“Protected” Bike Lane Potentially Behind Another Bicyclist Fatality
Carbon Wheel Cracker is a Strava Segment located on Northbound Jimmy Durante Boulevard in Del Mar, CA, a city located in San Diego County along the coast. This stretch recently had “protection” installed along the former bicycle lane. This “protection” is in the form of what are often called “flex posts,” which are fiberglass posts designed to move if hit. This works great in theory to keep motorists out of the bikeway but are hazardous to bicyclists, the intended recipients of such “protection” if they hit or nick the posts.
Similar “protection” measures are likely the cause of a bicyclist fatality that occurred earlier this year a few miles south along the Cardiff “protected” bikeway, the signature project of current CA Senator and former Mayor of Encinitas Catherine Blakespear.
Blakespear’s project has seen dozens of severe injuries and close calls including one just this past weekend - something legitimate and knowledgeable cyclists have long warned about. That project has been the focus of a few posts here.
Cycling Savvy’s Keri Cafferty wrote a long blog post about the issues with this “protection,” in How to Ruin a Buffered Bike Lane stating:
I get the desire to feel protected from cars, but at what cost? First of all, “feel protected” is all you get. Posts and curbs will not stop a moving car. They will, however, cause a bicyclist to crash. This is a known hazard which causes actual casualties, including serious injuries. Yet, these crashes don’t show up in national crash data, because it counts bicycle crashes only if they involve a moving motor vehicle.
Below that paragraph is an ominous photo, originally posted on the Facebook group Encinitas Please Restore Safe Cycling (which has become sort of a catch-all group for cycling issues with “protected” infrastructure across the county) of guess where?
The beginning of Carbon Wheel Cracker!
Unfortunately this segment was the site of a recent solo bicyclist fatality. Local news is reporting no other parties were involved and that it is believed the bicyclist lost control.
Biking in LA, a popular website that tracks bicycle infrastructure news in the region and bicyclist fatalities cited a video from local San Diego bicyclist Serge Issakov, who visited the site in person and believes the markings on the road may be from the crash investigators:
Issakov reports the site is at the bottom of a descent with a typical 4% grade, where road cyclists typically reach speeds of 26 to 30 mph, while a KOM could be somewhere in the 40 mph range.
The typical car-ticker plastic bollards show clear signs of being run over more than once, and would likely have been virtually invisible under the typical Del Mar marine layer — let alone if there was any coastal fog or haze in the morning hour.
But even without hitting the post, the cracks visible in the pavement could have easily destabilized the victim, which could have been enough to send him into the curb or the grate in the gutter, and onto the sidewalk.
And at those speeds, it might not have mattered whether he was wearing a helmet.
All I can say, after watching Issakov’s video, is I hope the victim’s family has a good lawyer.
If not, I can sure as hell recommend one.
As BikingInLA’s Ted Rogers notes, another factor, poor road pavement conditions could be the cause of the fatality and not the bollards.
This old video from Don Kostelec, a city planner in Idaho for example paints a clear example of how gutter seams, the transition between concrete gutters and asphalt, which are often part of bicycle lanes, can pose a crash hazards to bicyclists.
Only a well-done traffic crash investigation could further prove the real culprit. But the hazards of “protection” remains too.
RIP to the bicyclist and my deepest condolences for his or her loved ones.