Author: ArizonaBikeLaw

Bicyclist killed in central Phoenix wreck

Victim: 22 yo male, name not yet released (Donnell Kiwone Eason); incident 3/6/2015 ~ 1:30pm. Driver: 20 yo male; white Ford Mustang. The picture of the vehicle shows the impact area; left front corner whereupon the cyclist was apparently thrown over the hood and crushed the right-corner of the windshield and roof. Seems like a fairly high-speed impact.

The bicyclist, an unidentified 22-year-old man, was struck while traveling westbound on Thomas Road, Phoenix Police spokesman Sgt. Johnathan Howard said. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Howard said. (Photo: Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/The Republic)
The bicyclist, an unidentified 22-year-old man, was struck while traveling westbound on Thomas Road, Phoenix Police spokesman Sgt. Johnathan Howard said. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead, Howard said.
(Photo: Jerod MacDonald-Evoy/The Republic)

Here is what Central and Thomas looks like from a southbound driver’s viewpoint. According to the news report the bicyclist was “…riding westbound on the north side of Thomas Road at Central Avenue when he was struck by a southbound vehicle” — that would be with the direction of traffic; i.e. from left to right in this streetview.

Unmentioned in the news story is the intersection is signalized. Somebody apparently ran the red light as this as described was a right-angle crash. Continue reading “Bicyclist killed in central Phoenix wreck”

Man Pleads Guilty in Street Racing Fatality

Flowers adorn the central Phoenix wall on April 8 that a car rammed through following a wreck involving teen drivers in late March. The victim, Octavio Grijalva Herrera, died from his injuries.(Photo: Randsom Rockliffe / The Republic)
Flowers adorn the central Phoenix wall on April 8 that a car rammed through following a wreck involving teen drivers in late March. The victim, Octavio Grijalva Herrera, died from his injuries.(Photo: Randsom Rockliffe / The Republic)

See man-killed-while-mowing-the-grass for background on the March 26, 2014 incident.

Correction (earlier rant removed): The hit and run involved the other alleged racing driver (Chavez),   Gonzalez did not hit and run… Continue reading “Man Pleads Guilty in Street Racing Fatality”

PCSO: 1 killed in fiery crash; driver tried to bribe Pinal deputies

 

Pinal County investigators said a 21-year-old man was driving this car when it wrecked and killed a 27-year-old woman who was trapped inside. (Photo: Pinal County Sheriff's Office)
Pinal County investigators said a 21-year-old man was driving this car when it wrecked and killed a 27-year-old woman who was trapped inside. (Photo: Pinal County Sheriff’s Office)

That looks like it used to be a very fast car…. Pinal County investigators think alcohol might have been involved (incident Sunday? 3/1/2015 11:26p):

 

 

 

 

Continue reading “PCSO: 1 killed in fiery crash; driver tried to bribe Pinal deputies”

Light pole killed

IMG_20150301_114634513~2Oops, more driving on the sidewalk.  This happened sometime before Sunday morning, 3/1/2015 when I passed by. It seems like it was just a few days ago that someone drove up on the sidewalk and killed a bus stop; or just a few weeks ago that someone drove up on the sidewalk and killed a wall.  What leads to this sort of behavior — I suspect it has something to do with dangerous drivers. Like I said before, it’s all fun-and-games until someone drives up on the sidewalk and kills a jogger.

Was this a hit and run? I always wonder.

Bus stop killed

IMG_20150226_123424289This bus stop on Warner Road, just west of 51st Street, Phoenix (Ahwatukee) was killed sometime ~ 2/25/2015 by some sort of careless, dangerous driver. It’s all fun and games, except when somebody gets killed, like the drunk driver who killed 2 at a Phoenix bus stop in March of 2013.

Seriously, how much driving on the sidewalk goes on?

