How I Joined The Unenviable Club of San Francisco Victims of Hit’n’Run Drivers
On July 6, 2016, as I proceeded along the bike lane on Polk Street, I found my way blocked by a delivery truck.
I carefully looked over my shoulder to be sure no cars were heading toward me down the two lane, one way street. There were none. It was a sunny Wednesday at 9:20am, and rush hour was thinning out.
I pulled out to the middle of the rightmost lane to pass the truck. My big white bike, along with my Ikea reflective safety vest, are ridiculously visible against the black asphalt, but I always take the middle of a lane if I have to leave the green zone, so drivers cannot ignore me, or squeeze me into an opening car door.
All of a sudden, out of the corner of my left eye I see a car passing me close. Too close! BOOM! The car’s rear half has sideswiped my panniers. Next thing, I’m hurtling through the air, no bike underneath. My shoulder, my hip, and my head hit the cement hard.
I struggle to my feet. My view is spinning, my hands are numb, and my shoulder feels bizarre. All I can think is, get out of the lane before you get run over by the next car! Three construction workers rush over, help me lift up my bike, and guide me to the sidewalk.
I glance towards Market street to see if the car that hit me has stopped to help out. It’s an orange Subaru or Volkswagen station-wagon. It has, in fact, stopped just shy of the green light at Market… but it’s pulling away even as I look. There are, strangely, no other cars on the road, just as before. The driver only stopped to see if I lived; then, he took off.
After an unexpected, catastrophic event, you don’t think clearly. As the pain in my shoulder intensified and the world slowly spun around, I could only manage one thought: “Get to a doctor.” It didn’t occur to me to ask the construction workers for contact info, or if they’d even seen the car that hit me. At the hospital, X-rays proved my luck; the only broken bone was my clavicle, neatly cracked in two pieces.
When my shoulder connected with the cement, my head snapped sideways at high speed before smacking into the tarmac. There’s absolutely no doubt that my Giro helmet saved my life.
Still, the doctors put me on a 48 hour concussion watch. No mental exertion allowed! Two days of no smart phone, no Kindle, not even music, means a lot of time to replay this accident in my head and ask myself: How could that driver not have seen me? Where did they come from so fast? Why didn’t they stop? How could I stop him from hurting somebody worse?
Since that day, I’ve been forced to ride in a lot of Ubers (I can’t take Muni because they’re too crowded and jostling for somebody with a broken collarbone). I’ve noticed that the drivers are pretty distracted. Every thirty seconds they’re looking at their phone to accept riders, rate them, switch to Waze and back, decline calls, and more; many of the drivers are looking at their device literally half of the time.
The driver that hit me must have come from Hayes and swung wide into the right lane of Polk. He or she must have been looking down at their phone when his car slammed into me, I was just too obvious to be missed.
If the theory is true, then maybe they were ride-sharing. My requests for information from Uber were rejected outright, with claims that they don’t keep information on their cars minute by minute. This is silly; Uber knows where every car is since they’re plotted on a Google map all day long. Here’s how they dealt with my request for help with the matter:
I had, in fact, filed a police report in the hospital, but had heard nothing back for a couple weeks. After two more weeks of nearly continuous calling, I got finally got through to our overloaded, mailbox-full San Francisco Hit & Run Department. The officer that finally answered was very helpful and promised to research security camera footage at the scene. However, two weeks after this, he followed up with a report that he could find no video, no license plate, and no witnesses.
Uber’s total lack of effort to research the incident is inexcusable. We’ve had multiple bicycle deaths from hit and run drivers in the past few months. This driver will surely kill someone next time. Uber could easily prevent this with a five minute database query: I’ve provided the time and place and even a car description. They only have to give this information to the police to prevent a death. By punting this to the overworked police department, they have effectively washed their hands of the matter.
According to one report, in 2015 Uber poured more cars into San Francisco than all the cabs in New York City. By my own reckoning (simply sampling passing cars on various busy intersections around town), at least one third of the cars downtown are Uber’s and Lyft’s.
Doing the math, if 30% of the divers are ride-sharing, looking at their phone nearly 50% of the time, then: 15% of all drivers on the road are driving blind all the time!
I repeat: if 30% of the divers are looking at their phone nearly 50% of the time, then 15% of all drivers on the road are driving blind all the time!
Uber needs to follow up on reports of dangerous drivers, like the report I gave them.
Only Uber has the resources to follow up on the reports; the police are completely overwhelmed. The odds are very high that this driver and many others like him will kill somebody soon. Uber, do you really want blood on your hands again? I call on you, Uber, with your $8 Billion in VC funding and 7000 employees, to spend 10 minutes querying your database to stop a killer.
