Multi-bicycle crash in Goodyear

Goodyear police are investigating a 9/12/2019 crash that occurred around 6:30 involving 3 cyclists transported with injuries, and a fourth who was not transported. The news-chopper footage shows a black sedan, as well as a large number of additional cyclists who were presumably riding together in a group but were not directly involved in the crash. 12news.com azcentral

The crash occurred as an eastbound driver along Commerce Drive attempted to turn left and struck a group of westbound bicyclists.

The news story says sun glare may have been a “factor” which may well be true (20 minutes after sunrise) — but the cause is obviously a bad left. (and besides failing to yield, the position of the car seems to indicate the driver was “rounding off” the turn, perhaps trying to speed through in front of them). Regardless, sun glare wouldn’t explain why the driver failed to see a number of daylight-visible blinking headlights. Azfamily for the evening news tracked down a couple who was in the group, but did not themselves crash; that cyclist demonstrated his light (there were undoubtedly others in the group who also had daylight-visible headlights) in the video news piece saying “they’re extremely bright”.

Could have been charged with 28-672 (a misdemeanor), since the crash was caused by a driver making a “bad left“? Dunno, The obvious answer is that 28-772 refers to turning left at an intersection, and in this case the left was not made at an intersection (driveways do not generally qualify as intersections)

Group riding Crash Statistics

It got me to wondering how many “multi-bike” / group ride crashes there are — the answer is very few crashes reported to police involve 4 or more cyclists, as this one did.

E.g. The breakdown for Arizona statewide 2018 is below; there was one reported involving 4 bicyclists (in the table below, it’s the one with 5 TotalUnits). Nearly all involve one bicyclist and one motorist; about 2% involve either 2 bicyclists and one motorists (or vice versa), and then just a tiny number of other combinations.

Over a 10 year period 2009-2018 there were a total of 17,927 bike-MV crashes; just seven incidents involved 4 or more bicyclists over the entire time (0.04%)

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SELECT TotalUnits, count(*) FROM 2018_incident WHERE sF_Bicycle GROUP BY 1;
select IncidentID, IncidentYear, TotalUnits, TotalNonmotorists from incident where TotalNonmotorists>3 and sF_Bicycle ;
SELECT count(*) FROM incident WHERE sF_Bicycle ;