The driver who caused serious injuries in a May crash has been arrested and charged… “Glendale Police say 58-year-old Frank Kitko Junior was driving under the influence when he drove his sport-utility-vehicle into two people and took out a portion of a wall at the restaurant…” read more.
5/30/2015, ~ 1830; bicyclist Raphael D. Sagarin was killed when struck from behind after a pickup driven by a suspected impaired driver swerved partially off the road. The driver Gary Colvin has been booked on suspicion of manslaughter. Continue reading “UA prof killed while bicycling; driver arrested”
So there’s this meme (or maybe: myth, urban legend, commonly held belief, or whatever) that governments generate lavish amounts from traffic ticket fines, and that’s the “real” reason why the need to ticket their citizens — nothing to do with safety of course; and probably particularly the case when mentioning photo-enforcement. Continue reading “Revenue from Traffic Fines”
This picks up where godaddy-troubles-slow-wordpress-grid-hosting-solution left off. Azbikelaw has been on so-called grid hosting from godaddy ever since the migration of Nov 2010. And it’s been pretty good ever since; it’s not blazing fast, e.g. webpagetest.org on one particular afternoon saw a full wordpress homepage load in under 3 seconds; 1st byte at under a second. So, acceptable. As we learned in Dec of 2014 when problems arose trying to use wordpress on cazbike.org, grid hosting is no longer available for new accounts (i.e. azbikelaw is “grandfathered”). So, at that time cazbike.org to transitioned (albeit manually, I had to reload everything from scratch) to “cPanel” hosting. The pricing is the same. Continue reading “Godaddy go slow again?”
The case of Trevor Clarke, an Ottawa Canada driver who was involved in a serious 2012 collision with a bicyclist while drunk, and then fled the scene raised quite a stir. According to news reports, the driver was convicted (by a judge, meaning this was for unstated reasons not a jury trial) in 2015 of “impaired driving causing bodily harm”, but was found not guilty of leaving the scene because the judge said. “I am left in a reasonable doubt about whether Mr. Clarke knew or was wilfully blind to having collided with a person, precisely because he was so drunk. He cannot, therefore, be convicted of this offence”. Continue reading “Knowingly”
The 6/8/2015 morning crash as described is a classic left-hook; where the victim was riding straight ahead and crashed with a trailer being pulled behind a pickup whose driver apparently mis-judged the situation either the closing speed or perhaps forgot he was pulling a trailer. Continue reading “Noted pediatric cancer doctor killed in Scottsdale motorcycle crash”
News item, Feb 2016 — Gasoline costs TRIPLE in the Netherlands, and Denmark compared to USA
My notations from the book: City Cycling edited by John Pucher and Ralph Buehler.
John Pucher is arguably the foremost American proponent of separate bicycling infrastructure; often called “Dutch-style”. He is an academic (planner-type; he’s not a traffic engineer) who has many published articles on the subject. And while he is a vociferous advocate for infra, if you read his work fully, he does at least mention there are other factors at play; and furthermore he considers these other factors as necessary to achieve high levels of safety and mode share a la Netherlands or Copenhagen. Among those other factors are, for example, the extremely high costs associated with motoring in those places with high bicycling mode share (duh). In the book, he covers these in the chapter Promoting Cycling for Daily Travel (see below). Here’s a brief excerpt where Pucher explains:
In short, such pro-bike ‘carrot’ policies [e.g. cycle tracks, bike parking] are indeed possible even in a car oriented country like the USA. By comparison, there is almost no political support in the USA for adopting and implementing the sorts of car-restrictive ‘stick’ policies listed in Table 3 [e.g. expensive fuel, high taxes, expensive vehicle parking, restrictive land-use policies] that indirectly encourage cycling in the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany.
He also shows trends for a bunch of countries in fig 2.7 — it would be worth it to put that into Evan’s perspective of looking at the broader traffic safety picture internationally: Traffic fatality reductions: United States compared with 25 other countries in which Evans shows how badly the US is lagging in overall traffic safety compared to virtually the entire rest of the developed world. Continue reading “City Cycling”
5/25/2015, evening. This will be most likely a so-called “non-traffic” crash because it appears to have begun in the private parking lot — so these injuries don’t “count”. Several serious, including one in critical condition with a head injury, and another with a partially severed leg. All pedestrians who were waiting outside for a table when an SUV driver somehow jumped the sidewalk and rammed into them while parking. Glendale police say they are investigating impairment and a driver’s surgical boot for possible causes. Continue reading “5 hurt when SUV slams into Glendale Restaurant”
Collision occurred near the east entrance of Walmart on Hunt Highway, San Tan Valley (San Tan Valley is in the far south-east Phoenix metro area) Friday evening May 22, 2015. The fatality victim was a passenger in a van that was rear-ended while stopped.
police say: the suspect(s) were impaired, hit-and-ran, hid evidence, lied to police…
Holly Nicole Solomon was finally sentenced for aggravated assault yesterday for running her (at the time) husband over with her car soon after learning he didn’t vote in the 2012 presidential election. … see the rest here …
7/24/2015 Far northwest Valley. Maricopa Co Sheriff investigated. I had missed this news item at the time:
Pucher has the same or similar table comparing fatalities/injuries for NL, DK, GER, UK, USA (fig 2.6); i’m sort of confused by the injury rate calculations as
