Fourth Cyclist Killed in Twin Cities

In both of Sunday's papers, there was a brief story telling about a woman who was killed while riding her bike down Summit Avenue in St. Paul on Saturday morning. Ginny Heuer, 51, was riding for exercise, and despite wearing a helmet, suffered fatal head injuries in the collision. Today's Star Tribune carries a more detailed article.

Heuer was the most recent of four cyclists to be killed within a few months in our fair cities. As one who has just started riding a bike to work a few days a week, I have to say I'm having the expected reaction. Our closeness in age and the fact that she also recently started riding probably adds to my reaction.

Remembering Tom Vanderbilt's admonition in Traffic, I refuse to call it an accident. I know the spot where Heuer was killed very, very well, because my own daughter number one took an art class right there for years.


The 39-year-old driver of the SUV that killed Heuer says he stopped at the stop sign where the Summit Avenue service road joins the two-lane through-street. There's a bike lane along the right side of the through-street. As he accelerated onto Summit, he told police that all of a sudden, she was in front of him.

Well, of course, she didn't appear from nowhere. She was right there, in the bike lane, relying on the fact that she had the right of way and that it was broad daylight. Of course the driver of the car would see her, yes?

No. She might as well have been invisible.

Although the collision was obviously not intentional, neither was it a true accident: It was caused by a moment's inattention to one important detail in a busy world. By a person who was moving a two-ton piece of equipment down a city street.

As I said in my earlier post on Traffic, Vanderbilt writes that the more pedestrians or bicyclists there are on the streets, the safer they are per capita -- because drivers are less likely to hit something they are used to seeing (page 86). This is Summit Avenue, for goodness sake -- it's one of the main bike thoroughfares of the Twin Cities. If drivers don't see bikes there, where do they see them?

That's all I can say about this, except the more I bike, the less I like cars, including my own.

P.S. -- Neither paper got Ginny Heuer's name correct in their Sunday stories -- the Star Tribune called her Virginia Heuerbowar, the Pioneer Press Virginia Heuer-Bowar, but from today's paper, it appears her name was actually Virginia Heuer, and her husband's last name is Bowar.