Concussion or no concussion, Steve Hill wants a new bike. Pronto.
“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.
Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.
Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.
“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”
Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.
Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.
“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”
“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”
Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.
With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.
“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)
In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.
Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.
A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.
In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.
We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.
by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes
“To be honest with you, I feel like I should have it already,” he says to the woman he’s facing, Megan Hottman, a 35-year-old personal-injury lawyer who’s taking notes on a laptop inside her Golden, Colorado, office. From where I sit, just to the right of Hill*—who is 38 and trim—he looks pretty good, considering that he suffered a concussion and whiplash in a car collision just one week ago. But as I watch him, I have to wonder if he should have even driven himself to this meeting. As a longtime rider, I’ve endured similar injuries: I once went to the ER with a concussion after a crash, and I felt the effects for weeks. Hill has already told Hottman that he’s been experiencing dizzy spells.
*Because of ongoing litigation, the name of Hottman’s client has been changed.Talking a beat too slowly, Hill describes a big ride he’s supposed to do eight days from now. It’s a Colorado event that took place last summer and covered more than 100 miles and over 13,000 feet of vertical gain—a major undertaking.
Hottman nods. She’s a dedicated rider herself, so she knows all about the hunger to get back on the road. But Hill is in no shape for a day like that, and he’s naive to think that a lawyer can serve up a new high-end bike anytime soon.
“Almost every client sitting in that chair has some event coming up,” Hottman says diplomatically. “These accidents only seem to happen when you have something on the burner.”
Hill’s crash occurred in Boulder, 20 miles north of Golden. Pedaling his $10,000 dream machine on a pleasant summer afternoon, Hill was traveling north on two-lane Cherryvale Road as he approached South Boulder Road. He had the green light as he entered the intersection, at about 25 miles per hour.
Just then, a car turned left in front of him. Hill was far enough away to avoid a crash, but a second car abruptly turned left, too, and he couldn’t dodge it. The vehicle’s right front corner hit his left foot, shearing the pedal cleat off his cycling shoe. The car bulled into the seat tube of Hill’s frame, which snapped. He went flying, helmet first.
“I had very little road rash,” he says. “But I hit my head.”
“Yowzers,” says Hottman, a long, lean, and outgoing ex–professional road racer who now runs her own 50-member cycling team—called TheCyclist-Lawyer.com—and still manages to ride 6,000 miles a year. “Super, super violent!”
Hill again brings up the long ride he wants to do. “Do you think we’d be able to settle in a timely manner?” he asks.
With that, Hottman lifts her hands off the keyboard and peers up from the screen. Cyclists who consider hiring Hottman don’t always know about her out-of-office activities, which include a lot of educational work. She teaches bike-handling skills to beginners. She gives lectures to cops about relevant laws. She’s the coauthor of a forthcoming reference book that’s aimed at every attorney and judge in her field. Hottman has dissected cycling athletically, legally, and ethically, and she’s concluded that, while she dearly loves her two-wheeled brothers and sisters, riders don’t always display sound judgment.
“I’m not pro-cyclist all the time,” Hottman told me when we first spoke months earlier. “I get frustrated when I see riders behaving badly.” (...)
In her office, in the courtroom, in the news, on the Web, and on city streets and country roads, Megan Hottman encounters various species of the same genus: riders who are sure they’ve been wronged and simultaneously believe that cyclists are always right.
Often as not, they have been wronged, but Hottman consistently quotes a statistic that many riders don’t know or choose to ignore: roughly 47 percent of all bike-car mishaps happen because riders are at fault. That figure is debatable—there’s no national database, and Hottman’s use of it derives from small-sample studies, media accounts, and her own experience working on cases over the years. Still, there’s no doubt that riders often behave recklessly on roads and highways. Ask any driver who’s seen them blow through red lights or come screaming the wrong direction down one-way streets.
A particularly sour moment for cycling’s image occurred last September in New York City’s Central Park, when Jill Tarlov, a 58-year-old mother of two, stepped off a curb and into the path of 31-year-old Harlem cyclist Jason Marshall, who was swerving around other pedestrians and reportedly in an aerodynamic tuck when he hit her. Three days later, Tarlov, the wife of a CBS senior vice president, died from severe head trauma. Marshall, who told reporters that the collision was “unavoidable,” hasn’t been charged with a crime.
In San Francisco in March of 2012, cyclist Chris Bucchere killed an elderly pedestrian in the city’s Castro district, hitting him after running multiple stop signs. According to a report on the mishap in the San Francisco Chronicle, three other pedestrians had been mowed down in the Bay Area in the past year. Bucchere ultimately pleaded guilty to felony vehicular manslaughter.
We all know that motorists can be reckless and myopic as well, and statistically they may be at fault in car-bike accidents nearly half the time. When drivers screw up or drive too aggressively—or with outright malice—the consequences are usually dire for bicyclists because of the harsh realities of physics. Cars are massive metal beasts; bikes are not. When collisions happen, bikes and their riders get the worst of it, regardless of who’s at fault.
by Andrew Tilin, Outside | Read more:
Image: John Haynes
