10/6/2024 Sunday morning 7:45 College Ave near 15th St, Tempe. This is a very low speed (posted 25mph) collector street, with unusually wide bike lanes (6 feet or more?) here. Leading directly to the ASU campus, about a quarter mile away.

The driver of an SUV ran over 5 bicyclists on College Ave, hospitalizing several of them, with serious but not life-threatening injuries. Note to AzFamily caption writers: the vehicle was under human control, a driver ran over 5 people.

Since police have already said “alcohol does not appear to be a factor in the crash”, it means they’ve probably already summarily decided the driver was not impaired; police investigators should be looking to 28-672 as this appears to be a case of a driver failing to maintain proper lane (the reason is irrelevant — medical emergency, texting, whatever).

The time, day of week, and appearance of the bikes and cyclists suggest this is a recreational group ride. As mentioned here, crashes involving multiple cyclists are quite rare

Crashes involving large numbers of bicyclists are extremely rare, with just SEVEN occurring that involve 5 or more cyclists in the past 13 years (that’s 7 out of 21,000 crashes

And it occurring on a low-speed street makes it even more rare.

According to this later news piece, the cyclists were the Major Taylor Phoenix Riders.

Is College Avenue dangerous?

Placeholder. Spoiler alert, no, considering the high volume of bicycling. Though special attention should be given to the fatality last year at College and Alameda 4-way stop, which involved a right-angle collision, a mode entirely unrelated to this incident.

There’s a query in the comment below to grab all bike-mv crashes on this segment of College, which is between ~US60 and Apache along (or near) College Ave. Since 2009 (so 15 years) there were about 75 reported crashes.
The 6 incap injuries and deserve a closer look… at least 4 of them involved turns (right hook, left cross), and probably 5. Only one involved sideswipe or rear-end, and that was also a hit-run and it wasn’t even on College, it was along Southern Ave (crashes are geolocated and list the nearest street and cross street). THREE of the six were in 2009 (there were a lot of oddities in general in 2009 data).

The year-by-year breakdown of those 75 shows a decreasing number of crashes — however, there’s also a general trend of dramatically fewer number of reported crashes in many AZ cities, including Tempe, around 2014, noone knows why. E.g. in this College Ave segment dataset there were 8 in 2013, whereas 2021, 2022, and 2023 combined had 8.

To put it another way — this is the first time in at least 14 years for a driver to have run into a bicyclist from behind (or sideswipe) and caused a serious injury along College Avenue in this segment.
And in all that time, there doesn’t appear to have any pure strike-from-behind fatal incidents in the entire city, all 14 fatalities are listed here.(although three of the 14 involve left turning bicyclists being struck while attempting to turn left)

eInjurySeverity	count(*)
POSSIBLE_INJURY	22
NON_INCAPACITATING_INJURY	40
INCAPACITATING_INJURY	6
NO_INJURY	6
FATAL	1

Criminal Case (#criminal)

Given police have already signaled that impairment has been ruled out, a driver who fails to maintain proper lane, as it appears to be the case here, police and the City of Tempe’s prosecutor should investigate for 28-672 misdemeanor charges once the county attorney declines to press any felony charges.

somewhat to my surprise, police said they arrested the driver on what will be a 28-672 charge; I’m not sure if this needs to go thru a city attorney or not(? as I’ve mentioned multiple times before, in Scottsdale, drivers run over and kill bicyclists doing the same infraction, failure to maintain lane, police refer the charge, but the city attorney refused to bring the charge)

Driver arrested after crashing into 3 bicyclists near ASU Tempe campus
By Lauren Kobley
Published: Oct. 25, 2024 at 9:43 PM MST|Updated: 13 hours ago
TEMPE, AZ (AZFamily) — A man has been arrested after a collision sent three bicyclists to the hospital in Tempe earlier this month.
The crash happened on Oct. 6 on College Avenue, just south of Apache Boulevard and south of the ASU campus.
On Tuesday, Tempe Police arrested 21-year-old Gustavo Cuiriz, who was driving the Toyota SUV.
Officers say Cuiriz remained on the scene and cooperated with police. Preliminary information has ruled out impairment as a factor.
Cuiriz was arrested on three counts of causing serious physical injury by moving violations, a class 1 misdemeanor.
Police say that the court may also suspend his driving privileges.

