The Bay Citizen: In Bay Area, Youngsters Are More Prone to Bicycle Accidents

“Now, I would love to get up every couple of minutes to get him,” said his father, Kurt Sorensen, a Southwest Airlines employee.

Brandon was riding his bicycle through an Alameda intersection on a rainy Monday afternoon last month when he was struck by an S.U.V. By chance, his mother, Tammy, came upon him lying in the street as she drove past. She held her son one last time; he died at a nearby hospital.

A Bay Citizen analysis of bicycle accident data from the California Highway Patrol found that young cyclists like Brandon are at the highest risk. The analysis shows that in the Bay Area cyclists ages 10 to 19 were involved in more traffic collisions — more than 3,200 from 2005 to 2009 — than any other age group.

Nearly half of those accidents involved boys ages 12 to 16.

In a region filled with thousands of adult cyclists, including daredevils who barrel through congested cities at high speeds, data showing that youngsters are most prone to accidents surprised even bicycle advocates. They said it showed the need for early education about traffic laws and safety.

The highway patrol compiles information about bicycle accidents from local police reports. According to the data, San Jose had 434 collisions involving teenagers, the most of any Bay Area city. Oakland was second with 193. (The Bay Citizen’s Bike Accident Tracker is at baycitizen.org/data/bike-accidents/.)

“I would have thought it would be males in their 20s” who would have the highest accident rates, said Renee Rivera, head of the East Bay Bike Coalition. “Anecdotally, I see mostly young adults cycling.”

In fact, cyclists in their 20s had the second-most collisions with motorists — about 3,100 from 2005 to 2009.

The data showed that teenagers were judged by the police to be at fault 63 percent of the time. By contrast, cyclists in their 20s were faulted in 46 percent of accidents.

The police are still investigating Brandon Sorensen’s accident, and the cause is unknown. The driver is cooperating, and no charges have been filed, according to the Alameda Police Department.

The police and experts in bicycle safety said adolescents, as inexperienced riders, often put themselves in danger because they are unfamiliar with traffic laws. The California Vehicle Code requires cyclists to ride on the right side of the road and follow all traffic rules, including stop signs, traffic lights and signaling.

“Bicyclists don’t think they’re vehicles on the roadway,” Sgt. Steve Paich of the Oakland Police said. “They feel like they should be treated like pedestrians.”

Sergeant Paich said many teenagers think it is legal to ride their bicycles in the crosswalk, for example. “Riding in the crosswalk,” he said, “means you’re riding on the wrong side of the road,” which is the ticketing category for riding in a crosswalk.

Adolescent cyclists were cited for being on the wrong side of the road two and a half times more than for any other individual violation, the data showed. Adolescents were found to be on the wrong side of the road more than any other riders.

A sampling of police reports shows how youngsters’ ignoring traffic laws can put them in harm’s way.

In one accident, a woman was driving along Eighth Avenue in Oakland when a 15-year-old cyclist ran a stop sign and entered the intersection. Trying to avoid him, the driver lurched onto the sidewalk, but the cyclist was thrown onto the hood of the car before rolling off into the street.

The teenager was lucky. He escaped with a few stitches on his head and some scrapes on his leg. His name and the driver’s were redacted from the police report.

In another instance, a 12-year-old boy ran a red light at the intersection of Hegenberger Road and Edgewater Drive in Oakland and was struck by a car. The driver was accelerating after the light turned green, according to the police report. The boy was not injured, but was cited for not having brakes or wearing a helmet.

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Shuttles, Turning Sedentary, Leave Pieces Behind for Science and Safety

As the agency gets its space shuttles ready to be shipped out to museums, it will not be sending them off lock, stock and barrel. The crews doing the prep work have been flooded with requests to squirrel away parts of the spacecraft for analysis. Valves, flight-control instruments, even the tires and windows — little is safe from the clutches of NASA engineers.

“I’ve got a list of hundreds of items that have to come off the ship,” said Stephanie S. Stilson, who is directing the preparation of the shuttle Discovery for delivery to the Smithsonian Institution next year in what NASA calls its “transition and retirement” program.

In April, NASA named the permanent old-age homes for its shuttles, which have been escorting astronauts to space for 30 years. The Endeavour, which completed its last mission early Wednesday with a pinpoint landing after 16 days in orbit, will bask in glory only briefly before it is groomed for delivery to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. The Atlantis, which will make its final flight next month, is destined to live at the visitors’ center here at the space center.

The Discovery made its last flight in March and now sits in a maintenance bay, enclosed by platforms that would normally be crawling with workers inspecting and maintaining its many systems — including the thousands of thermal tiles that cover its skin — to be ready for its next liftoff. These days, as the shuttle program winds down and the staff has been winnowed by layoffs, technicians work on the Discovery only when there are no more pressing tasks. And rather than sprucing it up for another trip to space, likely as not they are taking something out of it.

“We in engineering, we want to hold on to things that we could potentially use, or we want to study them, which is a smart thing to do,” Ms. Stilson said. The shuttles are the only spacecraft that have been launched into orbit multiple times — the Discovery is the most-traveled, with 39 missions — and a better understanding of how the materials and equipment have fared could help future aerospace designers.

Ms. Stilson spoke near one of the Discovery’s main landing gears, where the tires used on the last flight had been removed in favor of what NASA calls “roll-around tires” — basically a bunch of old spares. On a higher platform, workers were putting the finishing touches on replacement windows for the spacecraft, the originals having been taken out so engineers could study what effect the microdebris encountered in so many trips in space had on the glass.

While those who are to receive the shuttles say they understand the need for research, they are a little surprised by how much will be missing.

“We’re considered to be the nation’s official repository of our past,” said Valerie Neal, curator for contemporary human spaceflight at the Smithsonian, which will display the Discovery at the National Air and Space Museum’s annex near Dulles Airport. “Our point of view would be to receive an orbiter in as intact a state as possible.”

Ms. Neal said that when she first started discussing the fate of the shuttle with NASA several years ago, “I rather naïvely thought it would be intact.”

Some of the removal work is dictated by safety concerns. There are small explosive charges all around the shuttle, including one designed to blow a latch and deploy the front landing gear should the normal systems fail. Although the firing mechanism has been disabled, “We don’t want to take a chance that if it’s sitting in the Smithsonian it could somehow detonate,” Ms. Stilson said.

The thrusters near the shuttle’s nose and the podlike maneuvering engines in the rear both contain propellants that are highly toxic and corrosive, even in tiny amounts. So these components have been removed and sent to a special facility where workers in hazardous materials suits will “cut and gut” them, removing much of the insides before shipping them back. “We’ll reinstall them, and from the outside they’ll look exactly the same,” Ms. Stilson said.

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