Cycling, traffic safety, traffic justice, and legal topics; energy, transit and transportion economics
I’m mentioning this incident specifically for a couple of reasons… read on.
2026-09-07 around 3:30pm. Police say a man riding an “e-bike” died when he struck the rear of a parked semi near 19th Avenue and Mountain View Road.
The use of the term “e-bike” is often used very loosely. We need to know whether this is a class 1, 2, or 3 electric bicycle. If it is not any of those, it is a motorcycle. Continue reading “e-bike rider in Phoenix dies after striking rear of parked semi”
Why are these hit-and-runs taking so long to hit the media? Occurred July 17, 2026, and seems to have been first reported in the media July 27. Shouldn’t police be flooding the media ASAP after an incident. The victim seriously injured — this is a FELONY crime. Continue reading “BOLO: Gold colored SUV. Driver seriously injures Gilbert cyclist”
I was invited to attend a meeting 2/23/2026 pulled together by Kerry Wilcoxson (ADOT State Safety Engineer) where he invited folks from Arizona DHS (Dept of Health Services) as well as some other interested parties.
The topic being e-bikes and crash reporting. Which is of course getting all sorts of (mostly negative) attention, for understandable reasons. But the truth is we have very little data to go on… Continue reading “More about more about ebike crash reporting”
(referring to the City of Maricopa. Which confusingly is split across Maricopa an Pinal Counties).
2026-02-03 ~ 8am Juvenile avoids serious injury after being struck on busy Porter Road:
Maricopa police responded to a vehicle-versus-pedestrian collision involving a juvenile riding an electric bike on Porter Road on Tuesday morning. The incident occurred at approximately 8 a.m. near the intersection of Porter Road and Alan Steven Parkway, according to the Maricopa Police Department. This intersection is near both Sequoia Pathway and Leading Edge Charter schools…
Police said the child was riding the electric bike against the flow of traffic when they attempted to cross the roadway and were struck by a vehicle making a right turn at low speed.
The juvenile sustained minor bumps and scrapes. A parent declined medical transport at the scene, police said…
No citations were issued in this morning’s incident.
This is a reminder to check crash records, and wonder if it was actually an electric bicycle as defined (e.g. a class 1, 2, 3) or rather a motorcycle with an electric motor (like the popular Surron, Talaria, etc), that are effectively illegal. There’s a lot of sloppy language floating around. It’s not completely clear if police will file a crash report as it may be below the reporting threshold, so we’ll just have to wait and see. Continue reading “More about e-bike crash reporting; and What’s going on in Maricopa?”
2026-01-27 12:30a. Ug. A pedestrian was injured and a bicyclist was killed as a result of a driver, who was fleeing police at the time, crashing into them.
I assume, or hope, the DPS will be doing a thorough evaluation of the events vs. their protocols — the tragic outcome where un-involved people get hurt/killed a collateral damage during chases is exactly why police probably shouldn’t be doing high-speed chases in the first place. (Radios are MUCH faster than vehicles). The chase began at MP252 on I-10 which is a several miles away from the Speedway exit where the chase ended, and the driver was shot by police. Continue reading “Bystanders hurt/killed in high-speed chase I-10 Tucson”
Aug 1, 2025 ~7:30
67th Ave and Hillcrest Blvd, Glendale.
Police told AZ family news the pickup driver was turning right when he struck a youth riding an bike in the crosswalk on his way to school. Continue reading “Glendale Pickup truck driver; crosswalk cyclist; serious injury”
On May 1, 2025, AZfamily’s investigative reporter Derek Staal did a piece about Waymo; it of course piqued my interest… What happens when a Waymo is at fault in a crash? , here’s an excerpt
Federal crash data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) shows Waymo vehicles were involved in at least 202 crashes in Arizona between 2021 and 2024, ranging from minor scrapes and door dings to 31 crashes that resulted in injuries. But the records are heavily redacted and do not indicate who was at fault.
Arizona’s Family Investigates spent six months collecting and reviewing police reports on Waymo crashes in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Chandler, Mesa and Tempe. Of the 71 police-documented crashes involving Waymos, officers determined the self-driving car was not at fault 87% of the time. In 13% of cases, however, police blamed the Waymo vehicle.
Continue reading “What happens when a Waymo is at fault in a crash?”
