High-visibility outerwear and a flashing front light couldn't save Marganne Allen.
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| via the former Twitter |
From Salem Reporter a couple days ago:
Marganne Allen was gathering speed as she rolled [downhill] to the intersection, holding the right of way. She was on her way home to her husband and children after a shift at her state job.
It wasn’t yet dark. Allen wore a bright yellow jacket. A white light on the front of her bike flashed. She was traveling an estimated 25 mph – the speed limit....
[Slowing down to about 20mph from his 37mph on Leslie Street, and peeking around the corner Samuel Landis] saw nothing – no car, no pedestrian, no cyclist.
He drove his pickup into Allen’s path. She struck the front fender and crashed to the ground.
And to underscore this, today in a summary note of "five takeaways" they wrote on one of them:
The cyclist tried to ensure she was visible to driversAllen wore a bright yellow jacket. She rode with a flashing white light attached to the front of her bike. She was traveling an estimated 25 mph – the speed limit. Landis said after the collision that he didn’t see the cyclist.
The problem here isn't any lack of prudent walking and biking. By all accounts Allen modeled exemplary bicycling safety, over-and-above even.
I suppose an indirect benefit is that it shows more strongly the jaydriving and careless neglect by Landis. A person in black biking a night without a headlight would not have prompted the same level of scrutiny, and more people would have felt a driver who in fact stopped at the stop sign and then proceeded was more-or-less blameless.
But as it was in the reality of this particular crash, Landis still killed Allen. The personal bicycle safety gear didn't protect her.
The fundamental problem here is a person jaydriving under the too-popular expectation blowing a stop sign was trivial. No big deal. Everybody does it. Except it turned out to be a catastrophic big deal.
The primary burden for safety must be on drivers. They are the ones who employ lethal speed and lethal force.
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| At the Capitol on Court Street (2015) |
We cannot place the primary burden for safety on people walking and biking.
"Doing everything right" couldn't protect Allen.
As we head into the development of a Vision Zero plan, we need to make sure we don't get hung up on false equivalence, ostensible balance, and both-sidesing. It's the cars and their drivers.
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| High Street is a problem downtown |
As part of the MPO's safety plan development, they identified a list of high crash corridors. High Street is one of them. In addition to this crash, drivers struck and killed three people who might have thought they were employing the protection of marked crosswalks:
- Robert Duane Marshall (Center and High)
- Marlene Moreno (Center and High)
- Denise Marie Vandyke (State and High)
There may be small, incremental design changes to these intersections to make them safer. It's possible the downtown intersections need more squared off corners to slow down drivers. Leslie might need a diverter and an end to through travel across High and left-turns from High.
But the key is: What more can people on foot and on bike do in these cases? There's not room for any demand to walk better or bike better.
The room, the space for intervention, is for drivers to drive better and slower. That's the solution and what any Vision Zero plan needs to focus on.
3 comments:
Drivers and car design are a significant part of the problem. I drive a Hyundai Elantra. We picked this car because we thought it was safe because of airbags for us and our passengers. What we did not know at the time is that some of the safety features mostly for crashes were going to make driving the car very dangerous.
The side mirror and the extra wide window frame combine to create an almost 15 inch obstruction for me on my right side. Made worse due to my height. Multiple times while driving the car over the last 13 years I have failed to see someone on the curb, or stepping into the street from the curb. I even have almost struck a person crossing the street in a crosswalk with the light!
I'm not careless and I have never not looked, but the huge obstruction in my line of sight is significant. Luckily I have never actually struck anyone. But because of my age and the awareness of the limitations of the car and my eyesight, I no longer drive at dusk or at night. I drive slow and I look more than once even when I drive during daylight. But still I drive in fear.
Someone might say, just get a different car. Sorry, cars are too expensive for someone who is close to giving up driving at all.
I don't know how many people there are like me with poor night vision and poor visibility in the car design, but I think that when you get older you should not get a driver's license for multiple years. Annual review, inspection of the car, and maybe even an actual road test should be required. This would be controversial, but lives are at stake.
The biggest takeaway from the Marganne Allen tragedy should be that there is no designated safe bicycle route south from downtown to South Central Salem. The South Central Association of Neighbors has proposed a family friendly bikeway comprised of Church St. S. to Leslie St. to High St S. High St. would need to be reclassed as a local street and not a collector and be redesigned as a sharrow, including removal of the center stripe and other traffic calming measures. The City needs to act on our request.
In general you are of course right. The SCAN proposal for High Street is reasonble and would be valuable. (Readers who are unfamiliar with it can find more detail on it here in the middle section.)
But it is optimized for northbound travel and does not connect very well for southbound travel with the southbound bike lane on High Street through downtown.
As an experienced cyclist, Allen could have used a Church Street connection, just to avoid the hill. Many do. But some stronger cyclists prefer the directness of High Street and willingly climb Gaiety Hill.
Even if the SCAN proposal had been fully implemented, cyclists like Allen might not use it at Gaiety Hill. It has not seemed like she in particular was hampered by the lack of a more fully developed Church-to-High Street alternative there.
(Maybe friends or family will some time comment on why she used that route, but from here it seemed clear she prioritized directness, in the same way some people biking still prefer to use the side path on the Center Street Bridge, with its direct connections to Wallace Road and downtown, instead of the calmer meander employing the Union Street Bridge.)
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