Cycle of Rage: Wrong-Way Driver Reveals Wrong-Way Approach To Street Safety

Another day, another driver with a long record of recklessness nearly killing a man yet not suffering any punishment at all.

It all started on a gorgeous Saturday, when Tom Flaschen was biking northbound on Fifth Avenue, according to a post he put on Reddit later that day. Ahead of him, approaching him in the wrong lane on two-way Fifth, was a senior citizen behind the wheel of a Honda. For a second, it looked to Flaschen like the driver was merely cutting the left turn, like drivers often do, to cheat oncoming traffic. But then all hell broke loose.

A video of the incident was posted on Monday on Reddit:

If you look closely, you can see that perhaps the only thing that saved Flaschen was the fact that he was paying attention and stopped, then hopped off his bike a split-second before the driver rolled over his bike as Flaschen waved his arms.

You can’t see it on the video, but Flaschen said the driver did stay on the scene, but didn’t respond to his questions, saying only that the sun was in his eyes (not likely at 1 p.m.)

The cops showed up, Flaschen told Streetsblog, but did not write so much as a ticket, despite seeing Flaschen’s bike crumpled like a cheap suit and apparently receiving no denials from the driver.

The incident raises so many questions about our treacherous streets and the failure to hold drivers accountable:

• Why didn’t the cops even issue a ticket for failure to exercise due care? “They said they didn’t directly witness it so there wasn’t much they could do,” Flaschen said. (We’ve heard officers say this before and always wonder why they can’t simply basic detective work to determine what happened — after all, there was the wrong way car, witnesses, a destroyed bike, and a victim — and enforce the law.)
• Doesn’t this driver’s previous record of recklessness — 10 speed-camera tickets and two camera-issued red-light tickets since 2020 — matter at all? Does anyone feel a responsibility to not let such drivers — especially after they have driven the wrong way and struck someone — merely drive away? “The camera tickets are a reliable way of capturing repeat and reckless drivers, which is what this person is, so the police should have the power to get drivers like this off the road,” Flaschen said. (I know he drove away because I found the car in his driveway a few blocks from the crash site on Monday night — a huge dent in the front panel providing the incontrovertible evidence of the crash, above right.)
• The cops didn’t even take a report of the crash, so it will never appear in any statistics — and crash statistics are how the Department of Transportation determines which streets are “safe” and which streets aren’t. So no one in power will know that a man was almost killed on Fifth Avenue on Saturday.
• Flaschen said he initially had trouble getting video because Walgreens wouldn’t provide it. I’ve been in the news business for 35 years and my experience has been that corporations never provide video of crashes, which is such vital evidence of wrongdoing committed to a member of the community about which corporations claim they care so deeply. It’s just awful; victims need video for the very reasons I stated in bullet point 1 and 2 above. The public, especially the car-driving portion of the public, never believes crash victims’ stories unless there is video. “Walgreens told me their policy is to not release footage without a subpoena,” Flaschen said. “But videos like this are so important so to that the public can understand how these things happen, beyond the statistics. People need to see how bad it is out there.”
• Speaking of which, the video is also crucial because it reminds us — and, more important, public officials — that paint isn’t protection. “You have to be hypervigilant as a New York cyclist, which is why we need better design,” Flaschen said. “The Fifth Avenue Business Improvement District has a plan that would have protected me.”

Of course, I can’t help noting that this crash comes in the context of Gov. Hochul’s obsession with reducing the price of auto insurance, partly by reducing the compensation some victims receive for pain and suffering. But reducing the cost of driving for drivers like the guy who nearly killed Tom Flaschen makes no sense — they represent a clear and well-established risk to the public, and the cost of insurance should reflect that risk. (I stopped by the driver’s house late on Monday, but a woman who answered the door said he was asleep; she did not deny the crash … nor did the dented Honda in the driveway.)

“Given what happened to me, I don’t love the idea of making it harder for crash victims to be compensated after a crash,” Flaschen said. “We can make roadways safer with accountability and better design.”

It’ll also help if get bad drivers off the road.