Bike V Minivan

Not two miles away and about nine minutes before I left my own housal unit on my bicycle this morning, a bicyclist was killed at the intersection of Sheldon and Lewis Stein. He was thrown off his bike into the windshield of the Honda minivan that hit him, requiring emergency care for a child in the minivan who received a cut eye from flying glass:

That looks to be one hell of an impact. The driver was headed east, and just as that lady who was killed by an eastbound driver in Natomas a few days ago, right into the rising sun.

Of course, I can't speculate who's at fault here, but then, understand my bias as an Elk Grovian bicycle commuter -- there are a lot of bad drivers in our city and a whole lot of bad bicyclists, too. There are far, far too many of both who disrespect each other, the law, and either their or other's safety.

It is just as likely that this driver was going too fast for the sun-in-the-eyes excuse, as much as it is that the bicyclist ran the red light. I see both of these actions nearly every day, and only time will reveal what was the primary cause of this accident.

This incident has generated a hundred very non-informative, unimaginative, and horribly thought out comments on the sacbee.com forum. My blog is one of them. Riders with attitudes, bad drivers -- the car v bicycle debate rages on. It's no coincidence, I believe, that a minivan was involved. I believe that minivan drivers are the worst, and female Asian minivan drivers in particular, and I say that from personal observations (and two car-bike collisions) over my 14,000 miles of bicycle commuting in Elk Grove and Sactown. I could care less about the political incorrectness of such a statement; female Elk Grovian Asian foreign-made-minivan drivers suck; many are downright ignorant of bicyclists, they are, far and away, the worst when it comes to [their lack of] signaling, and rarely provide any margin between themselves and me. This minivan was driven by a 36-year old man, telling you how my stereotyping doesn't necessarily equate to dead bicyclists.

Elk Grove is among the most extreme auto dependent cities in the nation -- full of housal units and strip malls but no jobs, no expectation to get anywhere without a fucking car due to non-human distances and geometries -- this is a leading cause of such accidents, car or bicyclist faults aside, but it is never discussed. Urban design is never considered, yet has the most dramatic impact on multi-mode traveling. If we had converted just a few damn lanes and created two north-south & east-west paths in our city, physically separated from vehicles by so much as a two foot strip of grass, there'd be thousands more cyclists, a whole lot less foreign oil burnt, fewer obese Elk Grovians, and a better living experience. But -- cars are just too important in a city dominated by single use zoning where everything you need to do can't be done without a goddamn car. We had the potential along the Laguna creek for an east to west option but we opted for the eight lane Laguna freeway, or we bermed it up to build low density sprawl right up to its banks such that we can't even shoehorn in a continuous bike path.

Instead, anyone willing to ride a bike has to do so along the six-lane Sheldon Road Freeway, filled with irate females droping off their kids, alpha male jackoffs showing you who's in control, and possibly, just possibly, an I-couldn't-see-him-with-the-sun-in-my-eyes man simply driving too fast for the conditions.