 Jeepers I've been an urban cyclist for 51 years now and I've never been doored.But, almost, of course. I am always vigilant that it could happen, and besides, the best advice is that given by the Leauge of American Bicyclists: Do not ride in the door zone. OK, OK, easier said than done on skinny streets with two busses or two Hummers trying to pass each other- AND a bicyclist or two, all converging in the same space at the same time. WATCH OUT especially for those grand old Cadillacs, a two door '77 Biarritz Caddy has doors half the size of a football field. The two door cars are always most dangerous, those doors have to be much bigger than the four-doored vehicles to allow any access to any back seat or stowage area.Anyhow if any of you bikers out there would like to hack, or help, it seems the National Highway and Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) is ignoring my plea of many years ago to configure cars so the driver door SLIDES back. Such an arrangement helps protect kids who may prematurely jump out of a back door into the street side, a slider prevents this too, and hundreds of kids die from this every year, too. You all can think I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. Please realize almost every FEDEX and USPS and UPS truck in the US already has a sliding back driver door, and the Honda Odyssey's sophisticated electronics sliding back prove it could be done on any car, the only thing missing is the mandate. How about an internet campaign to get a mandate rolling so bikers can stop taking it on the chin?My name is James Doherty. I live in Jerry Brown's Oakland, just across the Berkeley, California border. I can bicycle to free speech famous Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley in just about 10 minutes on one of my hyper bikes. I'm a member of several bike clubs, including the aformentioned League, and am now webpublishing some great stuff on urban biking. I rode Berkeley's Critical Mass last Friday and had a great time. Check out http://www.danceswithbicycles.org/, http://www.freewebs.com/bicyclesrus and see my bike warrior pedal-powered rants on the UN Environmental Programme indexed http://www.CultureChange.org/"For city bicycling to catch on we need a revolution in our society's infrastructure. Right now a city rider needs to be a road warrior, and the bike needs to be cheap and ugly so it won't get stolen. That's not a bike friendly culture." - Gary FisherJames Dohertyjimisfun@mac.com
 These images are two several taken by Robert Winters for the Cambridge Civic Journal regarding the July 2nd 2002 fatality of cyclists Dana Laird. Dana was run over and killed as she swerved to avoid a car door on Mass Ave. It has been posted here with Roberts permission. Soon I'll be adding a separate photo page to display more photos Robert took at the scene and other general photography related to Car Door accidents. Until then please visit Roberts site to view more photos of this unfortunate incident.http://www.rwinters.com/bike/july2dooring.htmAdditional information:Go to the_ "Feburary 2005" section at the bottom of this page. There you'll find a post by Matthew Pickett who's brother knew Dana.Go to the_ links section under "magazine articles" to read the Boston Phoenix account of the accident.—Jerry
 Here's my story:
It was just before 6pm on November 5, 2001, and I was pedaling down the San Francisco streets on my way to the train station for the evening commute home. Night falls early in November, and the daylight was fading. In those days my bike didn't have a headlight. And although I wear a helmet, I hadn't put it on; it dangled from my handlebars. I was keeping close to the right-hand side of the street and traveling at a pretty quick clip when I saw a car door opening in front of me. I swerved, but not enough to avoid clocking the door with my right pedal. My launched into the air like a missile. I remember flying, thinking about what landing would be like. I crashed into the pavement and realized that I had gotten off lightly. Rather than smashing my head, I had merely scraped my nose against the asphalt. I had instinctively put out my left hand - my dominant hand - to break the fall. The guy in the car didn't even get out to check on me; he closed the door and sat silently in his car as I picked myself up. Then I noticed that my wrist was hurting, and my only thought was to get ice on it ASAP. I ran into a nearby eatery and got a bag of ice, then picked up my bike and walked to the train station. I forgot all about the guy who had doored me. I thought my wrist was sprained, but it turned out that I had broken my left scaphoid, a tiny carpal bone that often fractures in the course of a hard fall on an outstretched hand - it's a common injury among skiers, skateboarders, motorcyclists, basketball players, and soldiers dodging incoming ordnance. Even when it's treated properly, it doesn't heal in 10 percent of cases. Over the next several months, I learned that I was in that 10 percent. Here it is, June 2005, and I'm still working on getting my wrist back into shape. I got surgery in late 2002, and which finally healed the fracture, but it left my range of motion compromised, so I put my wrist in a stretching device three times a day. The wrist is pretty functional, but it will never be back to normal; Even if I get the range of motion back, the cartilage damage is permanent, leaving me with an arthritic wrist. If you get doored and you're unfortunate enough to break your scaphoid, my advice is: don't wait to see whether it will heal naturally. Get it surgically fixed right away if you can. You'll avoid a bunch of unpleasant complications that way.
Best,
Ted
 I did get hit by the door, but it was still closed.
Sunday afternoon, summertime on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica can be pretty hectic. The park overlooking the bluffs is very attractive and probably the best place for a young family to go to get out of the heat.
