Please Drive More Carefully

On Thurs­day while I was on my way to my den­tist’s office, I got hit by a car while rid­ing my motorcycle.

For the last cou­ple of weeks I’ve been won­der­ing whether I was imag­in­ing it or whether recent­ly peo­ple have been pay­ing less and less atten­tion to their dri­ving. It seems in the past month that I’ve seen a four­fold increase in red light run­ning and a lot more peo­ple just doing out­right dumb things. Most times, these peo­ple were chat­ting on their cell­phones. I’m wary of attribut­ing a trend to a series of anec­do­tal inci­dents, but it sure seems like the last few weeks have seen an upswing in care­less dri­ving here in the Bay Area.

I did­n’t see whether the woman who hit me was talk­ing on her cell, and I haven’t got­ten any infor­ma­tion from the police report yet, but what she did was plain­ly ille­gal and stu­pid beyond com­pre­hen­sion. The inter­sec­tion of North Point and Leav­en­worth is a ter­ri­ble inter­sec­tion, to be sure. Many of the inter­sec­tions along Colum­bus are a bit awk­ward, but North Point and Leav­en­worth, just fifty feet up from North Point and Colum­bus’s stop­light, has no stop­light but just a sign. To make things worse, there are two West­bound lanes but only one Eastbound.

A tourist bus — one of those dou­ble-deck­er hop-on, hop-off bus­es — was in the East­bound lane, stopped at the light when I was stopped in the left-hand West­bound lane. The light turned green and I went on through. The tourist bus did not start mov­ing, pre­sum­ably to allow pedes­tri­ans to cross before turn­ing up Colum­bus. A woman in a sil­ver car was at the stop sign on Leav­en­worth, right by the tail end of the bus. She appar­ent­ly decid­ed that she did not want to wait for the bus to turn and went around the bus instead. She start­ed her turn around the bus, mak­ing a blind turn into a lane of traf­fic mov­ing in the oppo­site direc­tion. I was the traf­fic mov­ing in the oppo­site direction.

My Tri­umph Speed Triple col­lid­ed with her front bumper and bounced North about 25 feet. Accord­ing to wit­ness­es, I bounced off the hood of the car and land­ed about 15 feet West. Every­one’s first ques­tion seems to be was I wear­ing a hel­met. Yes, I was wear­ing a full-face Shoei RF-1000, and I heard the sound of the hel­met hit­ting the pave­ment from inside the hel­met. Although a hel­met hit­ting pave­ment makes a kind of sick­en­ing crunch, there is no sweet­er sound to hear con­sid­er­ing that I heard it rather than my skull doing the same. I was also wear­ing stur­dy boots, a jack­et with T‑Pro impact-absorbent armor, and gaunt­let-style gloves with car­bon fiber knuck­les. Because I was only wear­ing jeans, I got a skinned knee. Because my left foot took the car’s front bumper off, I end­ed up with four bro­ken metatarsals and a lac­er­a­tion that required sev­en stitches.

That may sound unpleas­ant, and cer­tain­ly I’d rather have no bro­ken bones and no lac­er­a­tions, but all things con­sid­ered I came through pret­ty lucky. The bro­ken bones are all «clean, non-dis­placed» breaks accord­ing to the doc­tor who treat­ed me at SF Gen­er­al. These are sup­posed to heal the best and the fastest. Hope­ful­ly I’ll be back to run­ning in short order.

In the mean­time, I’m on crutch­es and not going very far or very fast. I’m lucky to have won­der­ful friends who have brought me food and kept me com­pa­ny as I’ve been recovering.

I’d like to ask any of you that dri­ve to please pay atten­tion to what you’re doing and not take unnec­es­sary risks. I know that we all have moments of poor judg­ment or dis­trac­tion, but a lit­tle focus and atten­tion goes a long way. Please read this list of things not to do when dri­ving. You can laugh because you’ve seen the same things, but don’t laugh too hard.