On Saint Patty’s Day I was biking home from my wilderness first aid class on the HSU campus, having just practiced a bunch of emergency medical scenarios over the course of two days. At the corner of 11th and H streets, I came upon a man lying on the sidewalk holding his bloody head as a few acquaintances and his bicycle sat around him. My first thoughts were something along the lines of: How did my instructors know which way I was biking home, where did they recruit these actors, and how did they get the blood on this guy’s head to look so realistic?

I quickly realized this was real, found out he had gone over the handlebars at high speed and hit his bare head on the pavement. I introduced myself and held his head as best I could without touching the blood.

Luckily, a friend from my first aid class who still had latex gloves in her pocket arrived in less than a minute. She was able to more effectively and safely hold his bloody head to keep him from moving. Spinal injuries are usually caused by a broken cervical vertebra, but the actual spinal cord damage often occurs after the accident when the victim moves around and the broken bones sever the cord. He definitely had the mechanism of injury to warrant c-spine immobilization.

To make a long story short, he was a little uncooperative because he didn’t want to stick around and get forced to pay for an ambulance and emergency room visit, so he refused treatment from the paramedics after they had done an initial assessment. He left in a friend’s car with his bike stuffed in the back seat. His decision to refuse assistance brings up some health care issues that I will leave to another columnist or letter writer.

I gathered from talking to a friend who had seen the accident that he had been flying down H Street toward the intersection, blew through the stop sign even though a vehicle was already stopped on 11th Street, east-bound, and was beginning to pull forward into the intersection.

The cyclist realized his mistake and hit the brakes, and, either due to rider error or a brake malfunction, his brakes locked up and he went over the bars.

An apartment dweller with a view of this intersection said he had seen four bike accidents in the last eight months here, all of them involving cyclists running the stop sign coming down the H Street hill, whether deliberately or due to loss of control.

Five minutes after the paramedics left, another cyclist (with dreadlocks to protect his head) arced down the hill from H Street through the stop sign onto 11th at about 15 to 20 mph and swept across the yellow line on 11th because he was going too fast to make the corner.

Bicyclists are going to continue to run stop signs, so even though I should urge everyone to always stop at stop signs, I’m not going to bother, because it won’t work. Riding bikes is a liberating activity that kind of goes along with a sort of anarchistic attitude. We wouldn’t need so many of these traffic lights and stop signs if we all rode bikes instead of driving 4,000-pound hunks of machinery just to transport our substantially lighter butts.

Besides, you may not notice how much gas you burn in your car re-accelerating after stopping at a stop sign, but bicyclists feel it their legs, and know how much easier it is to keep some speed rather than regain it. Bicyclists have a much better field of view, and can hear better (unless they are wearing headphones like some Arcata newspaper editors I know), so they are able to detect other vehicles approaching an intersection more easily.

So instead of urging this rambunctious bunch of bicyclists to stop at all stop signs, I’m going to give few tips to prevent carnage associated with running stop signs.
0.5) Don’t run stop signs. It’s a lot safer. OK, I tried.

1) Slow down. At a slower speed, you will be better able to react on time to the unexpected.

2) Look. Pay special attention when you are blowing through an intersection. Drivers are not looking for you (nor should they have to). You also need to remember to look out for pedestrians.

3) Yield. If a car arrives first at an all-way stop, or with the right of way in another situation, yield, they have every right to run you over (as long as they say they didn’t mean to afterwards). Also yield to pedestrians.

4) Wear a helmet. Brain injuries are a bummer, and helmets are cheap, comfortable and adjustable these days, so get one and wear it.

5) Maintain your bike. Having your brakes fail when you need them most would be bad.
Seeing that guy on the sidewalk with his bloody head has given me more to think about with regard to the idea of a “slow-and-go” statute for Arcata. I don’t think the injured cyclist who refused assistance from the paramedics would pay 10 bucks for a license plate for his bike (A solution for cyclist lawlessness suggested recently by Eye editor Kevin Hoover).

Some cyclists could be brought into the fold of lawfulness if the uniqueness of riding a bike was better recognized in our laws. “Slow and go” would loosen the restriction of having cyclists come to an absolute stop at every stop sign in Arcata. Instead it would require them to slow down, stopping and yielding only if any other vehicles approach the intersection. It wouldn’t change anything for motorists since cyclists would have to stop if there were motorists there. It could get more cyclists on board with obeying a more realistic traffic law, just like legalizing alcohol helped restore some respect for the law at the end of prohibition.

The flip side is that if cyclists took “slow and go” as license to run stop signs at full speed and land on their heads, it would defeat the purpose. We ought to look at the effect of the law in Idaho where it has already been in place for several years. In the meantime, keep the rubber side down!

Chris has a few irons in the fire. He usually does “California stops” on his bike at stop signs, just like most motorists. He is a member of the Arcata Transportation Safety Committee.