Comments

1
Artists on fixies = splatter art!
2
Graffiti artists on fixies = Rorschach blot
3
Yet another demonstration of the idiocy of conditioning access to health care on the whim of your employer. So glad to hear that Ms. Ford-Terry will get the care that she needs without going bankrupt in the process! Hope you have a speedy recovery.
4
Wear a damn helmet next time
5
Perhaps people without insurance shouldn't be riding fucking bikes!
6
Perhaps people without insurance shouldn't ride bikes!
7
Yay, @3! Boo, everyone else. Insurance is the main reason I don't leave my soul-sucker of a job.
8
Perhaps people without insurance should live in cages and get their exercise on a wheel.
9
Bicycling is a damn risky activity. It's 20 times more deadly per mile than driving a car. And 400 times worse than riding the bus. Also: walking? Dangerous, by a factor of 15 compared to a car, 300x worse than the bus.

So yeah, if you have to make a false choice between biking and no exercise, probably best off being sedentary. Of course no such false choice exists.

And everyone deserves single payer health insurance; even wild daredevils playing Russian Roulette with their lives on their two wheelers.
10
@4 I would assume she was considering her head is still intact.

@9 I completely agree with your statement that everyone deserves single payer health insurance. If the country can't have it, why can't washington state at the very least? We are awesome, lets make this happen somehow.
11
Whitney, I was in that same place — a hospital recovery bed following being hit by a car whilst riding a bike (with helmet) — just a few months ago where you are stuck now.

Get well very soon and get back out there in the world asap. :)
12
@9: What are the fatality rates per capita for bicyclists versus pedestrians versus drivers (with or without passengers) in motorized vehicles? You can go with state of Washington or U.S.-wide data if you want.
13
I hope she was in the right when she got hit and the owner of the car's insurance is paying for it and the driver got a nice ticket.
14
@1 & 2: She rides a geared Kona cycle-cross bike, you dumbasses.

@4 How do you know if she was wearing a helmet? In the ten years I've known her, Whitney has always worn a helmet.

@9 I'd like to see your sources. I've seen statistics that suggest that while bicycle fatalities are higher than driving, they are both so low that the difference is rather negligible. 20 times more than almost never is still pretty low.

Of course when you talk injuries, bicycles skyrocket, but when you take out hapless minors, it starts to look better.
My own personal experience is that riding bike is not a particularly deadly activity, and I think the statistics would support that assertion.
15
@12 That's stupid. Tesla.

Per capita? Ninety-nine percent of bicyclists ride less then ten fucking miles a year. Per capita, for those people, bicycling hardly adds anything to their total risk.

There is no more meaningful way than per distance traveled to measure the risk of transport People who talk about it any other way are trying to hide something.

Per capita. Fuck me. That's stupid.
16
Just to clarify, Whitney's a part-timer at the Henry without the museum's insurance, but she had her own catastrophic coverage through Group Health (thank goodness), and, after looking at what an arts worker makes, and what it costs to live in this city, the kind souls working for Harborview's Charitable Causes Fund decided they would cover the rest. Harborview sometimes gets a bad rap, but as far as I can tell, they're treating Whitney very, very well.

More importantly, Whitney's accident was bad enough that she was quite addled. She walked her bike a few blocks from where the accident happened. It was a hit and run, and no one was around to help her. Whoever hit her drove away. She's still not really sure at which intersection the accident happened because she was bloody, banged up, and in shock and walked her bike a few blocks before calling for help. It would be great to piece it together. She knows there was a roundabout, it was somewhere between 21st North of Union and 14th and Union, in the neighborhood to the North of Union. It was between 1:15AM and 1:40AM Sunday morning. If you know ANYTHING, or you've seen a broken bike lock in the road, blood, broken glasses; or anything that indicates an accident happened, please speak up or call the police precinct non emergency number: (206) 625-5011.

And, yes, she was wearing a helmet. I fear if she hadn't been, she'd be much worse off.
17
Get better Whitney, you're one of the most amazing people in Seattle, not to mention one of my favorite!

