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Bicyclist seriously injured in Dorchester hit and run
By adamg on Thu, 06/08/2017 - 8:57am
A woman riding a bicycle on Geneva Avenue near Waldeck Street was hit by a vehicle whose driver kept on going, around 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday. She was taken to the hospital with serious head trauma. 617 Images reports the homicide unit was called in, just in case.
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Comments
I am surprised so few bikers
I am surprised so few bikers use cameras. Were I biking to work I would be all about that.
Hope they pull through.
I am surprised the city doesn
I am surprised the city doesn't use cameras on every intersection to catch homicidal drivers. Were I interested in saving peoples lives I would be all about that.
You're assuming they don't
The city, in fact, has a pretty large camera network (no, not at every intersection, though), and a full-time office at BPD headquarters to scan the feeds when a crime happens nearby.
I'm surprised that you don't
understand that many people who ride bikes are lower income. Bike cameras cost good money.
Cost
Yes, these cameras still run a few hundred dollars. If you're replacing a car with your bike commute setup it's not too hard to write that into the equation as a necessity, but if you're using a bike as the only financially accessible method of transportation it is not.
That said, I did eventually decide it was wise to save up and buy one, and now I ride with it every day. That camera has seen some $h!t.
I am surprised they are still
I am surprised they are still so much money. Figured dirt cheap options would be out there buy now.
Rode with a GoPro for 3 years until this winter
Recorded all my rides as best I could, honestly beyond the cost, the tediousness of doing something with the video files, mounting and dismounting the camera and making sure you had a charged battery, making sure there was enough memory, etc was just a stressful drain in the end.
It was pretty cool have a record of all my rides to work but again, if you wanted to make a quick run down the street, ok gotta check the GoPro, is it charged? Oh did I forget to delete that other video?
Of course after riding for 3 years without getting hit once (plenty of near hits though!) I stoppped this winter and was only just hit by a car a few weeks ago.
Yeah it's a PITA
But I still do it for my daily commute. Not so much for a run to the store or somewhere closer. Every time I think about putting it away I have an incident where I'm glad it was there and rolling. I witnessed a bad car crash last year where a guy plowed into a car with a young mother and her baby, and I gave the video to the ADA.
And this was just yesterday in what should be a nice road for a bike: Beacon St. in Newton.
Nice video
Everyone who rides frequently has had this happened to us many times before. This is why we push back when people want to claim that cyclists should "share the blame". Had you been hit the driver would have claimed you "swerved in front of them" or were "wearing dark clothing" or some other nonsense.
But oh, sometimes cyclists run red lights so I guess it's OK.
I recognize that plate and driver, actually.
I do a group ride that passes through Newton center and we used to see that car ALL THE TIME doing stupid shit around us.
Now I'm starting to think they're intentionally trying to get into a crash with a cyclist.
That's honestly why I sometimes post them
Of course there are plenty of hairy moments if you ride every day, but the really bad ones I do put online just in case that driver has a history or makes a habit of aggressive/bad/angry driving.
My view is should that driver actually hurt someone there will be a record of a previous incident.
Have you....
... sent a copy of this to the police?. Maybe they could have an officer chat with this individual...
Yeah, I suggest you do the
Yeah, I suggest you do the same. Who knows, maybe the police will care enough to at least give them a warning.
A bunch of cameras can record
A bunch of cameras can record in loop these days, at least one less thing to worry about. Battery is probably the biggest unfixed issue (and cost)
Plug for a friend
This is probably overkill for most people who aren't going on long touring trips or the like, but my friend runs a company out of Cambridge that makes dynamo-powered usb chargers that can go in your stem cap or elsewhere, as well as a light/charger combo.
Definitely worth looking into if you tour or never want to have to charge your phone/camera.
https://www.sinewavecycles.com
I've strongly considered
I've strongly considered getting a camera, but given that I've been in 2 accidents in the past year, one of which involved my (helmeted) head hitting a catch basin grate, I'm not too keen on the idea of strapping a $500 camera to my head only to have it broken the next time a driver "doesn't see" me.
I've also strongly considered getting a dash cam for my car.
I use a yi action cam as a
I use a yi action cam as a dash cam, not designed for it but can record in loop so no fussing about deleting files is cheap (70 bucks) and can also be used as an action cam.
I figured cheaper options were out there.
$500? WTF?
