Bike Fatalities

We need to change the prevailing tendency to blame traffic violence victims for their own deaths.

Recently, for the second time, someone took away the flowers, candles, messages, drawings, and white-painted bike wheel that were placed at Oak and Michigan as a tribute to bike courier Blaine Klingenberg, who was fatally struck by a bus driver at the intersection on June 15. His friends and members of the cycling community say they want to install a permanent memorial nearby that won’t be at risk of being removed again.

There were at least four media-reported bike fatalities and three serious injury crashes in the Chicago area during the 12-day stretch from September 19-30. During that same period, on September 20, Chicago Fire Department lieutenant Danny Carbol, 56, sustained serious brain damage in a bike-SUV crash in suburban Evergreen Park.

The Northwestern University community, as well as Chicago-area bicyclists, are still processing the death of Chuyuan “Chu” Qiu, an 18-year-old student who was killed last month after she collided with a concrete truck while biking by the Evanston campus.

It’s almost starting to feel like Bicycling magazine naming Chicago as the nation’s best bike city last week has turned into a curse. In the two weeks since that announcement on Monday, September 19, the region has seen the following bike fatalities and crashes with injuries requiring hospitalization:

In the wake of the bike/truck collision that took the life of Anastasia Kondrasheva on Monday, as well as several other recent bike fatality cases, this Friday activists are holding a candlelight vigil and ghost bike installation at the crash site. The organizers say they’re through waiting for the city of Chicago to make progress on its four-year-old goal of eliminating all traffic deaths. Instead, they’re demanding that major steps be taken immediately to prevent such tragedies, especially those caused by commercial drivers.

The young woman who was fatally struck by a right-turning flatbed truck driver yesterday while biking in Roscoe Village has been identified as Anastasia Kondrasheva, a 23-year-old health coach at an Edgewater health facility.

Tragically, last week’s epidemic of bike fatalities and serious injury crashes in the Chicago region, has continued into this week. This morning a young woman was fatally struck by a flatbed truck driver in Roscoe Village. She was the sixth person to be struck and killed by a commercial vehicle driver while biking in Chicago and Evanston since June, and the third to be run over by a right-turning flatbed truck driver.

This has been a terrible week for bike fatalities and injuries in the metropolitan area, with at least two deaths and two serious injury crashes in the city and suburbs. Here’s a look at the four cases.