Safety in streets for cyclist - Comparison of 3 cities
Channel: Pgrant Sunnyvale
Date: 2012-05-01

Comparison of cities biking support of area cities and law enforcement was made using actual footage of sideswiping incidents April, 2012 in Berkeley and Sunnyvale California.  How the different departments responded and a comparison made with most frequent type of citations made.  

Results are an eyeopener for sure.  

For other cities. this comparative analysis is applicable and highly recommended as a sanity check against hype given out by cities and police on their quality of service.   

 A car should be treated like any other potential weapon, and a citation should be readily issued for endangering a cyclist, or pedestrian  for even indifferent drivers. .  Near misses of thrown bottles, gun discharges, even BB's are cited, and person has to go to court to explain their actions.   Why don't those that violate the law clearly gravely endangering pedestrians and cyclists go to court too?  

Listen carefully to this video, you can hear the cyclist jacket sleeve being hit by the car and his hand flash up as his arm was jerked up as the cyclist was being sideswiped, yet police did not cite the motorist in Sunnyvale.  Listen carefully to the investigating officer response during the playing of the video  to the complaint.  Contrast his taking as truthful, statement of the motorist, that are clearly disproved by the video, from lane positioning of the motorist to the sound of the jacket hitting the car..,   Yet in Berkeley, it was a manhunt all over the TV with that video going viral.

I have heard the same complaint from pedestrians, PTA groups, especially near schools of lack of law enforcement..  The issue is that police do not issue citations without injury or witnessing the incident?   That may be suitable for motor vehicles with their great safety protection for the occupants, but is morally wrong, if not legally wrong,  to arbitrarily delete the legal safeguards the legislator and governor signed into law.  This modification of the law by law enforcement removes from pedestrians and cyclists the protections due to them under the law.   In effect police are making their own version of the law by not enforcing the law as written.


Note:
SVPD issued 15,936 vehicle code violations, of which about 400 were accident related injury.  (there were 418 injury related violations in 2010, 2011 numbers not posted yet)   The numbers in this video are from 2010 SWITRS annual injury reports, city population as reported in Wikipedia, bike commuter percentages as reported in CBC which is from 2010 Census.  Motor vehicle rider population assumed to be city population - biking population.  Injury percentages are percentage of annual injuries reported of cyclist (or motorists) / respective population.