This podcast episode will change how you think about traffic collisions

Listened to this yesterday afternoon and wrestled with it all night…

Ultimately stories like this normalize the lack of responsibility that drivers take. We are pulled into the emotional side of it and given an opportunity to feel sympathy for the hardship that was faced by the driver and maybe consider that he didn’t deserve that burden in his life. However, driving should carry these burdens and people should be made more aware of the physical, financial and in this case mental burden that driving does and can potentially carry.

I do not mean to sound harsh but this driver is one of the very few drivers that will actually incur to true cost and burden that the privilege of driving carries. I wish stories like this would convey that idea, rather than this obscure philosophical BS about their “paths crossing”, just state it like it is: One person, by driving a car, accepted the risk that he would nearly kill someone. That it happened and he thus suffered from it should not be surprising or used in a way to normalize the two parties as equals. I want to teach this to my son so that the overall burden he feels when he needs to drive causes him to avoid it as much as possible, I wish more parents would take this mindset. General culture seems to portray a parent being so fearful of their children out on the road driving but at the same time learning to drive and getting a car is one of the most celebrated milestones in a young persons life.

As respectfully as I can say Jonathan I don’t know that this story will change how anyone things about traffic collisions. People that mostly drive will be comforted by a story that gives sympathy to a driver and his hardships and people that mostly cycle will continue to be upset about such normalization and again reminded that the cyclist will always be the one that has their life greatly transformed (hopefully for the better like this case).

(The story leaves out details and I don’t recall hearing about this accident years ago. Without investigating past police reports there are some clues in the story that suggest the driver was closely following a larger vehicle to make it through a yellow light, I believe it said he was going 45? It’s implied the cyclist was watching the light phase and attempting to jump the green and didn’t see the driver behind what he thought was the last car through in the intersection. Again, this is speculation based on spares details but if it is something similar to this it’s not exactly a “haphazard, random occurrence of a car and cyclist coming out of nowhere and colliding”).

This was a rough listen for me. Very similar thing happened to me 27 years ago this week when I was riding my bike to school. I ended up going through the windshield of a car that hit me at 55mph. On the one hand the driver driving to the hospital is probably the reason I didn’t lose my leg. On the other hand I don’t remember anything about what happened, I was riding along in the bike lane one minute and in the front seat of a car with 7 broken bones and leg that was largely severed at the knee the next. My parents had been sued by a woman who was trying to use a minor fender bender to get rich a few years before, she ended up losing in court but my parents were tired of litigation so they settled for pretty much having my first year of healthcare costs paid for and not much else. My life has been changed significantly for the worse and I’ve had to pay out for healthcare treatment related to the collision for my entire adult life. I was also forced to confront the driver because Corvallis is a small town and I ended up working at the same company that he did. I don’t think he is a bad person but I was nowhere near made whole and if he felt badly about that afterward it didn’t ever come with an apology or an offer to help with medical bills. Hearing that the driver in the case on the podcast actually sued the cyclist definitely makes me feel a lot of anger at him and brings back a lot of my feelings about my own case.

There have been some positive things that came out of it too though. It spurred me to work to try to make streets safer for everyone. I was quite involved with the BTA’s legislative committee when that was still a thing and help write and pass several pieces of legislation that I think have made incremental differences for Oregonians. I also think that my badgering of PBOT about needed infrastructure improvements has caused some changes on the ground and I probably would not have been invested enough to put in the time on those things if I hadn’t had such life altering injuries. In my experience though, nothing good ever came from interactions with the driver who hit me after the fact.

I will also say that people who work in the medical industry absolutely need to be more cautious about discussing a patient with family members etc on the other side of the curtain. I was walking while listening and the part where he talked about the doctors talking to his parents about his injuries almost knocked me down because it brought back one of the most tramatic moments of my life which was 4-5 days after the accident when the doctor was discussing with my parents that they still might have to amputate my leg. I am sure they thought I was asleep or not listening but it was a very frightening thing for a 12 year old who was basically completely incapacitated to hear. I also experienced thoughts of suicide afterward especially when due to gangrene I was getting worse instead of better for awhile. Thankfully I had some very good friends around me, most notably Beth who checked in on me often and helped me make it through. I am forever grateful to her for not forgetting about me and calling often when I was homebound.

I was hit over the summer and while it totaled my bike and was quite an ordeal almost all summer I wasn’t seriously injured. There was some disagreement about who was majority at fault although lawyers never got involved and things settled relatively smoothly to get me a bike, cover chiropractor visits, etc..

I know in the world of litigation drivers in accidents are told to never reach out or do anything that would admit guilt (aka “Apologize”). That said though, if I ever send a guy off my hood and across the street and destroy his bike and thoroughly put a cloud over much of his summer I’m definitely sending a note to the address on his license after everything is settled with insurance.