When the ride hits home

[Gone in 60]

I'm sure I'm like a lot of people who ride regularly and with many years and miles under the belt, while always taking safety precautions, stop giving a lot of front-of-mind thought to the dangers of riding until something jars me back to the reality of it.

Had that happen on Saturday night, and have been mulling it over in my mind. Spent the evening with friends after work, so I came off of my freeway off-ramp late in the evening and faced a sea of flashing red as I came onto the boulevard that leads to my neighborhood. Riding past, the unfortunate site on the other side of the road was a bike on its side with a crowd of emergency workers tending to someone strapped to a board on the street. A row of sport bikes was parked along the curb with a crowd of leather-clad riders standing nearby. The context was clearly a group of riders, probably coming out of the nearby canyon, headed toward the freeway when one of them collided with... something.

In the dark with the glare of the red lights, and my desire to keep my eyes on the road on my last mile home, I didn't get a long enough look to see if another car was involved, I just gave the rider a mental "Good luck, man" as I turned onto my street.

Accidents happen all the time, but when it happens on the street you ride and walk every day, it makes you think more, doesn't it? Next morning on Sunday, I took my usual neighborhood walk to get the blood moving and hit the new coffee shop. As I approached the scene from the night before, my insurance investigator mind clicked in to see if there were easy clues to figure out what had happened. One thing that was probably lucky was that it happened right outside a hospital, so response was likely immediate. If there was a collision with a car, that car would be coming out of the hospital parking lot. No skidmarks, no fluid in the roadway. Some broken plastic bits in a small pile near the curb. A black mark on the roadway that might have been from a sliding foot peg.

A brake fluid reservoir on the sidewalk about thirty feet down seems to indicate some speed was involved. Mrs. was out of town on a girl trip so might have been a good thing I was alone, she might have said "why is a broken motorcycle part on the sidewalk?"

This morning, riding past the same spot as I do every day, there was a car waiting to turn left out of the hospital. Tough, unprotected (and I think illegal) left turn. A driver might get impatient sitting there waiting, and if it's illegal, likely that the driver would want to make that left as quickly as possible. Was that the case Saturday night? No way to know, but something I'll think about from now on.