You're not making NatGeo videos here. Find a used one for a hundred bucks.
it is surprisingly hard to find a camera...
...that a)has a decent battery life (anything less than 2 hours in warm weather becomes a serious pain in the ass) b)has good night recording (ie images aren't blurry, grainy, and plates are readable) and c)is weatherproof.
Then there's the difficulty of mounting it so that the video isn't a blurry mess from vibration.
There is exactly ONE camera that ticks ALL these boxes, and it's made by Cycliq. GoPros have kinda shitty battery life - that's their main problem. They're only really suitable for people who spend less than an hour a day on their bike, and many people who ride for transportation can spend more like 2 hours a day on their bike.
$500 was an exaggeration.
$500 was an exaggeration.
I don't actually know how much they cost, but would be surprised if a decent one wasn't at least a couple hundred.
And the exact cost doesn't change my point, which is that I'm wary of biking around with an expensive and easily breakable thing strapped to my head.
I have a pretty good quality
I have a pretty good quality action camera that costs 70 (yi action camera). I put it on my head during hockey, as a goalie, unless you get wrecked by a car I would not worry much about it on my head on a bike.
Now battery life is the challenge tho.
Well, that's the thing... if
Well, that's the thing... if you really want to be diligent, you actually want two cameras - forward and rear facing. If you get hit from behind and only have a forward-looking cam, it's unlikely to capture much of interest. So that's 2x the cost. At the same time, you're looking to get a camera which has a decent battery life, is waterproof, does not require a lot of fiddling and can be turned on with gloves on, performs well in crappy lighting (dusk/night), and strikes the perfect balance between wide-angle view and being able to resolve plates (everything looks smaller in wide-angle lenses so plates are harder to see)
Point is, you can't just get some cheap, crappy camera.
Lets wait for all the facts
Lets wait for all the facts to come in. Did Marty Walsh see a cyclist without a helmet in the last month or so? An Anonymous poster on this site recently implied they don't have time to look for cyclists because they chose to have kids and a long commute. Perhaps this driver is that poster?
You've done it again Holmes,
You've done it again Holmes, you found me. I live in the burbs of Dorchester near Geneva Ave. I was rushing home to see my kids and ran over a bicyclist, I figure at that late hour red lights don't mean anything and its rather late to be using your toys in the middle of the road so I just ran him down. Jackass.
Interesting Thought
I find it interesting that there were 5 people shot last night and not 1 comment. A bicyclist struck by a hit and run driver and the comments have started.
Absolutely
It must speak to UHub readership. You'll get 60 comments on how many parking spots a new development should have, and 0 on Adam's fastidious posts covering violence in Dot or Roxbury.
Did you comment on that article?
What should we say?
You're commenting here - why not there?
Personally I have a lot of opinions on bikes and cars (almost saw a cyclist flattened this morning and it was 100% the car's fault).
I'll say this - right after that incident I told my wife that reading stuff out on Uhub has made me hyper-conscious of bikes when I pull across a bike lane (which I have to do every time I leave my parking spot), open my door, make a left across the lane on Comm Ave, see cyclists in the road and recognize they have the right to be there etc.
So yeah - our comments out here make a difference. As a close friend of a family who had a family member murdered a few years ago - I have no idea how my comments out here can add to the dialogue. So I just keep quiet on those posts.
Plus, call it what you will, but I'm going to assume that most of the shooters and occasional stabbers - probably aren't reading Uhub.
I count myself as part of UHub readership
So... I'm speaking about myself as well.
We shouldn't overlook the fact that it's very easy to skim past tragic news that doesn't personally affect us. I chime in on cycling posts because I ride to work every day. I don't often comment on stories like last night's murders because thankfully I haven't experienced that personally.
But kudos to Adam for reporting on those incidents every time. The Globe has them buried about 10 pages deep in the Metro section and no mention at all in the paper-proper.
It's a relational thing
There are cyclists who come here and comment. There are people who might not like the comments and will say so. That gets the ball rolling.
Meanwhile, what do most of have to say about the shootings? It's not that we don't care. We just have nothing to say about them.
That said, one comment on the omnibus story could set things off. And I have no plans to write it.
Maybe because...
Maybe that's because most of us can do something about bikes getting hit by cars, whether we ride or drive or do both. When someone shoots another person, we weren't there, we don't know them, we're not connected to the situation, there isn't much we can do.
Really hope she's okay
n/t