What do sawed off shotguns have to do with photo enforcement?

bear with me here…

Senate OKs bill to allow sawed-off shotguns, silencers

Arizona’s Senate gave preliminary approval Monday to a bill that would end the state’s ban on sawed-off shotguns and silencers on weapons… The proposal, contained in a surprise amendment to Senate Bill 1460, passed with Republican support and Democratic opposition… The amendment, introduced by Sen. Kelli Ward, R-Lake Havasu City, was tacked onto her bill to restore gun rights to those with felony convictions after certain waiting periods or after the convictions are legally set aside. Ward said her amendment was “constituent driven” and about “making certain things legal that are illegal,” a vague description that drew hushed snickers from some in the Senate.

“My own view,” Ward said during a break in the session, “is we have the right to keep and bear arms, and really, that right shouldn’t be infringed. The government putting any kind of regulations on that is wrong.” — azcentral.com

Meanwhile, the full senate voted down Rep. Ward’s bill to end all photo-enforcement anywhere in Arizona:

Senate slams brakes on photo-enforcement ban

B9316159612Z.1_20150223215503_000_G33A1T7MJ.1-0
The gov’t is watching you Kelli Ward’s privacy nightmare?

Mind your speed: Photo enforcement will continue to be a tool local governments can use to control traffic, as the state Senate on Monday rejected a bill that would have banned red-light cameras and other technologies.

The issue drew bipartisan opposition, despite the argument from Sen. Kelli Ward, R-Lake Havasu City, that photo enforcement is unconstitutional and infringes on individual privacy… Safety, and an acknowledgment that local government is better able to gauge its traffic needs, prevailed as four GOP senators joined with the Democrats to kill Senate Bill 1167. Cities and towns lobbied against Ward’s bill, pointing to statistics that they say show the cameras, especially when used for red-light enforcement, cut accidents. … Ward, however, disputed many of the statistics and said the greater issue is what she perceives as the unconstitutionality of photo enforcement in the first place. Such devices, she said, collect information without the consent of the driver that can be stored by private companies and governments for later use, and they infringe on privacy rights. “You have no right to face your accuser,” when photo enforcement is used, she said. — azcentral.com

 

Continue reading “What do sawed off shotguns have to do with photo enforcement?”

Officer resigns – misunderstands jaywalking and ID law

[2/17/2015 update: Officer Ferrin has resigned. ASU released a chief’s letter and an independent investigation commissioned by ASU performed by  Investigative Research Inc.  (apparently through public records?) I would describe as scathing, and that corroborates most of what I thought/said below, see the lengthy news story on azcentral — There is no law requiring peds to provide an ID card (in other words his saying “Let me see your ID or you will be arrested for failing to provide ID” is wrong, see  Arizona v Akins, below); there was no ‘jaywalking’, see link below to the actual jaywalking laws; there was probably no probable cause for the arrest; he didn’t “almost run her over”; 5 days earlier the officer had a similar (but non-physical) power-trip incident over a crosswalk. and on and on. The transcript, see below, confirms Officer Ferrin doesn’t understand the (ID) law]

see are-cyclists-required-to-carry-id-are-pedestrians-updated-2014/

Wrong-way driver pleads not guilty in death of Phx fire dispatcher

[ Wrong-way driver Stephen B Martin has pleaded not guilty in early February to all charges including felony counts for 2nd Degree Murder, several endangerment, along with some minor marijuana-related charges. CR-2015104415 (minutes). “Martin’s blood-alcohol content was 0.313 percent when a sample was taken at the hospital, records show” ]

see phoenix-fire-dispatcher-dies-after-i-17-wrong-way-crash

Tucson bike-train plus MV-ped in unrelated fatal collisions

There were two transportation-related fatalities in Tucson this past weekend…

Man riding mountain bike struck and killed by train
A 20-year-old man was struck and killed by a train on Saturday (2/14/2015) afternoon. According to a Tucson Police Department press release Jorge A. Villalobos was riding a mountain bike north along the train tracks near the Rillito River and Interstate 10.
TPD said Villalobos began riding on the bridge crossing the Rillito River. A train was also heading north on the tracks…. — bicycletucson.com

This would be a non-traffic fatality; both because it wasn’t on the road (it was on a train bridge), and because train fatalities don’t count toward as traffic. Continue reading “Tucson bike-train plus MV-ped in unrelated fatal collisions”

More driving on the sidewalk

This incident apparently happened Saturday afternoon around 5p 2/7/2015. This is about a mile away from the spot where a driver drove up on the sidewalk and killed a jogger a few years ago.