___

At this point, apropos of nothing: Here are a couple of prior incidents where drivers are said to have suffered a “medical emergency” (and are presumed to be not able to be held accountable for any outcome, is that how it works?): The 2013 death of cyclist riding in Tour de Tucson, or the death of a police officer on the freeway where prosecutors initially said the driver that killed him was texting, and even charged the driver w/manslaughter only to drop all charges later.

3 thoughts on “Driver runs into 5 Bicyclists on College Ave, Tempe”

The perils of riding in the bike lane. The motorist looks up and sees bicyclists ahead of them, but they are in the bike lane, so they do not have to worry about getting around them. Now they can go back to looking at their map, changing the radio station, looking around, etc.
I will take the lane next to a bike lane. When a motorist comes up behind me, I make sure to look at them to make sure they see me. I then use the bike lane as a release point. After they pass, I return to controlling the lane.

Here is a query for all bike-MV on the stretch of College between approx US60 and Apache…

This link should work for anyone (lists incap or fatals), currrent results = 7 incidents

That generates this query:

SELECT IncidentID,IncidentDateTime,CityId, LOVCity.name,Onroad,CrossingFeature 
FROM incident i LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVCity ON i.CityId = LOVCity.id LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVCounty ON i.CountyId = LOVCounty.id 
WHERE ( (OnRoad LIKE "college%" AND CrossingFeature LIKE "%") OR (OnRoad LIKE "%" AND CrossingFeature LIKE "college%") ) AND sF_Bicycle AND eInjurySeverity IN (4,5) AND (Latitude < 33.416 AND Latitude > 33.3831 ) ;

here is the “big query” as I like to call it; NOTE this is coded for serious injuries, and year 2017, adjust accordingly 😉

SELECT i.IncidentID, i.IncidentDateTime IncDateTime, i.IncidentYear IncYr,LOVCity.name City, OffNcic.name Oncic, i.OfficerId, i.eCollisionManner, i.eLightCondition, i.TotalUnits TotUnits, i.TotalNonMotorists TotNM, i.eInjurySeverity, i.HitAndRunFlag HandR, i.OnRoad, i.CrossingFeature, i.Latitude, i.Longitude, i.eTrafficWayType, i.eIntersectionType, i.eJunctionRelation, i.eWeather, p_bike.UnitNumber b_UnitNumber, p_bike.eNonMotoristLocation, p_bike.eSex b_Sex, p_bike.Age b_Age, p_bike.eViolation1 b_Violation1, p_bike.eSafetyDevice b_SafetyDevice, p_bike.ePersonType b_PersonType, u_bike.eLane b_Lane, u_bike.eTravelDirection b_Direction, u_bike.eUnitAction b_Action, p_car.UnitNumber c_UnitNumber, p_car.eSex c_Sex, p_car.Age c_Age, p_car.eViolation1 c_Violation1, u_car.eLane c_Lane, u_car.eTravelDirection c_Direction, u_car.eUnitAction c_Action 
FROM (((( 2017_incident AS i JOIN 2017_person AS p_bike ON i.IncidentID = p_bike.IncidentID) JOIN 2017_unit AS u_bike ON p_bike.UnitID = u_bike.UnitID) JOIN 2017_person AS p_car ON i.IncidentID = p_car.IncidentID) JOIN 2017_unit AS u_car ON p_car.UnitID = u_car.UnitID ) LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVCounty ON i.CountyId = LOVCounty.id LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVCity ON i.CityId = LOVCity.id LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVNcic AS OffNcic ON i.OfficerNcic = OffNcic.id LEFT OUTER JOIN LOVNcic AS ExtNcic ON i.ExtendedNcic = ExtNcic.id 
WHERE p_bike.ePersonType = 'PEDALCYCLIST' AND p_car.ePersonType='DRIVER' AND  
(Latitude > 33.3831 AND Latitude < 33.416 ) AND
(OnRoad LIKE "%College%" OR CrossingFeature LIKE "%College%")
AND eInjurySeverity IN (4,5)
ORDER BY i.IncidentID;

Tom — yeah i know what you mean. That could have been especially helpful here as the (motor) traffic at that time was probably light, and the group of what appear to be experienced hard-core roadies may well have been moving pretty fast (the speed limit is only 25mph). To put it another way, the cyclists that were struck may have been riding at the “normal speed of traffic”.

Is College Avenue dangerous?

Criminal Case (#criminal)

3 thoughts on “Driver runs into 5 Bicyclists on College Ave, Tempe”

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