On The Road
by: Bill Oetinger 6/1/2005
Loose Ends
Once a year or so, I root around in the dusty, musty archives of my past columns and unearth a few loose ends that want to be tidied up. This is one of those months. While I'm sure you have the memory of an elephant when it comes to my scribblings, I will provide links to the columns in question, in case you care to refresh yourself on the original topic.
First off, I want to revisit the distressing topic of my column from two months ago: Sharing the Road...with Drunks. When I wrote it, I didn't have any stats on fatalities caused by drunk drivers, and I said I wasn't going to bother looking them up. Later, the stats fell in my lap, and now I'm passing them on:
According to data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, in 2004, 16,654 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes...an average of one almost every half-hour. These deaths constituted approximately 39% of the 42,800 total traffic fatalities. This is a decrease from 2003, when 17,013 people were killed in alcohol-related traffic crashes, representing 40% of the 42,642 people killed in all traffic crashes.
17,000 fatalities a year in the United States. Who knows how many more around the rest of the world? (My daughter was nearly killed by a drunk driver in South Africa. She was badly mangled, but she survived.) Seventeen thousand. I'm sorry...I can't get past that number. It boggles my mind. For that matter, so does that other number: 42,000 highway fatalities of all sorts. What a price we pay for the convenience of our cars!
Somehow, we as a society have accommodated those numbers into our lives. If we don't personally know someone who has been killed or maimed by a drunk, then the numbers remain an abstraction. We get far more worked up about 1700 soldiers killed in Iraq than we do about ten times that number killed right here at home. (The same was true during the Viet Nam war, when domestic highway deaths far outstripped the body counts in Southeast Asia.) Isn't that strange? We hear this constant, rather faint drumbeat of outrage and hand-wringing coming from groups like MADD, but...so what? We just work around it. Ignore it. No one puts up a memorial on the Mall in Washington for the hundreds of thousands who have been snuffed out because someone--many someones--chose to get plastered and then drive.
But it's too big a number to ignore. And while many have said the problem is too complex to admit to an easy solution, there are things that can be done. Case in point is the guy who caused me to write that previous column. Joseph Lynchard, on his way home from Eddie's Bar--owned by his brother, Eddie--three times over the legal limit, veered off the road and wiped out cyclist Kathryn Black while she was standing by her bike, well off the road.
Now, it turns out this same guy has seven prior arrests and six prior convinctions for DUI, including one incident in 2001--on the very same stretch of road, presumably driving home from Eddie's Bar--where he rammed a stopped, unmarked sheriff's car, totaling the car and injuring the deputy sitting inside. In another case, a probation officer wrote a memo in his file: “The record speaks for itself; there is little room for argument as to whether or not the defendant has a drinking problem. It is equally clear that the defendant presents a real danger to others on the road when he has been drinking.” Almost all of his DUI arrests involved accidents which damaged other cars and property, and in some cases caused injuries...and now a death.
And yet, amazingly, in all six of his prior convictions, he received little more than a slap on the wrist: he was assessed a modest fine and sentenced to attend classes for a first-time offender. Over and over and over again...back to the class for first-time offenders!
You read that in the paper, and you know something is wrong with the criminal justice system. How can a chronic criminal like this keep slipping through the cracks? Had his prior convictions been a matter of record, he would have been--should have been--put behind bars years ago. Had the wheels of justice turned as they're supposed to, his victim would be alive today, still being a mother to her kids and a wife to her husband, instead of being one of 17,000 statistics.
Finally, this time, Lynchard is being charged with murder. It remains to be seen if he'll be convicted, but in any case, it's a little late for Kathryn Black and her family.
The prisons are aglut with poor stoops who got caught in the wringer of some mandatory sentencing machinery, often doing hard time for something as innocuous as shoplifting or possession of a small amount of pot...all in the name of being tough on crime and gung-ho on the war on drugs. But where is that tough sentencing machinery in the case of DUIs? What happened to Three Strikes? Hell, try SIX strikes for this terminal toper.
We need to do whatever it takes to see that the judicial system functions properly: that old DUIs stay active in one's file, lit up in big neon letters so they won't ever be missed in subsequent trials. If that means higher taxes so we can keep a few more paper shufflers employed in the District Attorney's office, then fine...do it. Or maybe it doesn't require one tax dollar more. Maybe all we need is to stop pretending that drunk driving is just a regrettable little oopsy-daisy downside of convivial, social drinking. Maybe we need to finally see this as the plague that it is...as pernicious and deadly as any Ebola or AIDS virus. 17,000 fatalities a year...shameful, obscene, and wholly unacceptable.
