A death on two wheels

I just attended the memorial service for my cousin, who died at 56. He died while riding. Not a motorcycle, but the one thing that makes me feel more vulnerable on the road than my motorcycles. A bicycle.

If you live a life of purpose, by being a leader in your church and working at a food pantry to help others; if you spend decades teaching children and truly caring about them, winning teacher of the year award four times in the high school where you work; if you dedicate yourself to helping your friends and immersing yourself in your community and if, like my cousin, you make a lot of people laugh along the way with your off-the-wall humor, then you’ll have lots of people at your memorial service. Hundreds were there to honor my cousin.

But we all deserve a long life more than we deserve a premature memorial service, no matter how nice it is.

My cousin got the latter because an elderly woman in an SUV ran over him while he was riding his bicycle. He never regained consciousness. Hard to find anything good in this, but he probably never even knew he was in danger, probably didn’t suffer, and his donated organs helped 25 others.

A memorial display too soon.

Two wheels, one problem

I have written before about how motorcyclists and bicyclists have common interests, and not just because many of us pursue both activities. (Especially among professional racers, bicycling is the most popular form of training.) Over at my day job at RevZilla, I’ve written for the motorcycling audience about the growing danger of distracted drivers and the scientific explanations for why drivers just plain don’t see us. If anything, it’s worse for bicyclists.

According to preliminary figures for 2018 from the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, bicycle traffic deaths are expected to be up 10 percent (and pedestrian deaths up four percent). An aging population and ever more distractions in the car are certainly contributing to that, as ever more people see driving as not an enjoyable activity or as something that carries great responsibility, but as an interruption in their online lives on Instagram and Facebook and Snapchat. I don’t know if the latter contributed to my cousin’s early death, but the former most likely did.

Those of us who ride see it all the time on the highways. The driver weaving back and forth ahead on the interstate, and then as you come alongside you see him looking at his phone. The driver who is going 80 mph then slows to 55 mph, because she just took a call. 

It’s a danger to those of us on motorcycles but it’s worse for bicyclists for two reasons. One is closing speeds, which as anyone who has spent time on a race track knows, are the real danger. I’ve been on a track doing 140 mph and it’s not unsafe at all, unless I come upon a rider doing 80 mph. If that rider does something unexpected, I don’t have any time to react. If I come upon another rider doing 130, the danger is less even though we’re going faster. The superficial and popular thinking is that speed kills, but the truth is that disparate speeds are far more dangerous. When bicyclists mix with cars on the road, closing speeds are always high.

Second is the bicyclist’s reduced ability to escape an emerging situation. There are only three ways to escape: swerve, brake or accelerate. A bicycle does all three more slowly. On a motorcycle, I can usually accelerate faster than any other vehicle around me, giving me one more way out. Bicyclists are generally at the mercy of the attentiveness and skill of the drivers around them, and as the NHTSA statistics show, that’s an increasingly poor bet.

I am a serious motorcyclist, using my motorcycles as my main personal transportation and riding 15,000 or more miles a year. I am a dabbler in bicycling. My bicycle riding is about as safe as it can be. My neighborhood is all 25 mph streets and four-way stop signs, and half a mile away is a bike path I can link up to other bike paths and ride a hundred miles or more without having to mix with traffic (assuming either my ambition or my Craigslist special bicycle were remotely appropriate for such distances, which they aren’t). Still, despite that, I always feel more vulnerable on my bicycle than I do on my motorcycles.

My cousin’s younger brother, ironically, is the most avid bicyclist I know. He commutes to work daily by bicycle and rides on the weekends, well over 100 miles a week. But he does it all on trails, having abandoned the streets. He drives in his car to the bike trail and then rides to work. I told him that while my bicycle riding is safe, I still feel vulnerable, and the people I know who are serious, long-distance riders on the streets all know someone who has been lost. His response was not encouraging.

“We’re going to lose more,” he said.

I can’t argue his point, though I wonder if there’s a hope hidden in the carnage in the NHTSA stats. We motorcyclists are a small minority. It’s easy for car drivers to assume we’re nuts with a death wish, especially when they see riders who are irresponsible. We’re an easy group to ignore politically.

But pedestrians and bicyclists? Those are bigger numbers of people, and now they’re dying in bigger numbers. Societal attitudes can be changed, and the perfect example is drunk driving. The social stigma attached to that has changed it from something people would laugh about when I was young to something that will get you ostracized. Drunk driving has diminished, as a result. Could the deaths of pedestrians and bicyclists be the tipping point that starts to make distracted driving a socially unacceptable behavior?

It would be nice to think my cousin’s untimely death, the wrenching loss suffered by his wife, his children and his parents, his little granddaughter growing up without a memory of him, would result in something more than just his donated organs. I’d like to think. I can hope.