Last week was not a very good one, at least not accident wise.
On Monday evening (a week ago today) I went to the bakery to get some bread and juice. Our poor dog hadn’t been out for a walk for a day or two so I decided to take her with me. Olivia is a 5 years old boxer who has been with us at the company for a long while, she’s very obedient and she’s free to run on the sidewalks without using a leash. She was very happy to go and ran off quickly, sticking to the sidewalk without entering the street. I walked by and let her run by herself. As we approached the first crossing she forgot, in a moment of joy to look at me if it was okay to pass the street and she ran over. Usually this kind of mistakes just end up with me telling her off. This was not her lucky day, a car approached and ran right into her. Luckily the car was not running very fast and the driver quickly hit the breaks. Olivia was not actually ran over, but she got up on her two legs and ran back towards the office without giving a sound. At this point I did not know if she was injured or not, so I started to run after her. A moment later, when I came back the office she wasn’t there. I spent the next two hours on my bike driving around the city trying to find her. Eventually through a couple of leads by pedestrians I could locate her in a corner about a km from where the accident had occurred. She was quickly brought to the vet would could only establish that she was well and had nothing broken. She had a couple of her pads on her front feet torn off, probably due to the shock and had a bit of pain walking. Today a week later she’s just fine, like nothing happened.
My second traffic incident of the week occurred when I came back after a 60km bike ride on Saturday evening. My Saturdays afternoons/evenings are reserved for bike riding and last week wasn’t an exception. We tend to leave around 14 and are seldom back before the sunset. When we came back on saturday it was not completely pitch dark, but it wasn’t many minutes of brightness left. As out of no where, a white VW Beetle overturns me, giving me approximately 2 m for me to either break or turn. Obviously I ran into the car with my front wheel, lost balance and smashed the asfalt pretty badly. My helmet cracked and the jersey got thorned apart, no serious injuries, just abrasions. What upset me the most was the fact that while the driver stopped to check if I was okay, he refused to acknowledge any wrong doing, merely telling me that “I couldn’t see you”. I will take it a lot easier in the future, especially when riding in darkness and cities. Moral of the story, as a cyclist, do not ever trust other drivers when riding in urban areas.
Did you have working head and tail lights? It’s really hard to make any judgment without knowing that.
I like the general attitude of drivers just as little as any other cyclist, but on the other hand, regardless who’s at fault, there’s usually no contest over who actually gets hurt most in these things. Assume everyone out there is stupid and you do a lot better as a general rule.