I saw a man die at this intersection last month. It wasn't the first death I've witnessed, nor even the first violent death. I know it won't be the last death I see, but I do hope it's the last violent one.
I was stopped at the intersection of
Farm to Market Road 1826 and Highway 290, waiting to make a left turn. A Honda minivan made a right turn on red onto 290, heading east. A Toyota pickup truck eastbound on 290, traveling near the posted speed limit of 60 mph, didn't see the Honda pull out, for whatever reason (texting, map reading, fumbling for a cigarette). The driver saw the minivan, and immediately and instinctively whipped the truck onto the shoulder, where he then hit the brakes. The loose gravel on the paved shoulder acted like ball bearings, and the truck, with brakes locked up, sped straight into the traffic signal mast. The mast didn't budge, but was embedded into the truck, straight through the engine compartment all the way to the back of the cab... right where the driver was sitting. To say the driver died instantly under estimates the long time he spent staring at that oncoming pole with no control of his vehicle. No steering, and no brakes.
What does this have to do with cycling? A lot.
I have helped to reconstruct a number of vehicle 'accidents' involving bicycles while aiding police investigators, attorneys and traffic engineers. To prevent collisions and other so-called 'accidents' from reoccurring, you have to understand what happened in the first place, and then understand why it happened, and then try to gauge the likelihood the event might happen again (If you missed the ITV/PBS drama
Collision, I highly recommend it). Things aren't always what they seem at first glance.
One of the recurring causes of single-vehicle collisions, like the fatality I witnessed, is a driver suddenly seeing something in the road ahead and taking emergency actions, which are really emergency reactions. What people
don't do when they see something ahead of them is run over it (there are always exceptions). They swerve to avoid the obstacle in their path.
Training (and instinct) usually prevent them from serving to the left (into oncoming traffic). Instinct reinforced by training (Defensive Driving has a whole section on this) leads the driver to swerve to the right. They swerve into trees, onto sidewalks, into houses, up on sidewalks, and onto shoulders and bike lanes. That's one of the reason there have been no measured data showing bike lanes are safer than shared lanes. That bike lane, or shoulder, or sidepath that may look safe to you, looks like an escape lane to a motorist in an emergency (or stupor). Traffic engineers regulary refer to sidewalks as "escape zones", and they don't mean for pedestrians.
The League of American Bicyclists recently said (in defense of their policy of segregating cyclists from roadways into bike lanes) "there's no evidence that sharing the road is safer than being in a bike lane", and that's partially true (the reverse is also true, to a point). The LAB (because it has become nothing more than a propaganda machine for the bicycle facilities lobby) constantly spins and intentionally twists data, leaving out key elements, to present a favorable (to their cause of segregating cyclists from public roadways).
In looking over the CDC and NHTSA bicycle crash data, I discovered years ago that the incident of "collision from the rear" was the same for cyclists in bike lanes and on streets without bike lanes. But there's more to the story. Every bicycle crash incident study shows that the danger isn't in the bike lanes themselves, but at intersections due to turning and crossing movements. These intersections aren't counted as "in the bike lane" because they are outside of them (that's changing with the dangerous innovation of colored bike lanes across intersections, and we'll see data soon about that in the future). Bike lane users at intersections have a dramatically higher rate of collision with turning and crossing motor vehicles than do cyclists riding in the roadway (not those riding off of the roadway, such as on the shoulder or on a sidewalk).
By happenstance, this was illustrated this morning.
I took the picture below on my commute to work. It shows a car being removed from a trail that runs parallel to a major thoroughfare. A motorist ran off the road (reason unclear) and plowed into the newly dedicated White Rock Lake Spillway trail section, miraculously missing any runners or cyclists (trail traffic is fairly heavy that time of day). The motorist utilized the escape zone. Luckily, only a small tree sacrified its life in slowing down the Mini. It could have been much worse.
P.S. This new, improved trail section is 30 feet closer to the six lane divided roadway than the old one was (it used to run along the fence line to the left). But it's prettier to look at. "Aesthetics over safety", is what they said at a public meeting.
