Also find it interesting that you ended up in a sub-category of engineering—remember when (even as a toddler) you used to build roads w/ your books all over the living room & build bridges & such with your Legos? The railroad you & Mark built? You also used to sketch stadiums, etc. & a favorite computer game was “Sim City.” At that time we thought you might become a “civil engineer.” Later, your fascination w/ science & astronomy led us to believe otherwise. But your interests as an adult coincided w/ your earliest inclinations.

If I click the “follow me there” on “Half the Fun” will I get an e-mail whenever you write an article on PT? Sorry to tell you, but I’m not so much interested in Portland Transport as I am in your work.

So proud of you, Mom

You write: “as a cyclist I think she should have been more vigilant (to damn near the point of paranoia)”

Perhaps, but very difficult to do, and, if it was me, I’d quickly stress out and give up.

Here’s another option: primed with a modicum of instruction, get onto the street and cycle. Done correctly, it requires neither great skill nor bravery and it is much safer than cycling on the sidewalk.

CyclingSavvy is good example of adult instruction for what you need to know to get around town safely. I’ve taken their course and I recommend it.

http://cyclingsavvy.org/

Cheers.

Again, a lot of things contribute to an unsafe situation here. As an engineer, I wish the infrastructure were designed better, as a cyclist I think she should have been more vigilant (to damn near the point of paranoia), and as a citizen or what have you, I wish laws were enforced better so as to keep drivers from entering the intersection without the right of way.

Two other factors pile on as well:

1. the speed of the (lady) cyclist across the intersection. Not that she was going too fast for conditions, but for the motorist, she wasn’t there ‘one-mississippi, two-mississippi’ seconds before. In two seconds or less, the time it took her to almost completely cross in front of his car, the motorist’s situational environment changed radically, so fast that he missed it;

2. the lady is moving from right to left, when all the traffic for which the motorist is accustomed to scan comes from the left. A cycle path could have been put on the other side of the road so that cycle traffic moves with the flow of motor traffic.

So, yes Red on Right is a major contributor to this incident, but so is putting a cycle path (or permitting cyclists to cross on the ped path) against the flow of traffic.

Cheers.