Traffic to the beach was crazy backed up late this morning, with rumors flying around Twitter that a cyclist was killed. When I reached the Fisher Island ferry terminal, there was a lane blocked, and two mangled bikes down just at the spot where traffic for the terminal cuts through the bike lane. A little way up, a lightly mangled silver Mazda 3 sat, the position of its wheels marked by Miami Beach police.
While I don’t yet have confirmation about whether the accident was fatal, it’s not difficult to reconstruct what happened. A jerk motorist heading for the ferry changed lanes to turn, cutting through the bike lane without looking. Maybe we need to rethink having those lane markers suddenly turn dashed there. But what we really need to do is not convict this driver of negligence or reckless driving or something. If there’s a fatality here, the crime is simple vehicular manslaughter. And until we start to loudly and consistently enforce the law this way, cyclists will continue to be an afterthought in the minds of drivers. A couple more photos after the jump.
Update: Both the cyclists survived, tho one is in critical condition.
If the driver cuts across multiple lanes without looking or considering other traffic whether its a cyclist or motorist, isn’t that reckless driving? I do agree that our police force and our local judges are not aggressive to protect pedestrians (whether they are cycling, running, or walking).
It’s reckless allright. But in Florida, reckless driving means up to 9 days in jail and up to a $500 fine. If there had been a dead cyclist in this case, that’d have been the kind of sentence that says “don’t you drivers worry yourselves about them bicycles now.”