Two Wheels Good, Four Wheels Better

Yet another reason to be pissed at air-polluting assholes & the hypocrisy that lets them commit vehicular homicide w/ apparent impunity.

But studies performed in Arizona, Minnesota and Hawaii suggest that drivers are at fault in more than half of cycling fatalities. And there is something undeniably screwy about a justice system that makes it de facto legal to kill people, even when it is clearly your fault, as long you’re driving a car and the victim is on a bike and you’re not obviously drunk and don’t flee the scene. When two cars crash, everybody agrees that one of the two drivers may well be to blame; cops consider it their job to gather evidence toward that determination. But when a car hits a bike, it’s like there’s a collective cultural impulse to say, “Oh, well, accidents happen.” If your 13-year-old daughter bikes to school tomorrow inside a freshly painted bike lane, and a driver runs a stop sign and kills her and then says to the cop, “Gee, I so totally did not mean to do that,” that will most likely be good enough.

“We do not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for D.U.I. or hit-and-run,” Leah Shahum, the executive director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, told me.

Laws do forbid reckless driving, gross negligence and vehicular manslaughter. The problem, according to Ray Thomas, a Portland, Ore., attorney who specializes in bike law, is that “jurors identify with drivers.” Convictions carry life-destroying penalties, up to six years in prison, Mr. Thomas pointed out, and jurors “just think, well, I could make the same mistake. So they don’t convict.” That’s why police officers and prosecutors don’t bother making arrests. Most cops spend their lives in cars, too, so that’s where their sympathies lie.

Take Sgt. Richard Ernst of the San Francisco Police Department, who confronted people holding a memorial at the scene of Ms. Le Moullac’s death. Parking his squad car in the bike lane, forcing other cyclists into the very traffic that killed Ms. Le Moullac, Sergeant Ernst berated those gathered, according to witnesses, and insisted that Ms. Le Moullac had been at fault. Days earlier, the department had told cycling activists that it had been unable to find surveillance footage of the crash.

Provoked by Sergeant Ernst, people at the memorial decided to look for themselves. It took them all of 10 minutes to find an auto shop nearby with a camera that had footage of the incident. The police eventually admitted that the truck driver was at fault, but they still have not pressed charges.

The police are emphatically (by which we mean "fucking") not your friends. Jerks.