Ghost bike on MLK Drive near Sweet Briar. Photo at Philly.com

The piece in today’s Inquirer about the Ghost Bike movement brings to mind a lot of items that I’ve been reading on sites like Streetsblog (NY), Greater Greater Washington (DC), Philadelphia Bicycle News (Philly, of course) and elsewhere that attention is called on a regular basis to the difficulties of cyclists and walkers in this auto dominated world.

Often times, stories about cyclist fatalities are reported in short blurbs in the briefs section of the local papers.  As PBN says, that’s if the story even gets reported at all:

There was only one reported death in the media in Philadelphia in 2008 although they generally miss a couple. I am going to assume until I hear otherwise that there were less than the 5 bicycle deaths in the city last year.

Most often, the death is attributed to an “accident” like the one in that killed the 6-year old featured in the Ghost Bike piece.  Greater, Greater Washington once made the point about why media reports that call these incidents “accidents” or police decisions to call them “tragic mistakes” affect the driving public’s willingness to change behavior:

By the way, we need to stop referring to crashes as “accidents.” As many others have pointed out in the past, calling collisions “accidents” makes them sound completely blameless, like random happenings we can do nothing about. Drivers should be careful enough not to hit people, and we should engineer our intersections so that if drivers have a momentary lapse, there’s as little chance as possible that someone will get hurt or killed.

I’d wager that in most cases these “accidents” involve some degree of negligence by the driver.  A careful examination of almost any of these incidents would probably reveal that there was a moment at which a driver could have slowed down, become more aware of his or her surroundings, or seen a potential situation developing.  As much as car advocates say that it’s the cyclists who need to be more mindful of the rules of the road, the cyclists are not the ones driving around in a potential weapon of death.  There’s no denying that in our society a bias exists in which drivers are allowed to get away with a lot more and where the assumption by the public is most often that somehow the cyclist, or even pedestrian, had it coming.

Anyway… I guess this means that I’ll volunteer to start tracking cyclist and pedestrian deaths-by-auto on this blog in 2009.