On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 4/1/2005
Sharing the Road...with Drunks
Once again, all my pending topics for a new column have been driven to the back burner by emerging current events. Not the dire world events that cause me to foam and rant from time to time. No, this is a local event: another entry in the long, agonizing litany of cyclists killed by drunken drivers.
This latest fatality happened just today, March 28, 2005...the day after Easter. A 43-year old woman cycling along Mark West Springs Road north of Santa Rosa was struck by a 72-year old man in a pick-up. Police on the scene immediately arrested the driver on suspicion of drunken driving.
It was exactly one year ago this week that another cyclist was killed within half a mile of this latest incident. He too was wiped out by a drunken driver. Same road. Same direction of travel. And while this road has its problems with too much traffic, too much speed, and--sometimes--too little shoulder, both of these incidents happened on a stretch of the road with fairly wide, “safe” shoulders.
Last year’s fatality was the second in just over a week in our community. The first involved a man who had drunk most of a bottle of gin by 10:00 am on Easter morning, then got in his car and promptly ran down two cyclists, leaving one dead and one a paraplegic. When the second fatality happened a few days later, the local press decided they had a major news item with a hot-button theme, and they ran with it. At first, the reporter they assigned to the story cast the entire matter as a bikes vs. cars issue, with loads of misguided garbage about “bikes are unsafe” and “cyclists bring it on themselves by riding unsafely.”
Needless to say, this ignited a firestorm of outrage within the local cycling community: first, that the terrible crashes should have happened at all; and second, that the local paper should spin it around so that the crimes of drunken drivers were construed to be the fault of the victims--the cyclists. To their credit, the paper subsequently recanted that absurd premise and took a more balanced position in follow-up articles. However, the damage had been done, and you won’t be surprised to learn that several letters to the editor fulminated on the theme of those darn scofflaw bikers. After reading a few of these rants, and a few more from irate cyclists about stupid drivers, I got fed up and fired off a letter of my own to the paper, which I reprint here:
“Enough with the anecdotes about how bad cyclists do this or bad drivers do that. Let’s all agree that some cyclists don’t ride the way they should and that some motorists are just as bad. But let’s also admit that most cyclists do ride safely, and that most interactions between bikes and cars occur seamlessly, without trauma or drama.
“Aside from the fact that Mr. Payne’s article on bike/car safety was filled with misinformation and sloppy fact checking, the real problem is that it is not the article that needed to be written at this time.
“He cites a case where a drunk driver mowed down two innocent cyclists to write about how cyclists are often at fault in collisions with cars. Excuse me? A man—an attorney who certainly knows the law—was blind drunk on Easter morning and yet chose to get in his car and attempt to drive. The victims were cyclists, but they could have been pedestrians or other motorists.
“We don’t need another “Us vs Them” article about bikes and cars. We need an article about the epidemic of drunken driving in our society. It’s not a cycling issue. It’s a public safety issue that concerns us all.”
That’s pretty much the message I want to convery here, again, one year later: this is not about bike safety. It’s not about how bikes and cars interact. It’s about drunk drivers.
I wrote a column on the subject of bike safety a few years ago in this space. It was called Living Dangerously. That may have been a poor choice of a header for the article, because the thrust of the piece was that--in spite of the occasionaly much-publicized fatality--cycling is actually not very dangerous at all. If these dreadful news items cause you concern about the safety of cycling, I urge you to go back and read that essay. I don’t think the statistics I cited in that piece have gone out of date since then, nor have the conclusions I drew from those stats.
But for sure, one verity from that time has stayed constant: that article was prompted in part by a terrible incident where a drunk driver--blotto on Bloody Marys at 9:00 am on a Sunday morning--had careened through the middle of a local, weekend club ride and crushed the life out of a popular, well-known cyclist.
However, in between these high-profile cycling fatalities, dozens upon dozens of other innocent people have died at the hands of drunken drivers on our local roads. They were pedestrians, occupants of other cars, and passengers in the cars with the drunks. All innocent. All dead. The few cyclists killed represent only a tiny fraction of the carnage visited upon our community by these rolling suicide bombers.
I’m not going to look up and reprint the statistics on drunk driving “accidents” at the national or world level. If you’ve been half awake over the past 20 years, you will have seen the figures somewhere. They are staggering in their immensity and pervasiveness. The numbers recount an epidemic of violent, needless death and trauma that far outstrips the body counts for most wars and plagues and diseases. Some experts estimate that at any given time, at least 20% of all the drivers on the road are drunk. One out of five...and if you’re sober, that means one out of four of all the other drivers with whom you’re sharing the roads will be driving with some level of impairment to their faculties.
An average, recreational drinker might assume that the incidence of drunken driving will go up in the evening, when the bars are closing or when happy hour is turning into sloppy, falling-down-drunk hour. But all four of the cycling fatalities mentioned here happened in the middle of the day...two in the afternoon and two in the morning, the latter two, incredibly, on Easter morning and on another Sunday morning, both before 10:00 am.
An average, recreational drinker might be forgiven for wondering how in the hell these folks could be plastered by mid-morning on a Sunday. But these are not average, recreational drinkers. These are chronic, habituated alcoholics. They are in the grip of a profound, pernicious sickness...both physcally and mentally unhinged.
What’s more, the sickness that compells them to drink to excess on a Sunday morning is the same sickness that renders them impervious to most of the penalties that society sets up to thwart their behavior. Many studies have shown that our most drastic drunk driving laws do little good in weeding out those with the worst problems. These folks are already beyond the pale, legally and morally and psychologically. Arrests and fines don’t faze them. Probably just make them angrier. Taking away their licenses accomplishes nothing. They’ll drive without them. In fact, the majority of drunk drivers causing catastrophic wrecks already had priors for the same infraction...often many prior arrests and convictions and suspended or revoked licenses.
If you’re hoping I will now propound some revolutionary new solution to the problem, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. I haven’t a clue as to how to get these sodden zombies off the road. Anyway, that wasn’t the point of this article in the first place. What was the point? Oh yeah...seeing as how this is supposed to be a column about cycling, I will tell you the point is that this isn’t about cycling.
Cyclists get killed by drunk drivers, as do a whole lot of other people. For once in our cycling lives, we are not the “other,” standing in opposition to the rest of society. We are part of the mainstream of society on this one. We are all of us--cyclists, pedestrians, and motorists--being held hostage by the driver who is putting the pedal to the metal while pickling his brain in a brine of booze.
Stay on message here: don’t start a war of words with other road users on this issue. It’s not about bike safety. it’s not about bikes vs. cars. It’s about sharing the road with drunks.
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net