. . .
This photo has been all over the web the past few days but so many people at the Tuesday Night Ride had not heard of this incident, and many others have written me to ask why I haven’t posted about it.
It’s not an easy picture to look at. It is a photo of a driver who apparently fell asleep at the wheel and drove into a peleton in a bike race in Mexico. One cyclist was killed and several others badly injured.
As many have said in various places on the web, it is not cyclists who need to see this photo, but drivers. Drivers need to see this photo because, judging from their behavior, some of them appear not to understand what happens when you strike a cyclist with your car. As an attorney who has clients who have been deliberately struck (along with, of course, many who have been inadvertently struck) by motorists, I know that some drivers simply don’t understand how vulnerable a bicyclist is. They think it’s funny. They think they are playing a joke.
Not long ago there was a T-Shirt company that sold shirts showing a cyclist flying through the air after being struck by a car, with the message “I don’t share the road” underneath.
But it isn’t funny. People die that way.
–Erik Ryberg