Now then, on to slightly more pleasant matters...
But I'm going to keep it within the realm of the law: a year ago this month, I wrote a column--Look in the Mirror--that explored some of the hot-button issues around bikes and the vehicle code. I referred to--and provided a link to--a website with all sorts of good info on bikes and bike law. Now I have found another site with another rich trove of facts and figures on the same subject. It's the home of the Bicycle Transportation Institute, and it's dense with goodies pertaining to how bikes are treated in vehicle codes around the country. If you have any interest in knowing your rights and responsibilities as a cyclist, you ought to bookmark this site and refer to it whenever you're in a muddle about the rules of the road.
Vehicle codes are a great bastion of states' rights: every state writes its own code, and although most significant laws are the same throughout the country, there are many little variations salted away in the agate type of those fat little code manuals. Bikes are a widely misunderstood and sometimes vilified subset of the traffic mix. So it should come as no surprise to find that the laws governing bike use vary considerably from state to state, depending on which whacky legislator took it upon himself to express his misunderstanding or outright vilification of bikes in a new ordinance.
One of the hottest of the hot buttons around bikes is the matter of riding single-file. I discussed this in the previous column and don't intend to beat on that poor old dog again now. But the BTI website does so, exhaustively. They have a state-by-state list of ordinances covering the matter, and they're quite literally all over the map. Most states allow for some scenarios when riding more than single-file is acceptable. But one state does not, and that is Virginia. In that state, according to their code, cyclists must ride single-file at all times. No exceptions.
Which brings me to another of my columns from the past year: Central Virginia. In it, I recounted a cycle-tour I took there last fall, and I went on at considerable length about how much I liked riding there. It really is a cycle-touring paradise, at least in the areas where I was riding (along the Blue Ridge and in Thomas Jefferson country).
I did all of my cycling in Virginia on my own, so the issue of riding two-abreast never came up. Most of the roads I was on were so quiet, you could have ridden four-abreast for hours at a time without ever causing a problem. Seems like a pretty dumb law to me. For some local spin on the law, I fired off an e-mail to Michael Follo in Madison, Virginia. Michael is the person who was most helpful to me in planning my tour in the Commonwealth. He's a teacher at a private boys' school near Madison, and he often organizes group rides for his students, up along the Blue Ridge Parkway and through Shenendoah National Park.
(After my column on Central Virginia appeared in this space, he made it required reading for the students taking part in his bike tours. I'm flattered to be included in the curriculum of at least a few students in Virginia, but I'm doubly pleased that a school program exist for getting kids on bikes for serious riding. And as long as I'm in the business of linking back to other, older columns, let me revisit the issue of cycle-tours as a school institution: I wrote about it some time ago, but the concept is still worthy of your consideration. The column was entitled Experiential Education. I think it's one of the more important columns I've ever written, and I urge you to give it a few minutes.)
Michael wasn't able to difinitively answer the question about single-file riding, but his reply was worth passing along anyway...
“Interesting...I can't say that I've ever been told that...and certainly never seen it enforced. Then again, I don't go on that many group rides except with my students, and I tell them to always move into a single file line whenever a car is coming. Not so much because of a law I'm not aware of, but because we're always trying to err on the side of safety with these novice riders.
”Of course, it wouldn't be the first time Virginia has found a way to distinguish itself for some dubious achievement or inane law. You may have heard recently that some of our state legilators tried to pass a law making it illegal to wear pants that hung below your hips and exposed underwear (or worse). It died in committee and didn't come to a vote, but it did make the national news. All I can figure is that it was aimed at young men hanging out at the malls, but someone realized every plumber in the state would be breaking the law as well...”
And with that parting crack, so to speak, we will move on to one final tidbit. This doesn't relate to a previous column. It's just a little anecdote I picked up on a ride, and for want of anywhere else to publish it, I'm grafting it onto the end of this catch-all column. It's simply a comment from another rider...
”I used to divide my leisure time between cycling and golf. One day my wife said to me: 'Larry, when you come home from golfing, you're always angry and frustrated. You bark at the kids and are short-tempered with me. But when you come home from cycling, you're blissed out...happy and tranquil and at peace with the world. Why on earth do you continue with the golf?' I thought about what she said, and you know, I haven't been golfing since!”
Bill can be reached at srccride@sonic.net