults now?

UniChris

Not squeezing at speed through the intentionally narrow space to the right of a pulled over vehicle comes from basic survival smarts, not the definition of a sharrow.

If you want get formal, attempting to zip rapidly through that squeeze is probably "failure to exercise due care"

livedarklions

If it hasn't been clear to you from my saying it about a million times, I'm completely bored with the argument of this rider's responsibility, and haggling over what is the proper speed and the minimum clearance on the right. At this point, I'm finding statements made by kingston about rideshare vehicles and no one seeming to know what the sharrows are supposed to be telling them. He's a very experienced rider familiar with the area, and has a lot more to tell us than a poorly angled security cam video and a short newspaper story.

I'd like to think that the collective brain-power here could come up with something more useful for this forum to do than individual fault assessment, but since I keep getting insulted and heckled when I try to broaden the subject, I guess that's probably not the case.

To be honest, I'm actually most disappointed in your responses to me. This stuff I've said about these liability shields tie in directly with a topic you've repeatedly discussed, the scary crazy riding practices of ebike delivery people. I think it's very likely that their employers have set up the legal relationship with the delivery guys so they're not liable if and when they hit people. Good luck collecting anything if you sue the uninsured ebike driver. rI-Like-To-Bike is fond of castigating lawyers with an agenda. Who the hell does he think designed legal relationships to shield employers from the completely predictable consequences of their employees' actions?

UniChris

Yes, you've made it quite clear you are uninterested in the fact principle fact of the situation, that the rider chose not only to go through a narrow gap not intended for passage, but to do so at speed

Funny how what you see in comon is liability, and not the dangerous operation of a bike like thing, especially one with a motor on it.

Realistically, before talking about liability one should talk about employment arrangements. The false contracting is behind many more serious abuses of the workers themselves. While being a true independent contractor is great, that's not what that is, and it needs to be legislated to employment.

That wouldn't actually fix the dangerous operation though - that probably needs minimum charges by distance *and* maximum distance per hour limits *and* lockouts of no-bikes routes set by local ordinance. People could still fly the wrong way up residential streets and then make up the time till their next legal dispatch with a smoke break, but there'd no longer be the "but they have to to survive app oppression" excuses.

As for liability for drivers and their employers all but a couple of states require automobile insurance policies. The question of the commercial (ab)use of private vehicles was looked at and I believe solved in at least some places, eg, requiring supplemental policies or policy riders.

Extending a requirement to commercial cycling might make sense, it would be unpopular with the traditional messenger types though. Perhaps a more viable requirement would be tying it to motorized delivery vehicles only.

And that topic really shouldn't be only delivery: motorized things capable of more than around 15 mph really should be classed as motor vehicles no matter who is using them.

But thats all pretty tangential to a thread about a situation where an unaware rider made a bad decision.

livedarklions

So basically, your big complaint and your incessant "corrections" on my posts is because you think this thread should have been "bad erider" /close thread? I really have no interest in going around this again, but I still think you wrote some checks that video can't cash. When it got down to a quibble about which side of the line the ebiker's tire was on (I see it clearly in front) of the line, I hit my "who bloody cares" limit. I also really didn't want to get into the whole trying to estimate speed from a security cam video without knowing how it was compressed for storage being a very bad idea.

Your whole take on what is "tangential" to this thread misses the point that part of this story was the Lyft driver leaving the scene which, if I recall correctly, Lyft acknowledged. Lyft also saw fit to discuss what they were doing about the Chicago "bike lane" situation, so I hardly see how any of this is tangential, unless you see that this thread was just supposed to be about what was or wasn't on the video.

And no, I really don't believe there's a single person reading these threads who's actually going to learn how to ride in an urban situation from them. As mr_bill is fond of pointing out, anyone trying to do so will get lost in all of the would-be gurus telling them which part of the road not to ride on, as they basically cover the entire road with their conflicting "advice".

UniChris

It goes round and round because you uniquely keep ignoring the actual facts in favor of things that are part tangential, part imagined uniquely by you in direct conflict with clear facts documented by the video and noted by essentially everyone else.

You're a smart enough cyclist not to make this mistake on the road in real life, too bad it's not reflected in your keyboard worrior-ing.

The part you do get right is that the active participants in this thread already have this sort of road smarts, but as the video clearly demonstrates there are lots of casual cyclists who do not. There are probably also plenty inexperienced cyclists who have or will browse through BF without posting in contentious threads. This isn't the best place to reach them, but it's not meaningless.

And I have to say my actual on-road strategy is continually refined by thoughts following from incidents I've read about here and elsewhere.

CliffordK

It would be another tangential topic spinning off about liability insurance.

In this case, it could be $5,000 in damage to the vehicle, and $50,000 in medical bills. The property damage will be simply written off by the driver, Lyft, or the insurance company.

It isn't that bicycles can't do significant damage to a vehicle.


Kalamazoo

Vegas

Yet, the worst damage is often due to the driver of the vehicle, and not the actions of the cyclists.

In the two accidents above, the driver walked (or crawled) away unscathed, while sending the cyclists to the hospital or morgue.

Perhaps the biggest liability risk is when a cyclist severely injures, or even kills another cyclist or pedestrian through gross negligence.

Fortunately fatal bicycle/pedestrian accidents are rare, but they do occur.

Racing and organized group rides are somewhat unique, and often include liability waivers.