IMG_20150208_112824552_0148th St northbound, near Ahwatukee Drive.
A passerby told me he heard a driver was planning on turning left from NB 48th onto Ahwatukee was rear-ended and pushed here. It’s only happenstance that no one was walking on this sidewalk at the time.

Ripped from the Headlines

Just one day’s worth, all in Phoenix-metro — remember this is only a small sample of the hundreds of car wrecks that occur daily around Arizona.  Are Cars Dangerous? Continue reading “More driving on the sidewalk”

Truck driver guilty in distracted driving death of DPS officer

[2/6/2015 A Yuma county jury found the driver guilty of negligent homicide, a class 4 felony, along with several other endangerment charges. yumasun.com I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that it’s unprecedented for a prosecutor to bring, and get conviction, on any homicide charge against a driver not suspected of being   impaired. Note that the “defense had also argued that is not against the law to use a cell phone while driving” claim did not win the day; he was convicted anyway. ]

Original story:  report-truck-driver-was-looking-at-phone-in-deadly-crash

Use of alcohol as a risk factor for bicycling injury

Skip below if you’ve visited this page specifically to see the Johns Hopkins’ study.

FARS Alcohol Results

The FARS data has a number of alcohol (and drug) fields — the fields ATST_TYP, ALC_RES relate actual test type, and results. To simplify things, I’ve added a derived field sALC_RES to breaks down test results into: negative, .01 through .07, and .08+, or no results. Most fatally injured drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians do get tested. (for those that are not, there are imputed results available from a separate data file, see below).

Note that the ALC_RES field, the numerical result, has changed over the years, before 2015, it was listed as the number of hundredths of a percent BAC, e.g. 0.12 was coded as 12. In 2015 and later, it is coded as thousandths of a percent BAC, so the same result would be listed at 120.  The logic for this is encapsulated in the file 20xx_person.sql in the synthetic value sALC_RES: intox / not intox.

FARS and Drug Testing

The coding for drug results in FARS is similar to the alcohol scheme, except there are no quantitative results, only positive/negative. Also there is no equivalent to the imputation of results for drugs.

FARS coding: positive results for drugs shows up in the field DSTATUS=2 (i.e. “test given”) and DRUGRES1, 2, or 3 have a number up to 999; all in the person table. 0 meand test not given; 1 means No Drugs Reported/Negative. Potentially illicits are in groups generally in hundreds, e.g. 100-295 are narcotics, 300’s are depressants, 600’s cannaboids.  Anything 996 or above are various meanings for unknown.

Examples: Zolpidem (Ambien) is 375. See pages 579-594 of the FARS Coding and Validation Manual.

FARS and Imputation of Alcohol Results

Driving while intoxicated has been recognized as a significant serious safety factor for decades; at the same time, it’s long been recognized that many involved in fatal traffic collisions (mostly drivers but sometimes peds and bicyclists) do not have recorded alcohol test results. This nhtsa report published in 2002 explains most of the deep background and terminology on the scheme to “fill in” missing results: Continue reading “Use of alcohol as a risk factor for bicycling injury”

Bicyclist hit, killed by pickup truck in Glendale

A bicyclist described as a male in his 30’s was killed Wednesday, February 4, 2015; near 95th Ave and Camelback Road, Glendale, AZ after colliding with a pickup truck. The news report only says the cyclist and vehicle were going in “separate” directions. Continue reading “Bicyclist hit, killed by pickup truck in Glendale”