@14 is right, Whitney is super safe, way safer than 90% of Seattle's cyclists.

if anyone has anything bad to say about her I will fight you to the death, no jokes....
18
@17, I will serve as your second in this fight. Whitney is made of good. And has an excellent brain that I am very happy was nestled in a helmet Sunday morning.
19
thank you all of Whitney's friends... you speak the truth in love...i am so angry at the stupid comments made by 4,5,6, and 13 assumes someone actually took the responsibility to see what they hit... and gave a sh!!! read # 16 18...they speak the truth...

I am the mom who got the phone call that Whitney was in ICU....no one should have to get a call like that ever...but to know that it was hit and run...and she wandered around for help...in shock and bloody....it just makes me heartsick...

come ON Seattle...
20
@15 What's your opinion of hours exposure?
21
A few facts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (the CDC):

Unintentional motor vehicle traffic is the leading cause of injury death for Americans.

In 2005, the most recent year for which data are available, 45,520 deaths in the United States were related to motor vehicles

Re bikes:

Each year, nearly 1,000 persons die from injuries caused by bicycle crashes.

I don't know how helpful these numbers are. More people spend more time in cars and non-fatal cycling accidents are vastly under reported. I think we all realize that Seattle, and most of the USA, is not a super friendly place to ride a bike. I wish we could be like Denmark and build safe bike lanes and give everyone health insurance!

Whitney I hope you get well soon! A similar thing happened to me 4 years ago. Don't let them take away the joy of riding your bike.

22
@16 - Hit and runs suck, and seem to be pretty common with car vs. ped and car vs. bike accidents. I vote u-lock justice for those that leave the scene of a collision.

Get well (& completely well) soon, Ms. Ford-Terry.
23
emor. Hours of exposure? But why? Mostly, you have a constant distance to travel and you make choices about what mode to cover with that distance. Moving closer to work decreases your exposure in time and distance equally, and the benefits of moving closer are the same no matter if you walk, bus, drive or what.

People don't say, "I need to travel 25 minutes at any speed from my house every day to get to work." It would make no sense. People don't just move for a certain amount of time and then stop. They need to go a certain distance, and they must keep traveling whatever amount of time it takes to achieve that distance. If they move slower, they must spend longer.

You could ride a bus from A to B in 45 minutes, and a car from A to B in 15 minutes. We know that the bus is 20x safer per mile than the car. If one population made that commute by bus every day for 20 years, and another population did it in their cars, we know that for every person who was killed in bus accidents, there would be about 20 killed in car wrecks. And 400 killed in bicycle accidents, and 600 or more killed in motorcycles.

So if you have to go from A to B, and your choices are walk, bicycle, bus, car, or motorcycle. The amount of time each of those takes doesn't change your risk -- you still must go from A to B and the risk per mile tells you all you need to know what the consequences of that choice are. In fact, if you started making calculations based on time, you would be able to convince yourself that the safest thing would be to buy a Suzuki Hayabusa and ride to work at 190 mph, minimizing the time exposure. But we know that, per mile, that would be 35 times more dangerous than driving a car, even at the speed limit. At 190 mph, it would be suicide.
24
First off: Get well, Whitney! We love you...

Now: Hey, slog idiots! What if Whitney's Mom read this, and was forced to school you? Oh, that already happened? Well, then I hope you are appropriately shamed.

Alright, let's take this piece by piece: "People in Seattle Art Keep Getting in Very Bad Bike Accidents" - well, three may be enough for a slog entry, but it does not a trend make. You can of course extrapolate from this that people in the art world are paid a pittance for their work (true, for the most part), and therefore being forced to bike leaves them open to the sumo:welterweight physics of car-bike accidents. But that doesn't really take everything into account.

We can't ALL drive, as rush hour can well attest.

I am proud to call myself one of Whitney's friends. And while I don't want to fight any idiots, I would love to accompany anyone to the Walk, Bike, Ride meetings... I think you may find that not driving is actually based upon many judgements, and can be pretty safe overall.

Stats *are* hard to track down. Here's some to start. http://www.ibike.org/library/statistics-… I'd love to see actual data to some of the claims above... and I'm still waiting...

Get well, stay safe, and think before you open your mouth! Whitney is amazing, as are we all. Don't go and change that.
25
Betsey: Thanks for correcting me. I assumed she had Henry insurance, and I shouldn't have.

As for the schadenfreude people and the no-helmet freaks, you make me embarrassed to write here.

Please wait...

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