Now, drivers are much more aware of faster bikes in bike lanes. In all the crashes I was in between 2009 and 2014, I was even faster than most e-bikes are now, but I was an extreme anomaly in that respect. Bikes were not super rare on the road, but racers on general roads commuting have always been rare. Like if you’re going to train, it is not on the surface streets. Several of my crashes were from a time when I rode a 33 mile route each way to and from work 5-6 days a week. I’m one of the most hardcore all-weather, nothing-stops-me roadies you’ll ever meet. Like I ride home with broken bones just to say I made it.

Anyways, I’m on a tangent. On the road, around unpredictable drivers, my rather rare speed led to crashes. I had hundreds, if not thousands, of near misses. I had 6 crashes from cars in 150k miles of riding and have had none since. I am at around 250k now. I’m a lot slower by average speed, and I never ride around traffic like I did back then. Both of my bad crashes were from someone making an illegal u-turn. That is the one event where intuition lies and there is nothing a person can do to escape.

It looks exactly like all of the hundreds of times when someone has pulled out in front of you and cut you off. So you instinctively swerve, but as you do so, the car keeps going and closes the escape route faster than the brain will reprocess the inputs.

It is no different for a driver in a passing car. The worst scenario is being on a bike, right behind that passing car, and being as fast as the cars on a slight down hill when someone pulls a sudden u-turn into a passing SUV. That is what got me. The car in front of me was doing 35mph and never braked. It was a Jeep Grand Cherokee t-boning a Mitsubishi Montero. I know all about it from court stuff, but I went black retroactively to the moment I merged behind the Jeep until I was in the ICU 3 hours later. I braked according to witnesses, but my Garmin GPS computer showed I made contact at 29.7mph. I was folded in half backwards.

All but one of my crashes were like that, where it was absolutely due to errors of dumb drivers. All were also in the most southern parts of Orange County CA, in smaller areas with poor infrastructure. At the time, I rode mostly in more developed areas of city with better infrastructure and those are generally much safer. I had a lot of close calls in those areas but they are usually avoidable within the space available, unlike people that get lost or are dopey on the fringes where there is no proper infrastructure.