Management of insurance for these mostly low cost accidents, and rare severe injuries would be a nightmare.

As noted in this thread several times, good "Defensive" riding can also minimize the liability risk.

In the Chicago case, it may well have been a Lyft bicycle hitting a Lyft car. They'll have to argue about how to apportion liability.

CliffordK

I think there is some uniqueness to the ride share business.

As I mentioned above, a cyclist's behavior may vary around certain well marked commercial vehicles. So, I hope few cyclists cut between a taxi or bus and the curb when the vehicles slow and stop to pick up or discharge passengers.

But, the cyclist should have treated the above vehicle with the same deference they give a taxi. So, perhaps better vehicle markings would be a benefit. And that is something the city or state could legislate, or the ride share companies could independently mandate.

CliffordK

I have to say that I find cycling is a learning process, even extending into mid-life. I try to evaluate any near-misses, and try to figure out what I could have done better.

Off and on there is a raging debate about lane positioning on this site, and when to "take the lane", or "be part of traffic". In the case above, no matter where the cyclist was on the road, this is a rare case where the bike should have gone left rather than right. Of course, there are other times when squeezing to the right can be very bad, especially around turning trucks.

I cringe whenever I read about a "take the lane" person getting smushed, especially on major highways and freeways. Yet, sometimes they encounter road designs that make using the shoulder difficult (in which case I'd encourage looking for alternative routes).

Hopefully "Advocacy and Safety" can slowly shift the collective consciousness towards overall safety.

And, bike share and e-bike safety are issues that need to be brought to the forefront, with no easy answers.

I hope there can even be snowballing effects of leading by example. So, for example when driving... passing a bicycle by slowing down, waiting for traffic to clear, and passing when there is good visibility, giving the cyclist at least a half a lane of space. Perhaps doing so pisses off some of the cars behind, but if other drivers learn the technique, all the better for the next time I take the road on the bicycle.

livedarklions

I suspect the difference here is that I actually read the linked article and am responding to the issues raised in it, and you keep insisting that anything not clearly demonstrated in the video is somehow tangential. And you also keep insisting that the video is showing things it simply can't given the duration of it and the angle from which it's taken.

Would I have shot that gap? Probably not, but again we're not able to see what it looked like from the rider's perspective so I'm a lot more reluctant to make all of the conclusions about this that you and a bunch of the other posters are doing. I do note that a lot of you are assuming you know exactly what happened on the far sides of the vehicle which you definitely cannot see, and that ALL of your assumptions favor the driver and passenger. And I and everyone else on this thread have one thing in common, there's no guarantee that the way we would have handled it wouldn't have caused us to get hit by someone else. The "this wouldn't happen to me because" statements that abound here are basically untestable and serve no good purpose whatsoever.

Mid-block in-lane drop-offs cause problems, we've got two riders on this thread who have ridden that area that say it's a prominent feature of the neighborhood where this happened. It does not take much thought to figure out that much of, if not the vast majority of, such drop-offs are going to be done by vehicles for hire. Lyft and Uber both have systems where the drivers are rewarded for dropping people off as fast as possible so they can go onto the next fare, and where the drivers will likely get dinged by a bad rating if they tell a passenger they have to wait for a safe exit from the vehicle. You want to call that set of things tangential, but it's a systematic feature of this kind of service.

livedarklions

I also think that if you ignore the proliferation of rideshare vehicles in a city, you're grossly misdescribing the evolving nature of urban traffic in the U.S. The effectiveness of going left rather than right as a strategy is going to be impacted directly by the level of attention to safety displayed by those and other drivers. These things are never just issues of individual behavior, it's the interaction of that behavior with the system it's occurring in. I came about as close to getting smooshed as you can without actually getting hurt taking the lane in a textbook manner a few weeks ago, I have to laugh when people want to say it can't happen to them.

Your taxi livery comparison to rideshare cars was actually an interesting insight, btw. One thing that yellow livery and cab number can do, btw, is make it obvious who to sue if the cab doesn't stop at the crash.

UniChris

That you persist in giving credit to unquestioning media parroting of demonstrably false claims by parties with a vested interest over the actual fact that the location is a shared lane not a bike lane and the evidence that refutes the rest of the false narrative is exactly the issue.
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The only actual evidence available is the video and the fact of the street configuration, what someone told a reporter is meaningless.

If it's mid block drop-offs that are your particular ire the reality is that such is one of the core functions of urban roadways. When vehicle is use restricted, that's what is allowed, it's the through traffic which would be banned. If you wanted to make more space to deconflict that, it means less parking, and less parking actually means more hire vehicles since not everyone can bike or walk and those who do can't for all trips or all weather (says the guy hiking home with two bags of groceries by way of a detour to look at a house for sale)

I-Like-To-Bike

B-b-but the media report quoted an eyewitness to the event (the injured rider) who declared, “I had no chance. It came out of nowhere.”

There you have it, the final word for those who seek it from their own agenda driven viewpoint, the car came out of nowhere and there was nothing the rider could have done to avoid or mitigate the elevated risk from a mid block drop-off. All fault should be placed at the door of rideshare company cars that come out of nowhere to discharge passengers.

Somehow that sounds just as ridiculous from the mouth of a bicyclist who carelessly rides into another vehicle as it does from a motorist who runs into a bicyclist that he should have seen and taken appropriate avoidance action.