I find any hit-and-run abhorrent. A hit-and-run driver involved in any traffic crash with any injury is a criminal felon; and if the injury is serious or results in death, it’s a serious felony (class 3 or 2). It’s worth pointing out that hit-and-run is a crime for the driver regardless of who caused the crash (i.e. which party had the right of way is irrelevant, except for sentencing).
The background is I noticed here and there over the years what seemed to me to be an odd listing in the traffic database of a fatal bicyclist, and an unknown vehicle with unknown everything else (direction, lane, lighting, etc etc) except for bicyclist demographic and it usually had a location, but was NOT listed as a hit-and-run. I inquired about a few of them and the story was always something like the coroner(I think?) submitted something somehow to traffic records. I brushed it off as something that happens very rarely; some sort of freak occurrence. However. It turns out there are dozens of such cases every year., unsurprisingly most of them are pedestrian. Continue reading “More about missing Hit and Runs”
[UPDATE: yes, this is wrong wrong wrong. 2022 was in fact a terrible, bad, worse year; see Arizona Crash Facts 2022 ]
This is a warning about preliminary data and drawing stats from it… there was a news article “Arizona traffic fatalities are down in 2022, data shows” that was suggesting that 2022 might be on-track for significantly fewer traffic fatalities:
After a deadlier than usual year for traffic deaths in 2021, fatalities in 2022 showed a sharp decrease, according to preliminary data from the Arizona Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
According to the preliminary data from the office, traffic fatalities between January and June fell from 626 deaths in 2021 to 350 deaths in 2022 — a 44% decrease.
Sadly, this is unlikely to be true. Continue reading “2022 Preliminary Arizona Traffic Crash Stats”
[UPDATE: it seems quite possible something changed after 2020? see comment and stats]
[UPDATE: Something DEFINITELY changed as of FARS 2022; see below]
Executive Summary
Each of these has the potential to skew crash reporting statistics. Motorized bicycles have not seen wide use, but ebikes are expected to become much more common
I propose adding a few new “Body Style” definitions: 1) bicycle (well, pedalcycle), 2) motorized bicycle, 3) ebike; this would not require any changes to the Arizona Crash Forms, simply an update to the Crash Form Instruction Manual.
It is expected that ebikes will see large growth in use in the coming years; e.g, the WSJ reported: Continue reading “Motorized bicycles, Ebikes and crash reporting”
Note to self to follow up to see how this gets coded in asdm and fars. Conceptually, a pedestrian was killed in a rear-end collision, a collision a driver should have been easily able to avoid if the struck vehicle had lights/flashers (it was at night). Was the disabled vehicle displaying emergency lights, or otherwise lit?
Phoenix file number?
Who is most at fault? For comparison, who is most at fault in the rear-end collision pictured here, the pickup driver or the school bus driver — the Pickup driver rammed a stopped school bus?
Continue reading “Woman, 19, pushing disabled car struck, killed in Phoenix”
A note about data sources
Data from all these sources is located centrally on this google docs spreadsheet. which covers each bicyclist fatality occurring from 2009 onward.
Normally these are all in agreement, however there are multiple inconsistencies in both 2013 and 2014 that I cannot resolve. Continue reading “Missing 2013 and 2014 Fatalities”
Adot has released Crash Facts 2014 in early June (of 2015), as usual/expected; and I received the database from them very promptly. I have updated the graphical crash map so it now has data from 2009-2014 for ped-MV and bike-MV crashes. Continue reading “Arizona Crash Facts 2014”
Executive Summary: You may have never heard of the MMUCC (Model Minimum Uniform Crash Criteria; a set of federal guidelines), it trickles down into every state’s motor vehicle crash reporting system. It’s somewhat analogous to the relationship between the UVC and state’s vehicle codes. The problem, I should say one problem, is non-motorists tend to get overlooked. One obvious example is delved into here — the “Manner of Crash”, e.g. angle, rear-end, sideswipe, etc. is ONLY defined when it involves two motor vehicles, leaving that data-field undefined when a crash is between a MV and bicyclist. Since bicyclists are vehicle drivers, the MMUCC should reflect that. Read on for a proposed change that’s on the table, and how you can vote/comment officially: Continue reading “MMUCC C9 Manner of Crash”
Skip below if you’ve visited this page specifically to see the Johns Hopkins’ study.
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.
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.
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”