Not the Best Week

I haven't posted on the recent cyclist death on Swanston St for a few reasons; it's received attention in all the local newspapers and the best blogs, it sparks up the inevitable 'no-place-on-the-road' victim blaming debate, and talking about it at all sits somewhere in the uncomfortable space between community awareness and scaremongering.

Also, it spooked the crap out of me.

I've taken a dive on tram tracks more than once, and on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays I cycle with my partner Jen halfway to her work in Parkville before turning onto Canning St - a route that sends me down Swanston St and past the now funerial Bourke St corner. The space afforded the commuter cyclist on that stretch is sometimes no more than the thin, creased strip between tram tracks and buses (parked, merging, turning).

Some commentators have suggested rider ignorance is to blame - tram tracks are an obvious hazard easily avoided. It's an oversimplification. Buses park in the outside lane with their hazard lights on. If you're halfway past them when they switch from hazards to their right-hand turn signal, how are you to know that the lights on the left have gone dark and the bus is about to merge out? If this happens in the blind spot, you're in trouble. If a tram is passing at the time, well, you can imagine.

The buses do have to go somewhere, that's certain. But that place is obviously not on the busiest bicycle route in the state.

This morning the shade was cool, but the sunlight heartening where it tiptoed through the buildings. It felt good. I didn't look to the flower memorial today. I just rode on past - over Flinders St where the station stood incandescent in the sunshine.