The Blasphemous Bicycler

Well, it’s been two weeks since my accident, and I seem to be healing nicely.
Anyhow, now that I’m pretty sure there’s no long-term damage, here’s what happened. As I said last week, I decided to ride one block of my commute on the super-busy route 11/15.

Here’s my artistic rendition of the roadway. 11/15 is a two-laner, with a turning lane in the middle. There are fairly wide shoulders.

I needed to go north around the park, then make a left onto the side street. I didn’t feel like fooling around with crossing traffic twice, so I did something a bicyclist is never-ever supposed to do: I rode against traffic.

Here is a diagram of the situation. The southbound lane is stacked full of green pick-up trucks heading south into Harrisburg. I am the rotund, bright yellow, bicyclist heading north in the shoulder of the south bound lane.

My intention was to turn onto the side street. There was also a car waiting to make a right onto the highway (indicated by the red pick-up truck). Our respective intended paths of travel are indicated by the dashed lines.

Note that our intended plans of travel intersect. This is a bad thing, and is why you are never, ever supposed to ride against traffic. The driver of the red truck was looking to her left, waiting for an opening in the traffic. As I approached the intersection, my spidey-sense was tingling slightly, but I didn’t see any opening in the traffic that would have allowed her pull out in front of me, so I went for it.

Evidently, there was a small opening in traffic. Without turning to look the other way, she stomped on the gas just as I was crossing in front of her.

Her passenger-side front quarter panel hit me with a force that was totally amazing given that she only had about 5 feet in which to accelerate. I was knocked off my bike, and hit the pavement pretty hard.

The aftermath was that my front quick-release skewer snapped in half, my front fork was twisted in a strange and unnatural configuration, and my seat and seatpost rotated 90 degrees anti-clockwise.

I’ll spare you all the gory details, but suffice it to say I do not recommend anyone try to rotate your seat post with your butt. Parts of you will turn purple that you don’t want purple.

A few days later, I noticed that the steel rails of my Brooks Flyer saddle were actually twisted in a cork-screw kind of fashion. I shudder to think what might have happened had I not been riding a sprung saddle.

Apart from saddle trauma, I had two nice symmetrical top-tube bruises on my thighs, (one from the impact of the car, and one from the impact with the ground) and various minor scrapes and bruises all over the place.

Overall, I was very, very lucky.

A few people have asked me if I plan to ask the driver to pay for the damages to my bike, and for my medical expenses.

I do not. I consider the accident to be “mutual at fault.” My fault for riding on the wrong side of the road, and her fault for not looking when pulling out into traffic.

My bike sustained about $300 worth of damage, and my medial expenses amount to a $15 co-pay.

Considering that I easily could have been seriously injured, killed, or castrated, $315 is not a very big deal in the grand scheme of things.

Most of the swelling has gone down, and the purple parts are less purple now. If the weather is cooperative, I think I might go out for a short ride this weekend, and get a late start on my new year’s resolution to ride more, to commute more, and to always ride on the right side of the road.

So, it’s been a full week since my bicycle accident. Now that I can’t ride for a while, I’m bored out of my skull, and thought I’d do a little over-analysis on how this whole thing happened.

I crashed, in large part, because of poor route selection for my commute. Route selection is a tricky thing sometimes. Here’s the basic overview of the routing challenges on my commute.

Notice that between my house in Marysville, and my job in Summerdale, there is a big honkin’ mountain in my way. I’m also penned in to the East my the great and mighty Susquehanna River. The river, in her infinite benevolence, has seen fit to carve me a nice, relatively flat floodplain through the mountain, in order to make it possible to cycle to work.

There are only two public rights-of-way along this floodplain. One of them is US 11/15 (a high-traffic, nasty highway), the other (Main Street) is a lovely, low-traffic road along the river, with scenic views of the river and the mountains.

Naturally, I ride on Main Street. The problem is that there is only one way to get on Main St, which is through a tunnel under the railroad tracks at the north end of town. Getting from my house to that tunnel is where I ran into trouble.

The basic problem is that my house is separated from the tunnel by a nice big park. I have three options to get around the park.

