Just got back from the Davis Ride of Silence, which was organized by the Davis Bike Collective.
The organizers reached out to relatives of those killed, so at two of the sites, we met friends & family of people killed by drivers while riding their bikes in Davis.
This is the ghost bike for Dr. Marilyn Olmstead and her friends & family were there with us along County Road 100A, next to a farm field.
@mastobikes@fedibikes All the friends & relatives who met us at ghost bikes were clearly moved and said they were moved. They weren't all necessarily cyclists themselves. I think the organizers reaching out to them where they knew how to really made an impression and created some bonds that hopefully continue building more understanding in our society at large.
@mastobikes@fedibikes Ghost bike for Tris Yasay, killed by a still-unnamed UC Davis driver employee in May 2022. UC Davis cops/fire were first to respond so all evidence was collected by UC Davis investigating itself. Unsurprisingly, no charges were made by the DA. And instead of examining its own vehicle fleet & retraining its drivers, UC Davis had its cops apply for a grant to "educate cyclists" about safety.
The slow, silent ride will start at the Davis Bike Collective (1221 1/2 4th St ) this Wednesday 5/15 and will visit 4 different locations in Davis where people have been killed while riding their bikes
The route will be 7.5 miles and is expected to take ~1.5 hrs. We will have some flowers to distribute but feel free to bring your own offerings as well.
The only pedestrian deaths we hear about are noteworthy/famous/accomplished people. And sometimes (at least in NYC thanks to advocates) young children. Otherwise, individual pedestrian deaths usually don't even warrant a blip in the news cycle. #TrafficViolencehttps://mstdn.social/@hkrn/112255193447322239
I hate it when I see police casually breaking traffic laws, and I’m not even talking about emergency responses. It just shows their frank contempt for actual public safety and their belief that they are above the law. Here is how to report reckless driving by police officers. It’s doubtful that there will be any meaningful consequences to any single report, but I think it’s a good idea to build a record of their infractions.
What if mass shootings were reported the way vehicular manslaughter is reported?
Headline: 13 People Dead and 4 Injured After They Collided With Bullets.
Story: According to police 13 people died and 4 were taken to the hospital after they collided with bullets at a café on Main Street.
A 22 year old male was walking past the café and his gun began to fire bullets at the café. Several bullets hit the café damaging a coffee machine before more bullets hit some of the diners in the café. According to the police, none of the diners were wearing bulletproof vests or military body armor when they ran into the bullets.
Of the 13 dead, 9 died at the scene and 4 died later at the hospital. The 4 injured diners were treated for non-fatal wounds and released from the hospital.
The 22 year old male gun owner is uninjured and returned to his home very shaken by the incident.
Study: "the designation of individual responsibility for crashes preempts collective responsibility, preventing wider adoption of design interventions as well as systemic changes to the processes that determine the built environment of US roadways."
Talking about whether or not an individual driver will be caged and for how long is actively distracting us from improving safety. #VisionZero#TrafficViolence
Big blog post by @Ice_Cold_Rhino and myself. Back in December, I posted a graph about the spikiness of US pedestrian fatalities right after sunset, based on FARS data. That post garnered a lot of attention, and we did more work to verify that we weren't seeing a fluke and to start exploring possible explanations. Here's the full post, with code: https://haraldkliems.netlify.app/posts/pedestrian-fatalities-soar-just-after-sunset/ I'll share some of the graphs in this thread. (1/
Here's the main graph, similar to what I shared in December. Pedestrian fatalities stay mostly flat in the hours before sunset. But right after they begin to soar, with the peak happening about 20-50 minutes after sunset. Then they gradually decline but remain much higher than during the day. (2/
Around sunrise we see a similar but less pronounced pattern: A spike (but less pronounced than the one around sunset), and then a quick drop and flat line during the hours after sunrise, at a level lower than during the dark. (3/
This ranking biases toward places lots of people walk/bike to begin with. Tons of pedestrians/cyclists at Market & Octavia = tons of opportunities for injury.
Very few people walk or bike near 19th Ave & Sloat, but it still made the citywide top 10. So if you're wondering where, if you decide to walk there, you'll have the highest risk of getting hit, 19th Ave & Sloat is by far the most dangerous on the list.
At every #Portland City Council meeting, @bikeloudpdx volunteers have made it a priority to have one person give public testimony. It provides a little education to the Council and a lot of passion to open their hearts.
Here's testimony from Sarah Risser, a BikeLoud Board member whose son, Henry, was killed in #TrafficViolence.
A mom and little girl just fell off their bike on the 17th St tracks. They were going around this PG&E truck parked in the “protected” bike lane. Luckily nothing serious but the girl is bruised and the bike wheel seems messed up.
Car drivers kill 200-300 people per year in #NYC, and injure another > 60,000 people each and every year. And yet when people in this city try to get a permit to remove cars from their street for a day, they're denied by the #NYPD due to concerns about "violence." 🙄