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The Ride of Silence from an honoree's viewpoint
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The Ride of Silence is a bike ride that honors and remembers those who have been hit by cars while riding their bikes. I'm in the subset survivors of the set hit by cars of the superset bicycle riders. In the Venn diagram I'm in the dot inside the tiny circle that is inside the huge circle.
During the RoS survivors are supposed to wear red armbands. I wear enormous scars instead. This at once advertises that I'm part of the honored, and also makes people leave me alone. I don't know personally anyone that has been killed with a car while riding a bike, but several of my friends and fellow church goers have been injured with cars while riding, almost all were hit-and-run. All had serious injury, all had bikes destroyed, all had financial losses, and none ever got anything to compensate their damages. All but one was hit inside the city limits of Garland, and at one time 30% of the members of the church I attend were recovering from injuries they got after being hit with a car.
You may notice that I use "hit with a car" rather than "hit by a car". It's very simple, cars don't drive by themselves. To move somebody has to be working the controls and that somebody is responsible for what the car does. For an example I will use the experience of a victim I will call P. P was stopped at a stop sign waiting for cross traffic to clear (yes, most cyclists will stop at stop signs when riding alone) when an impatient driver went almost around him. I say "almost" because P was hit by this car that was trying to pass him at a stop sign. Now, passing at a stop sign is illegal, and violates so many traffic codes that the mind boggles at the behavior, but passing and hitting someone at a stop sign is just that much worse. Unless the person being passed and hit is a bicycle rider in the city of Garland, in which case being passed at a stop sign and getting hit, and the driver just leaving you there laying on the road is the fault of the cyclist. They found the car and driver that hit my friend P when she drove her car into a construction zone and high centered the car. Fortunately there was nobody working there to get hit, but still this shows the attention the driver was paying to the road. So was the driver charged? Yes, with driving into a construction zone, not with hit-and-run, or hitting my friend, or pasing at a stop sign.
That, and several similar experiences, is why we have the Ride of Silence.
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