Dangerous Roads

As always you guys, ride like everyone is trying to kill you, this past week two different people died after getting hit.  This is really terrible news, and I can't imagine what their families must be experiencing.  I know a ghost bike was placed today for Jim Chu, though I've heard nothing about the other incident.  If I had known about this sooner I would have gone to the ghost bike placement this morning.  My sincerest condolences and sympathy go out to them.

Something that will always bother me though, is that you can kill a person on a bicycle with a car, and not even get a fine.  So many people drive around without the slightest awareness of the destructive power they control (control used loosely here, given the skill of most drivers I see), it's amazing.  Certainly though, I am not trying to place blame on the drivers in these two particular cases as I don't know anything about what happened, aside from the short descriptions available in the articles above.  However, I've seen a number of cases where the driver is clearly at fault and nothing really happens to them.

People often seem to not realize this, but your average bike helmet is tested only in its ability to be useful in protecting against  the force derived from gravity when you fall.  That means the helmet may not do much of any good when you get hit by a car who is probably travelling ~30mph, without adding in what speed you might be moving at.  This is hardly to say that wearing a helmet isn't advisable or that it won't save your life.  What I am saying is that you should bear in mind the capabilities of your helmet.  I'm only mentioning this because both riders apparently died of blunt trauma to the head, and both riders were wearing helmets.  The fact that it was brought up in the article that they were wearing helmets is interesting to me.   It feels like when people aren't wearing a helmet it's implied that it is the reason they're injured/dead/whatever, which really rubs me the wrong way.  That said, I really need to wear my helmet more often.

Does anybody know if the ghost bike placed out on eagle and overland is still there? (Does anybody actually read this crap at all?)

/ramble