Another sad drunk driving death sentence
Written by: Herbert Krabel Date: Mon Sep 30 2013
The triathlon community was saddened on September 6th when the news arrived that Roy Nasr had been killed during an early morning bike ride in Dubai with 2 friends. One of the other cyclists was injured too, but Roy Nasr took the brunt of the accident and died. http://GulfNews.org reported that Nasr, 49, and a cycling friend whose name was not immediately available, were hit from behind by a car when the drunk driver swerved past the cyclists’ escort vehicle as they pedaled towards Meydan.
"A cyclist was killed after he was hit by a car on the Safa Park bridge early morning and another cyclist was also injured in the accident and was rushed to hospital,” said Major General Al Zafein, the chief of the Dubai Police Traffic Department on September 6.
On September 27th the United Arab Emirates paper The National reported that the Filipino man who was arrested in that case confessed at the Dubai Traffic Court to five charges - causing death, risking a person’s safety, damaging property, drunk driving and illegal consumption of alcohol and that the sentencing would take place on September 30th.
The sentence has indeed been announced today and it appears somewhat surreal. The admitted drunk driver will be jailed for a month and ordered to pay Dh200,000 (about $55,000) in blood money, plus his license will be suspended for 3 months.
Is that what a life is worth? $55,000 and a month in jail? That sounds absolutely crazy. Andrew Starykowicz also had to pay the $55,000 blood money when he crashed into a volunteer during the Abu Dhabi International Triathlon, but he was not drunk and that person did not die. (he has since gotten that money back)
A 3-month license suspension is standard when being caught driving drunk in the UAE, and the next infraction will see a 6- month suspension while the third one will cost a full year. Really? That, combined with fairly rare random tests seems almost like an invite for folks to drink and drive. There is however a good chance that a person may get jailed there when just being drunk in public, even if no harm is caused.
But this is not just a problem in the United Arab Emirates, cases like this are unfortunately happening around the world and seem to occur in an ever faster frequency, and each time the law appears to be on the side of the motorist even if the cyclist had not caused the accident.
After such ugly cycling death incidents folks on forums, Twitter and Facebook often make comments along the lines of "If you really hate someone you just hope they like riding a bike and then you just wait for an opportunity to run them over, and that is seemingly how you get away with murder or manslaughter." Hopefully though that is far from the truth.
But we cyclists also need to be more cautious and respect the traffic laws and fellow motorists, this way maybe we get more respect from them and hopefully fewer accidents. But the way it is now the law certainly appears to be not on the side of the cyclists, that seems true in the USA and apparently in the UAE, and other countries.
For now though our thoughts are with the family of Roy Nasr.
http://www.slowtwitch.com/Opinion/Another_sad_drunk_driving_death_sentence_3933.html
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Stayin' Alive - Rural
Written by: Dan Empfield Date: Thu May 20 2010
Cyclists getting hit by motorists. It's just a steady stream of bad news, isn't it? We all know there's a hard truth, that even in such case as a vehicle/cyclist interaction is the vehicle driver's fault, there are often things that the cyclist can do that might have prevented the tragedy.
This is not in any way meant to suggest a shared culpability. Rather that drivers are, on average, unequipped to be given charge of weapons that powerful. Therefore, we must make up the difference.
At best, all motorists get into their cars with baggage attendant. Not briefcases and backpacks, the baggage to which I refer are their dreams, worries, mental to-do lists. Drivers are multi-taskers. Time is short, schedules are packed, it's simply not efficient to drive only. And let's face it, I'm not just talking about them, I'm talking about us. Once we stop pedaling and turn on our ignitions, we become them.
That's at best. At worst, we're sharing the roads with—let's face it—a significant minority of motorists who can't compete. I don't mean they can't compete in triathlons, I mean they can't compete. The drunk driver; the 88-year-old who ought not to be on the road at all; the texting teenage airhead; wouldn't survive in a world less kind and coddling than ours.
Yet here they are, sharing the roadway with you, wielding 5000 pounds.
So it's not a case of fault in an accident. It's a case of survival, and realizing how to steer clear of the clueless and inept, as well as the well-meaning, conscientious drivers who are simply distracted.
We can shake our fists in the air, or, we can prepare ourselves.
To that end, I'm going to write down the result of 35 years of trial-and-error on the roadways. Mind, I'm going to rise from my chair in a little while to go bike riding, and I might not survive the ride. This, because a vehicle may foil all my defensive maneuvers and take me out. However, this regrettable possibility is just as prevalent when we're behind the wheels of our cars, is it not? How many head-on collisions between two vehicles occur on two-lane dividerless roads? Once you exit your property, the risk increases. So you become an agoraphobe or you venture forth, and do what you can to lessen the risk.
I'm splitting this into two installments. Below you'll read about how it is I comport myself on emptier, country roads. Following this is an installment on how it is I behave on busier, urban and suburban streets.
ROAD SELECTION
You drive to your swim workouts, do you not? I recommend you also consider driving to your cycling workouts, if you don't have safe roads proximate to you. Since you're only going to ride two or maybe three days a week, it's not that hard to strategically plan a bike route, and execute your ride on roads both scenic and safe.
What's my idea of a safe road? First, sparsity of traffic. I'm going to use Los Angeles as an example. You might think there is no such thing as a sparse stretch of pavement in this town. But L.A. is replete with great riding.
