Meet Frank.
Frank is not his real name, but Frank represents a real person.
Frank is a 56 year old professional upper management type who has lived in Santa Clarita for decades. He enjoys bicycling as a sport and has been cycling 90-130 miles a week on our roads since 1983 without incident.
Until last month.
That’s when Frank was hit from behind by a motorist travelling at 50+ mph. He barely got any attention from The Signal, so we decided to interview him at SCVTalk.
On May 18 -ironically around 1 pm on Wednesday during Bike to Work week- Frank was riding back from Fillmore in the Industrial Center on Rye Canyon road. Frank knows how to dress to attract attention while he bicycles.
“I wear very bright clothing and a helmet all the time because I want to be seen. I want to stand out,” he says.
On that day, he adds, he was wearing his “obnoxious knickers” just to be seen.
Frank was riding on Rye Canyon Road after a 50 + mile ride out to Fillmore and back. As John B. detailed in a post last month, Rye Canyon road is one of those high-capacity, high-speed, highway-like streets our City specializes in.
Such roads aren’t very accommodating of cyclists who have a legal right to the road.
That’s when it happened. A teenager driving a Dodge Magnum sport wagon was driving eastbound on Rye Canyon when a vehicle entered the number two lane (center lane) in front of the Magnum. The police report says the Magnum’s driver, in an effort to pass the vehicle in front of him, switched lanes to the right at 50+ mph.
Frank was on his 1980s vintage steel road bike riding at about 15 mph. The next thing he heard was the screech of car tires.
The Sheriff’s Station report put it like this: “Driver of car caused collision because of unsafe speed. He was not cited at this time. ” The report said the Magnum driver hit Frank at 55 mph.
Bicyclist Frank put it like this: ”Oh boy, I thought. Somebody is going to get hit. The next thing I know, all I see is the sky. And I’m bewildered. I’ts not until I hit the ground and started sliding that I realized I just got hit by a car,” he told SCVTalk in an interview last week.
Westbound on Rye at Beale. Where does a cyclist ride?
Frank says that when the car hit him, he was fortunate because his bike flew out from under him, and he ended up on the hood of the Magnum until the driver stopped and Frank fell to the ground.
“I flew up in the air and landed on the hood. The bike ended up 20 feet down the street,” he told SCVTalk. There were “87 feet of skid marks on the road.”
The teenage driver of the Magum stopped, got out of the car and checked on Frank, apologizing profusely.
“That driver’s eyes were as big as sausage eggs. I was very irate and upset,” Frank says. A bystander to the incident forced Frank to lay down and calm down. An ambulance arrived and Frank was taken to Henry Mayo Hospital for treatment.
Frank says he always rides as far to the right as is safe, per California law. “I ride as safe as I can on the asphalt,” he told me.
Amazingly, Frank suffered few injuries, a fact he attributes to God’s grace and mercy.
“There’s only one reason that I have some slight road rash. By the Grace and Mercy of God.” He even said that he’d like to apologize to the Magnum’s driver for the “rage and filth” that spewed from his mouth in the seconds after he was hit.
He added that he hopes the teenage driver becomes a “more safe and cautious driver” after the incident. According to the Sheriff’s station, the teenage driver was not on a cell phone at the time he collided with the cyclist.
But Frank noted that Santa Clarita has gotten less safe to bicycle in in recent years. In particular, he noted that he was disappointed that Newhall Ranch Road and Bouquet Canyon Road had become unsafe for cyclists.Both lanes are now four lanes in each direction, and while Bouquet has a bike lane on the north-bound side of the street, the south-bound direction has no space for cyclists.
“I would much prefer to have a bike lane in traffic,” he told SCVtalk. “But there’s so much traffic.” He advised the City to study other municipalities that successfully integrate bicycle and vehicle traffic, like Eugene and Portland Oregon.
Overall, Frank says that Santa Clarita needs more education when it comes to bicyclists. “There needs to be a lot of education. To some degree, there’s some hostility between motorists and cyclists. Cyclists need to make sure they’re obeying the traffic laws.”
My View:
John and I interviewed Frank at length. While he was very gracious and compassionate to the driver who struck him at 55 mph, we are not. The basic fact of the matter is that the City of Santa Clarita views cyclists as recreational, not transportational users. They sequester cyclists off the road, out of the way of motorists, because that’s how they see bicycling, as a recreational activity. They endlessly tout the 60+ miles of Class 1 bike paths as proof that the City of Santa Clarita is bicycle friendly, but it is not. The bike paths end, often dumping riders onto sidewalks or multi-lane streets with highways speeds that offer no protection to bicyclists.
A better way to accomodate motorists, transportational and recreational cyclists is to save some space for us on the roads we pay for. I’m a big advocate of cheap, effective, and easy-to-implement bike lanes rather than expensive off-street bike paths. As John B. pointed out, there is literally no space for a cyclist on Rye Canyon Road.
That needs to change, if the City of Santa Clarita really aspires to be bicycle friendly.
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