Slow Down!

by Trapped Ape

Pedestrian Fatality Probabilities vs. Vehicle Speed

6:00 a.m. Sunday morning. It’s so painful to move that it took me a full two minutes to slide out of bed and shuffle over to the bathroom. I’ve developed a technique where I use the weight of my arms to turn me onto my side, then verrry slooowly let gravity bring my knees to the floor, then stand up.  The pain pill has worn off and, just for good measure, left me with a bad headache and a stomach ache. I’m hoping to avoid the nausea that it progressed to yesterday morning. Maybe if I eat a little? I’m not hungry.

It’s “just” a cracked rib. If I weren’t so compulsively logical, I’d call it my punishment. I was going too fast—I’ll grant you that. Yes, I have to admit my guilt I guess. This time I don’t even get to claim “At least I was having fun.” I was late to a lunch date with my wife. Too wrapped up with my video editing on the computer: “Oops! Gotta go!” Luckily, I was doing 20, not 40.  Doesn’t sound so fast? Well, the odds of a pedestrian being killed if hit by a car at 20 mph are 15%. Double that to 40, it jumps all the way up to 85%.  At 40, it takes 120 feet to stop—40 feet for reaction time and 80 feet for actually stopping.  At 40mph, the reaction time distance is twice that of 20 mph, but braking distance goes up exponentially: 4 times greater. 

Ok, so I’m misleading you just a bit. On purpose, so sorry about that. In fact, I was on a bike, not in a car, and the “pedestrian” that got hit was also on a bike, although he was nearly moving at walking speed. He had just enough speed to suddenly make a left turn and place himself squarely in my path. I had just enough speed that I had no options but to put on the brakes for about 15 feet and plow straight into him. Banking in his turn, he was leaning towards me, like football player about to charge through the line. His shoulder planted a bulls-eye right on my rib cage, right at the rib I’d cracked a year ago. I was “down for the count” in the words of the policeman that appeared out of no-where and was guiding emergency vehicles to the scene.

Yeah, it kinda made a scene. I’m sure I must have looked like I’d punctured a lung or something. I was up to around 8 on that big bad pain scale, the one which, if you’re lucky, you’ve never heard of.  Short gasping breaths, desperate little grunts of pain, eyes involuntarily watering up though I wasn’t crying, almost impossible to focus on anything but the pain. I thought, God damn it, could my rib really be that vulnerable even after a whole year of mending?  I had the presence of mind to explain to him that I’d cracked this rib a year ago.  I told him to call off the rescue vehicles, but he ignored me.  Besides, the fire truck was already rounding the corner down the street.

So, now it’s 3 days later.  I can’t do the race I was so looking forward to next weekend.  I can’t plant all the onion starts I just bought.  Can’t bring my bicycles to the environmental festival today.  Lost a couple days of work and will now have to buy a parking permit to get there by car for a month or so. It’s painful even to reach out and pick up something that’s not near the edge of the counter, so my wife is doing stuck with all the cooking and cleanup. Oh, have I ever learned my lesson!  Going too fast is sometimes the slowest way to get somewhere.  Did you ever notice in Star Trek, that even during a red alert, everyone is actually still walking? Dang that’s an idealistic fiction, isn’t it?

Surprisingly, I haven’t felt any anger and very little derision towards that other biker. I know that our town is filled with newbies at the beginning of the new school year.  I know that many of them haven’t learned yet that you can’t just make random turns without looking or signaling. You would be amazed at the number of people qualified to attend the University of California that’ll just step out into the street while texting, without so much as a glance down the street. Yes, that other biker was an idiot, but the world is full of idiots, the roads are full of idiots. Maybe we’re all idiots–distracted, careless, troubled, sad, angry, jabbering, hurrying idiots… driving 2, 3, 4000 pound metal boxes around at 60, 70, 80 mph. We get on the roads and we actually trust the sampling of humanity we happen to cross paths with on any given day. Who would put up with such a system? What kind of planners would design such a system?

So, chastened I am today.  There was not such a big rush.  I didn’t “drive” defensively enough.  I didn’t assess risk very well.  I am sadder but wiser.  I will take this lesson forward to my automobile driving too, and hopefully improve my odds of dying eventually of more natural causes.  I am very, very glad that I get to go to work by bike.  I know it improves my health and my life expectancy significantly, that it’s the smart thing to do—and that it’s fun.  Even to ride a little fast sometimes.

When I feel my heart pounding after a fast bike ride, I feel more than a little fortunate to have that capability at my age. Yeah, I was writhing in agony last Thursday, but I knew I wasn’t going to die, knew that even tho I’d blown it in the risk assessment department, I was better off in the end riding my bike so much. As the policeman was guiding the ambulance in, I couldn’t help smile a little when I heard him being 10 years off in estimating my age. I’ll be back in the saddle again soon enough. It’s great to be alive.

Related articles

• Nurburgring – bikers beware (motorcyclenews.com)
• driving for (and sharing the road with) idiots (timothypierce.wordpress.com)
• What You Can Carry On a Bike. (tvglgw.wordpress.com)
• Think fast: The neural circuitry of reaction time (eurekalert.org)
• Texting Slowing Drivers Down? (foxnews.com)
• smarterplanet: CrashStat Steers Pedestrians, Bikers Away From… (stoweboyd.com)