San Francisco Bike Blog

This news is from last Friday, September 12:

A 9-year-old boy is now in stable condition at Children’s Hospital in Oakland after being hit by a minivan on West Las Positas Boulevard Thursday morning, according to police.

Police said the boy was riding his bike to Fairlands Elementary School along the north sidewalk of West Las Positas Boulevard at about 7:50 a.m. A woman in her 50s reportedly looked right then left before turning right out of the ValleyCare Medical Center parking lot. Witnesses confirmed that the driver stopped and looked both ways, police said.

After detailing other collisions, we get some advice from the Lieutenant:

[Lt. Tom] Fenner said the problem in this and the recent collisions is that there was no eye contact made between the pedestrian and the driver and actions were based on assumptions. He encouraged drivers to look right more than once and for both drivers and pedestrians to make eye contact with each other before proceeding.

That sounds like good advice to me. It’s difficult to tell the exact location of the accident, because this report doesn’t specify it, but if someone wants to find out and help us find the appropriate Google Street View, or pictures of the area, please feel free. This Google Maps link is the general vicinity.

There’s a few things I want to see happen for any tragedy like this:

1. I want us to be able to cover it from the bicycling community perspective so we can fight back against any ‘car head’ thinking that blames bicyclists for everything.
2. We need to be able to learn from these incidents ourselves, and teach our kids how to stay safe out there.
3. We need to document any real problem areas so that we can take action to remedy them immediately - either compel the city/town to do it, or do it ourselves (i.e. clear obstructions, add warning signs, etc.).
4. We need to mobilize public support for more and better bicycle and walking infrastructure anytime a tragedy like this occurs - like Safe Routes to School. Bicyclists and pedestrians getting mowed down by cars and trucks is not just an issue of driver and bicyclist and pedestrian training - we need safer infrastructure. Whether that is separated bicycle paths, traffic-calmed streets, or some combination of safer infrastructure, that’s up to us, but these changes aren’t going to happen unless we get active.

Also, we really need more bike/walk bloggers out there - including and especially the East Bay. I can cover a decent amount of the bike scene in San Francisco proper, but it’s just a lot of work. I felt compelled to write this story up because not writing about this collision didn’t seem to do justice for the kid that was hit and suffered.

Ideally we can form the basis for what I hope becomes a serious news reporting institution. Whether that happens at BikeBlogs.org or StreetsBlog.org or some other place is fine, but it needs to happen. There are bike and walk and livable streets blogs popping up all over the place - if you’ve ever thought about it, now is the time to give it a go. There are lots of voices out there that are going unrepresented as long as we are not organized.

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