Frank Krygowski wrote:
jbeattie wrote:
Dan O wrote:
Sir Ridesalot wrote:
AMuzi wrote:
http://www.cityofmadison.com/police/...t.cfm?id=15321
Classic. Reminds me of the legendary, "You honor, the fork
sprung and forced my client's bicycle into the bus"
Interesting but it doesn't say when the fork broke. Was it before or after the accident?
Based on the limited info (well stocked with what are probably
red herring), a most probable best guess would be that the broken
fork caused the crash.
snip
According to a claimed witness:
"There is no red light at the corner of Livingston and Johnson and this happened right out front of my apartment. The construction is what caused this. His bike's front wheel got caught in a huge crack down Johnson st and he flipped and smashed his head."
http://www.channel3000.com/news/bicy...ident/25893480
The comment by police that the broken fork caused the accident is very typical. Riders have wall impacts or catch a stick in their forks, get ejected and wake to find a broken CF fork. As a result of head injury or poor reasoning skills, they immediately conclude that the broken fork caused their fall. In the course of representing manufacturers, I have seen very few forks of any design that simply fell apart during normal use. It happens, but it is very rare.
I think that makes sense, even though I suffered a crash because of a bona fide
"just riding along" fork failure. In my case, it wasn't a normal manufacturer,
who would be likely to test his design; instead it was Jim Bradford, building
his last custom tandem before heading to Europe for his honeymoon. Seems he
grabbed a set of track forks and slapped them into our tandem. The wall
thickness turned out to be only 1/3 that of a proper tandem fork.
I notice that the article didn't actually say there was a traffic light at
the crash point. If witnesses saw the guy run a red light 1/4 mile earlier,
then related that, the article would be technically correct, but still
misleading.

That's 5 blocks from my house. The light is one block
before Livingston, at Blount Street. East Johnson was once a
'street', it's a Beirut level series of craters this year.

Rider was on the other side of the Orange Cone Line, passing
a stopped row of cars. Maybe he didn't know that a line of
orange cones means something like 'the surface sucks more
over here because we dug holes on this side'.

--
Andrew Muzi
www.yellowjersey.org/
Open every day since 1 April, 1971