Bicycle Austin forum

Another tragedy for Austin and a terrible loss for Tom's family. 

Two of the issues here.  First, the failure of law enforcement to properly charge violators in traffic collisions involving bicyclists.   TCSO seems to have more officers with bias than APD.*  Hopefully, APD will charge the offending driver.   When I have a case where the officer writes a bad crash report for the cyclist, I take the officer's deposition and grill them on the Transportation Code.  Either the officer admits to the conflict or looks bad trying not to admit it.  It makes the bad report less valuable to the auto insurance company at trial.

The second issue is the fact that motor vehicle don't look for bicycles.  My personal safety campaign is to get all cyclists to use a white strobe light on their bikes in the DAYLIGHT hours.  Tom may have been using one, I don't know.  But, it makes us many time more visible to traffic.  I rode through that intersection yesterday morning and Lost Creek curves just past the intersection as you are going uphill. It is a great hill on which to ride a bike, but more dangerous than I thought.

Brad Houston

*Constable Sally Hernandez may run for Sheriff.  She has been a friend for 20 years and has helped me with special issues related to serving lawsuits on drivers who hit cyclists.  If she runs and is elected, the cycling community will have a friendly ear at the Sheriff's Office for a change.