1. King’s Highway (in blue) — A slow climb up a narrow, shoulder-less road
2. Park Drive to US 11/15 (in red) — Having to cross three lanes of rush-hour traffic twice within a half mile
3. Cut through the park (in yellow) — No traffic to deal with, and there are usually interesting waterfowl in the creek

Normally, I use option 3, and cut through the park, stopping to say hello to the Blue Herons and Egrets in the pond. But on the day of my crash, the footway through the park was covered with snow and ice, and so I decided to use option 2, mixing it up with the rush-hour traffic on the highway.

This turned out to be a mistake…

A bunch of people noticed in my Dailymile widget, that I was involved in a collision with a car on yesterday’s commute. At some point, I’ll probably write a big long story about the whole thing, complete with navel-gazing about the meaning of the universe, etc.

In the meanwhile, here’s what I’ve been typing a thousand times in response to a thousand emails from lots of lovely people concerned about my well-being:

1. Are You OK? – As far as I know, yes I’m ok. I’m going to see a doctor tonight tomorrow, just to make sure. Mostly just scrapes and bruises. It was 20 degrees out, and I had a few layers of wool on to cushion my fall.
   Update: — Doctor says I’m ok, but I’m not supposed to ride bikes for at least a month
2. What Happened? – I don’t really want to publicly divulge all the details, just in case for some reason all hell breaks loose and the driver ends up suing me for scratching her bumper with dynohub shrapnel or whatever, I don’t want some lawyer using my own blog against me in court.
3. What about your bike?– Front wheel (shinamo dynohub) totally destroyed, front fork really badly bent. I don’t know if the fork can be fixed or not. Rest of the bike seems ok, but I haven’t really given it a good look.

   Update: — Took the fork over to Pedal Pusher. They said fixing a fork would be totally unsafe, but were not able to find a suitable replacement in their pile of spares, or from any of their suppliers. Fired off an email to Ozwald, to see about having a replacement custom-made.

4. Where did it happen? — Here. About a mile from home.

I’ve been trying to keep up with the status of the proposed Buffalo Valley Rail Trail. There’s been some pretty hilarious shenanigans underway, so I thought I’d summarize what’s been going on best as I can piece it together from various sources.

A few months ago, the Lewisburg Area Recreation Authority acquired about 11 miles of abandoned railroad tracks between Mifflinburg and Lewisburg.

Over the summer, the railroad tracks and ties were removed, and it looked like some of the trail would be open by spring 2010. A “friends of the trail” group was organized. I went to the first meeting of this group and signed up for the mailing list. We were supposed to register as a 503(c) non-profit, and get to work picking up trash, posting signs, etc.

I never heard from the group after that meeting, and I’m not sure if it still exists.

At some point, the trail was named the “Buffalo Valley Rail Trail,” and there was some sort of a kick-off meeting in late October.

Then things got weird.

Most of the rail trail actually lies outside of LARA’s jurisdiction, so LARA wanted to give the project to Union County. Pandemonium ensued.

Republican County Commissioner Preston Boop fired off an email to the Chairwoman of the Republican Committee, where he asked her for support from local Republicans to oppose the “Secret agenda and meetings of local elected Democrats,” and “wasteful spending of precious funds.”

Chairwoman Yvonne Morgan obliged, emailing her supporters, calling the trail a “Joke” and “Frivolity,” and even making a nasty personal attack on County Commissioner John Showers. This email exchange was promptly leaked to the press, and I have a copy of it here: (click for big)

If you’re so inclined, you can even watch a video of County Commissioner John Showers reading this ridiculous email into the public record. Keep an eye out for Yvonne Morgan sporting a pig hat.

In any event, LARA has a $3.7 million transportation grant from PennDOT for construction, but they can’t get that money until the design phase is done. They’ve applied for a $500,000 grant to do the design work, but they don’t know if they’ll get that money or not. In the meanwhile, it looks like they are going ahead with design work on credit.

I hope all this nonsense is sorted out before the end of the summer, because I’d really like to be able to ride my bike out to the Purple Cow for some ice cream.

I just saw this on the Harrisburg Bicycle Club’s website.

They want to extend the Cumberland Valley Rail Trail another 11 miles all the way from Newville to Carlisle, which would be really cool.

Anyhow, there’s a meeting about it Tuesday, December 15 @ 6 pm at Business Central, 18 N. Hanover St. in Carlisle.

More info on the project here: http://users.dickinson.edu/~hoefler/CVRTX/

I’m going to try to make it.