Stupid News
Mood:  caffeinated
Word from a post on the fixed gear bike forum [www.fixedgeargallery.com] is that some dude out west (Oregon?) "struck and killed" a 70-odd year old woman and is being charged with manslaughter.

Apparently he ran a stopsign.

This relates to a similar announcement that authorities are cracking down on "lawless" cyclists in Chicago -- a trend that may spread elsewhere if angry columns in papers from New York to Tuscon are any indication.

Of course, what the authorities aren't stressing is that the cyclist hit her when she was in an "unmarked crosswalk".

A wha-?!

Apparently in Oregon, any intersection is a crosswalk, even where there isn't one. I'm no expert on driving codes beyond the basics but this strikes me as sadly amusing. Maybe in Oregon it's an "unmarked crosswalk"; here in NJ it's called "jaywalking".

She was jaywalking -- fact. He ran a stop sign -- allegedly. Two wrongs don't make a right, but jeez, even if it's legal to cross where there's no markings, that doesn't make it safe. Where did common sense go, into that supposed ozone hole?

That the incident coincides with a crackdown on cyclists is alarming. As is the newspaper's description. "Struck and killed?" Maybe with a car that'd be a given, but with a bicycle, especially as she was a senior citizen, it may have been "struck and fell and died". The seemingly harmless cliche employed in this instance buts the direct blame for her death on the cyclist. This isn't just semantics; if she died from hitting the ground then the cyclist just knocked her over; an elderly condition would be to blame for her death. But in their sloppy use of tired soundbytres the newscrapers effortlessly paint the cyclist as pr oven guilty.

Make no mistake, no one should run a stop sign. But pedestrians should look before crossing streets -- especially where there is no crosswalk. Jaywalking by any other name...

The same anti-bike people constantly demand bicyclists defer to cars even if we have the right of way. A car runs a stop sign -- we should have stopped. A car pulls out without signaling a turn -- it's our fault for being on the street. Why is it no surprise that the same people who denounce cyclists for not being careful enough to accommodate other's bad / illegal driving, are now painting this woman as a "victim", as if she had the "right" to plod across an unmarked intersection oblivious to danger?

Sure, he allegedly ran a stop sign. And she was jaywalking.

What part of this story is cut and dried? Only in the world of the media, who on one hand rip Americans for not being more "eco-friendly" and then defend the right of SUV drivers to squash law-abiding cyclists by claiming that it's justified by one or two "reckless" riders.

The Chicago crackdown -- like the Oregon case -- is one of many waiting to happen. Given the police harrassment of cyclists during the unofficially sanctioned rides like "critical mass", et al, one would hate to see what results if the same unfortunate incident happens in New York or New Jersey. Cyclists may soon find that they have rooms reserved for them in Guantanamo Bay next to Al Quaeda types with beards down to here. Priorities? 'But cyclists are dangerous!' scream the media types as they break motor vehicle laws in their massive Sporte Utility Vehicles ...as one irate SUV-driving columnist so clearly illustrated in an Arizona newspaper, in which he described an incident where he nearly ran over a cyclist, who he claimed didn't see his turn signal -- maybe another SUV was in the way or he put it on after the cyclist had passed? His take on things -- which typifies the official response in Chicago, and the one-sided reporting of the "struck and killed" story -- is that bikes are the offender in all runs ins, either with car or person, just because they are bikes. Even in "unmarked crosswalks".

As the writer of the editorial on the Chicago crackdown put it bikes are "the problem" -- and riders should "consider [themselves] to be unarmed Americans in Baghdad -- at dusk", as that happy fellow from Arizona wrote, stating that he was surpirsed (he seemed disapointed) that more dead cyclists haven't turned up hit by cars.

Yeah, sure. But jaywalking should be protected.
Hypocrisy is too tame a word for it.

-- Elvis