Month: April 2010

By chaingangdc
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1. Stay on the ground and go by ambulance to the ER. Doing so will:
– a. document and begin mitigating any injuries you may have sustained, including injuries you may not even notice at the scene;
– b. satisfy legal requirements that injured parties do everything in their power to lessen the damages they sustain; and
– c. ensure that a police report gets written.
2. Do not rely on the police to investigate the crash, document the facts, or collect the names of witnesses. It’s been my experience that, whether intentional or not, the entire system is rigged against bikers, so:
– a. Always carry a flash-equipped disposable camera and, if you are conscious and able to speak, ask someone at the scene to take pictures that capture everything—your position, your bike’s position, the vehicle(s) involved, any relevant traffic control devices, etc. Remember—pictures can tell 1,000 words.
– b. Carry some pre-printed “witness cards,” and try to get the first people at the scene to give you their names and contact info even if they didn’t see the crash itself. First responders see and hear all sorts of relevant things (e.g. your bike headlight was on, or the car driver saying “I didn’t see him!”). Include line items on the card that beg for answers, such as “headlight was ___” or “Did the driver say he saw me? ___”
– c. If you can get to your cell phone or have someone get it for you, call yourself and leave a message describing what happened. You will forget things over time, and small details from the scene can really matter later on. Leave the phone connected because it might record the driver saying things, like “I didn’t even see him” or “I was running a bit late getting home.” If it’s not too much of a strain, do a play-by-play of everything you hear and see while waiting to be hauled off in the ambulance.
– d. Write your own “courtroom-grade” incident statement as soon as possible and submit it to the police. Use googlemaps or other satellite images of the scene marked with points A, B, C, etc, then write a narrative of what happened at each of those points. You can also submit the statement to insurance companies in lieu of the verbal statements they sometimes prefer. Which is more reliable—your memory of what happened days or weeks after the incident, or a statement you wrote within 24 hours based on a phone message you left for yourself describing the scene as it unfolded?
3) Get a copy of the police report and confirm that what you wrote is either appended to the official report or accurately transcribed. If it’s not, complain immediately to the filing officer’s supervisor and consider filing an internal affairs complaint. These reports form the basis of national statistics about the cause sof bike/car crashes, and it’s been my experience that the police tend to absolve drivers of wrongdoing in collisions involving bikes. This, I believe, contributes to the common knowledge that all bikers are scofflaws and, therefore, we sort of deserve to get hit.
Ride as safely as you can.
Continue reading “Tips if you are involved in a serious collision with a car:”

Over the next few weeks, Masako Chen (C’11) and three of her classmates in the innovative Shaping National Science Policy seminar will begin lobbying nearly a dozen congressional members who specialize in transportation, energy and bicycle use.
"We’re getting the wheels turning for city bike-sharing programs across the country," said Chen, whose Spokes in the City team is one of the student groups in the seminar offered through Georgetown’s Science in the Public Interest (SPI) program.
The seminar is taught by Georgetown’s Upjohn Lecturer on Physics and Public Policy and SPI founder Francis Slakey and biology lecturer Karen Wayland.
Throughout the semester, the professors and students delve deeper into navigating the political system, helped by lectures from congressional science staff, science journalists, lobbyists and pollsters. The seminar concludes with an examination of five case studies in science advocacy, linking students with industry and community leaders.
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Seeking Federal, Local Laws
The student teams in this semester’s seminar class have each identified a policy issue, researched the science behind it and crafted a policy solution.
Chen’s team, for instance, seeks $5 million in seed money to start city bicycle sharing programs on 20 college campuses across the country.
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Continue reading “Students Take Environmental Solutions to the Hill”

This week, we strap on a helmet, squeeze into some Spandex, and go for a ride with bicycle blogger Gregg Deal.
By Emily Leaman
Gregg Deal has been riding bikes since childhood, and he raced mountain bikes in the ’90s. Then he took some time off—and he put on a few pounds. And then a few more. So what did it take to get him back in the saddle? “My wife would regularly poke my stomach,” he says. “I think she was expecting a Pillsbury laugh or something.”
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Five words to describe your feelings about cycling:
“This is the type of question I dread. You’re asking me to take something that has been a big part of my life and break it down into five words, and I’ve already used something like 36 words just to say that. So, lets see: epic, beautiful, suffering, pain, freedom.”
Five words to describe what it’s like to ride in Washington:
“Again with the five words? You’re killing me. How about: epic, adrenaline, fast, public, Spandex. Those last two can go together. Yeah, public Spandex.”
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Biggest cycling pet peeve:
“Getting run over. Perhaps I can be more specific. How about: Tony Kornheiser trying to run me over because he finds me to be a chesty, homo-erotic, shiney-Spandex-wearing, crunchy loser who thinks I own the road then goes on his radio show and brags about it. If you can’t read my sarcasm, I’m laying it on pretty thick. I’m not a fan of being honked at, yelled at, or put in any number of frightening situations in what has become a war between cyclists and motorists. How about we don’t war at all?”
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Continue reading “The Blogger Beat: District Cycling”

[I’ll assert that attention is focused where the money is. If the money is more readily available for mega projects then that’s what we get. Focus more on measurable results, and moving people and not just cars there might be some hope for a better tomorrow. This whole people are driving less so how are we going to fund increasing driving capacity has got to end now!]
By Ken Orski, Publisher, Innovation Briefs
he need for states to manage costly multi-year construction projects. Multi-year transportation bills and contract authority have helped state DOTs to avoid fluctuating year-to-year transportation program levels and have minimized the attendant uncertainty when planning for large construction projects. That justification was indeed valid when we were building the Interstate Highway system and planning other capacity expansion mega projects such as Boston’s “Big Dig” or Northern Virginia’s Springfield Interchange. But that age, if we correctly read the tea leaves, is over. Implementing walking and bicycling networks and other “non-motorized” and “livability” projects will not require much advance budgeting or a long planning-design-construction cycle. Routine road maintenance and preservation activities to keep the system in a state of good repair, likewise do not need multi-year planning and budgeting.
With “the end of favoring motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized,” and with state transportation agencies urged to give “the same priority to walking and bicycling as is given to other transportation modes” as Transportation Secretary LaHood announced, perhaps the time also has come to end multi-year transportation bills and embrace an annual appropriation cycle like the vast majority of other federal programs.
Continue reading “Is the Interstate Highway system and planning other capacity expansion mega projects done?”