The city most proximate to The Compound is Palmdale (the start of the Queen Stage of this year's Amgen Tour of California). Palmdale is a city of engineers. It's the home of Lockheed Skunk Works, proximate to Edwards Air Force Base, and, plenty of Palmdale's engineers commute to Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and elsewhere "down below." If I lived in Palmdale and commuted, I'd take my bike with me to work. On the way home I'd pull off the 210 freeway at Osborne Street and ride Little Tujunga Canyon. The next day I'd pull off the 14 freeway at San Canyon and ride that same fabulous, challenging road in the other direction.
The next day I'd pull off the I-14 at Acton and ride Aliso Canyon Road up to Mill Creek Summit on Angeles Forest Highway (on last year's Amgen ToC queen stage).
All these are sparsely traveled roads, and cars have room to give you a wide berth. There are countless low-density roads in SoCal. It amazes me that cyclists in triathletes who live in the South Bay (from Manhattan Beach to Santa Monica) ride north on heavily trafficked, stoplight-infested roads instead of simply driving their bikes to Malibu, where the good riding on challenging, scenic, spare and car-free roads commences.
PROPER POSTURE ON COUNTRY ROADS
What do we keep hearing? That so many of these horrible accidents actually do happen on sparsely traveled roads. So, even if you take my advice and find these roads, how can you remain safe?
Just as you never know who's going to swerve into you, creating a head-on accident, while you're driving on roads like these, you never know when a motorist is going to cause a tragedy beyond your control to avert. It's a numbers game. Yet, there are a few tips I can share that might increase your odds.
1. You need your hearing. You need to know when a car is approaching. Therefore, I never ride with music streaming into my ears, and I recommend you don't either.
2. Music or no, wind direction plays an important part in what you can hear. If you're riding into a headwind, you can't hear what's coming up behind you. Therefore, when riding into a wind, you must recognize this, and be on extra alert.
3. We all ride as we are supposed to, by law, and that is as far to the right as is practicable. But that doesn't mean you straddle the fine line between asphalt and dirt. Probably you ride 12" to 24" away from the edge of the roadbed. When I hear a car approaching from the rear. I keep riding with my 12" to 24" margin. As I sense the car getting close—after he's calibrated for what he feels is his proper gap between his car and my bike—I gently steer toward the edge of the roadbed. By the time the car reaches me, I'm very nearly at the edge of the road. In other words, I've taken the margin the driver thinks he needs, and I've added an extra foot or foot-and-a-half margin he's not accounting for. The idea is to make this extra room late enough in the process so that the approaching car can't add this extra margin into his figuring.
4. I'm on high alert when a car is approaching from the other direction. Why? Because, if a car is approaching me from behind, and happens to pass me at the exact moment the car on the other side of the road passes by, now all three of us must squeeze through at the same time. For this reason, if a car is approaching from the other direction, well before that car approaches me I may look back and see what's coming up from behind. Otherwise, I employ the same tactic as described above, providing extra margin just as the oncoming vehicle passes me.
5. When there's one, there may be more. Keep in mind that when a car passes you from behind, that's not the end of it. Very likely there is a second, or even a train, of cars behind the first car. So, after I've made that extra margin for the car overtaking me, I don't immediately reestablish my normal 12" to 24" margin, because I have to keep that margin established for the cars that might come after the first overtaking vehicle.
6. Learn to look behind you without swerving. It's common to veer in the direction you look, that is, if you look over your shoulder to the left, it's common to then steer your bike marginally to the left. This is a bad habit. Best to train yourself how to look over your shoulder while keeping your bike in a straight line. This is not only a safer way to ride your bike in vehicular traffic, it's also a good way to keep from taking down cyclists who're riding behind you.
7. Trailers and trailer mirrors. I hate seeing utility trailers pulled by pick-ups coming up on me. This, because trailers are frequently—in fact, usually—wider than the trucks pulling them. But the trucks' drivers don't recognize this, so, they allow you a margin commensurate with their trucks, not their trailers. I'm on extra alert for these, and, I try to use the tactics described above to grant myself the extra margin I need.
8. Riding two and three abreast. You ladies and gents need to decide what's important to you: practicing your social life aboard your bikes; or riding safely. When you and I ride together, I can guarantee you that if we're riding two or more abreast, I'm going to be the one against the side of the roadbed. If you want to ride out there in traffic, be my guest. Just make sure I know your spouse's cell number, so that I can apprise him/her what hospital you're at. Conversely, if you ride directly in front of or behind me, I won't take it personally. We can catch up on social events at brunch after the ride is over.
9. We're triathletes, so, we ride tri bikes. This means many of us have a special muscular burden we bear: in the backs of our necks. Just as a tired boxer let's his guard down, making him vulnerable to attack, so we're vulnerable to getting hit if we don't stay sufficiently diligent. Calibrate your bike position, and the distance of your ride, so that you're not spending an unsafe amount of time looking down instead of forward.
Above are 9 tips for safe rural riding, and I'm sure Slowtwitchers could conspire to add to this knowledge, and make this ruleset number an even 10.
Next up are my rules for safe urban riding.
http://www.slowtwitch.com/Features/Stayin_Alive_-_Rural_1353.html
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