A couple of guys were riding bicycles on a country road near their homes in southern New Jersey yesterday. Both were to serve as groomsmen in their sister’s wedding today.
The wedding has been postponed.
An SUV driven by a man whom authorities believe to have been “under the influence of alcohol” was coming toward them from the opposite direction. The SUV driver attempted to pass two other vehicles and, crossing over into the oncoming lane, struck the two guys, killing them both.
The driver is now in custody, charged with two counts of death by auto.
It’s not unuasual for bicyclists to be hit and often killed by motorists. Bicycle rider deaths account for approximately 2.6 percent of all motor-traffic fatalities every year, acc’d’g to the National Safety Council. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration tells us the years 2017 through 2021 saw a ten percent annual increase in bicyclists’ deaths in motor vehicle accidents over the previous six years. The law firm of Paul B. Weitz, specializing in motor vehicle accidents, attributes the rise on bikers’ deaths to a number of factors; “High on the list were speeding and distracted driving. Texting, using in-car technologies or other distractions, such as children or pets, diminishes drivers’ abilities to react to their surroundings.”
The two New Jersey guys’ deaths became national news because one of them, a fellow named Johnny Gaudreau, 31 years old, was a professional hockey player for the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets. His brother, two years younger, was named Matthew Gaudreau.
There’s no evidence that the Gaudreau brothers were riding in a risky fashion or were disobeying rules of the road. It’s not known at this time whether the two were pedaling on the shoulder or within the traffic lane. Right now, the brothers appear to be the innocent, tragic victims of an alleged asshole driver.
Back when I had the physical capability, I was a year-round bicyclist. I did the vast majority of my riding on big city streets. For many years, my bike was my primary mode of transportation, even through the worst of Chicago’s winters. Bike riding in cities is, statistically, the most dangerous form of bicycling. As far back as 1975, the annual perecentaged of urban versus rural bicyclists’ death was a 50/50 split. Every year since then has seen a growing percentage fo city bikers getting killed. By 2022, 83 percent of biker deaths in motor-traffic accidents occurred in cities, while only 17 percent happened on country roads. (Figures from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety.)
The poor Gaudreau brothers sure as hell got beaten by the odds.
Bicycling is gaining in popularity these days, thanks to the high cost of owning and operating a car, the exercise benefits of riding, and people’s concern about the environment. Had I a 45-year-old body again, not wracked by all the usual effects of aging in addition to the numerous other maladies I’ve been unlucky enough to accumulate, I’d be out pedaling the streets and roads of Bloomington, Indiana. To this day, every once in a while, I promise myself I’m going to invest in a sturdy, dependable three-wheeled bicycle — that is, until common sense reasserts itself.
This is America, where the car is king. Our cities and our countrysides are designed specifically for automobile traffic. Hell, the car has been equated with our most dearly held quality. “Ever since its debut in 1886, the automobile has been a symbol of American freedom.” So reads the opening line of the “History of the American Car” on the Carchex website.
Bikes and bikers, as a result of decades of planning and engineering, are an annoyance. They’re barely tolerated. Most drivers see bike riders only as obstacles to skirt around. Many drivers’ first reaction upon encountering a biker is anger: Get the hell out of the way!
In confrontations between bikes and cars, bikes always lose. Here in Bloomington, we’ve tried to build supposedly safe passageways for bike riders on some streets, here and there. Some of these fixes — for instance, the clusterfuck that is the dedicated bike lane on 7th Street — cause more chaos than they were built to remedy. No matter how many clever designs roadway engineers come up with, bike riding on city or town streets will never truly be safe as long as we continue to see bikers as pests, and as long as our ever-larger vehicles keep ballooning to the point where we’ll need tugboats to help us parallel park our Cadillac Escalades.
No matter how much bicycle advocates claim they have a right to be on our roads and try to convince the rest of us biking is the future of personal transportation, whenever a biker collides with one of those Escalades, the SUV driver will exit his vehicle unharmed while the biker just might have to be buried.