Woe to the poor cyclist that gets in the way of a car diving for a parking space.Ocean is a slight downhill grade and I was in excellent shape in 2002 so I was cruising along at 30 mph, just about the speed of traffic. Up ahead, I notice that a car pulled out of a parking space - just far enough ahead that it wasn't obnoxious. And it was such a beautiful day, why worry...Then the car next to me, who had recently pulled up along side of me, veers hard into my thigh. I am not a wall flower, so I start screaming and pounding on the window but the car just keeps coming. The woman in the passenger seat turns to look me in the eyes and I can see she is screaming behind the glass, but the car just keeps turning into the newly opened space. I had nowhere to go so I hit the curb without being able to slow and this turned out to be a good thing as the sidewalk is double wide.. I had enough momentum to fly over said side walk and land on the grass beyond, tumbling into a palm tree. The driver was nice enough, admitted to being a sometime cyclist. Everything seemed fine until I got on the bike to go home. The first left hand corner I took, the carbon front fork failed and down I went at 5 mph, separating my shoulder. Oh, well.
 I was biking up a small hill at night, had some good momentum, of course all my lights going, and all of a sudden this guy in a parked car, with no lights on whatsoever, opens the driver's side door. He did this when I was about 2-3 feet from the door, and if I hadn't swerved, I would have gone straight into the metal and probably snapped the door off it's hinges. Unfortunately for me, swerving to avoid the door led to my kneecap smacking into the edge of the door as the driver instinctively slammed the door shut. I couldn't walk, much less bike, for about an hour, and my mom picked me up and took me to emerg to see if I had any damage. I didn't, but the triage nurse digging into the gash on my knee to extract the road gravel was damned painful. The guy was nice and helpful and very sorry about it, and it wasn't really his fault, I just was frustrated because I had no way of knowing that the door was about to open, and he hadn't checked his mirror before opening the door or he would have seen my lights.
Not exactly a story of being doored, but here goes..I was riding with a friend through philadelphia, May 2001. Going down walnut we came to a stoplight a block west of rittenhouse sqaure. she was on the sidewalk, i was on the street, riding the median between parked cars and traffic, which was stopped at a light. as i neared the intersection and came up to the first car waiting, mis-judged the distance bewteen the driver's side mirror and the passenger side mirror of a parked car. the handlebars locked against the mirrors and sent me flying with the bike coming down on top of me, like a windmill, 180 degrees. it was a tangled mess, my friend laughed, the expression on the face of the driver was actually quite humorous in hindsight, but they rolled down their window (they couldn't open their door as the heap of twisted metal that was my bike was in the way) and asked if i was okay, as did some people who just happend to be walking by. as it was completely my fault, there wasn't much i could do about it, and paid for a new front wheel to replace the one i had tacoed. i was pretty embarassed by the whole thing and still kind of am, but you live, you learn. usually when i ride on the streets now i'll keep an eye on parked cars three or four lenghts up, looking to see a silhouette in the rear windshield and be able to anticipate an opening door or exiting vehicle.
To Live and Ride in Los AngelesI was heading East in the Bike Lane (of all places) on Sunset Blvd. one sunny Sunday afternoon when I got doored by an SUV. I am usually aware of opening doors of cars that have just parked and usually can expect the driver to swing open the door without the slightest glance into the side mirror. In this case, there was this couple that had been sitting in their vehicle for a while and due to the tinted windows I couldn't see that they were there. Well, the driver decided it was time to get out and as he was talking to his passenger, swung open his big SUV door just as I was passing. My front tire made impact with the edge of his door, sending me flying into the next lane. Luckily, there weren't any cars coming at the time and I just got scraped and bruised.The guy apologized profusely, and was nice enough to take me, my bike and my ruined front wheel across town to a high-end bike shop, where he paid for a new rim ($125) and gave me a ride home. In parting, I told him, "I'm not glad ran into you, but I'm glad it was you that I ran into."It was hard to get back on the road for a while. It was hard to relax and not expect every single parked car door to suddenly open as I passed. I'm back to my old riding self again, though I ride much farther to the left than ever, 'taking the lane' and staying clear of the Door Zone.
It was Nov of 96, San Francisco...I was on my way to rehearsal at Planet X studios on Folsom st (no longer there). I was on Valencia and made a right onto 16th, 5 seconds after I made that right a car door opened and wrenched the handlebars right out from under me. I went flying and landed with my legs and feet in the street.A car came and ran over my right foot and part of my lower leg, I watched it happen from street level; it ripped my sneaker right off.Talk about instant pain; it felt as if my leg had been dipped in boiling oil, the pain seemed to stick to my leg like hot wax. This all happened in front of a bar right next to alleyway called Randal. A bunch of Mexican guys came out from the bar and picked me up off the street and placed me on the sidewalk. Someone got a milk crate to elevate my leg; and they talked to me to make sure I didn't go into shock or have some bad trip from the accident.In the ambulance I called the band to tell 'em I wasn't gonna make it to practice that night. No broken bones, just major tendon/ligament and soft tissue damage. The doc said it would have been much easier if I just broke the bones, they could fuse 'em together and voila...new bones, but it takes much longer and it's much more complicated with tendon/ligament injuries.The person who ran me over made it seem like it was my fault and she got away with it. Her insurance company said there was no way they were gonna pay; we would have to go to court and since I did not have a light on my bike, forget about it, I was gonna lose. I did get some dough from the person who doored me; he was a pretty decent guy about the whole thing, he called me later on that night to see how I was doing and to apologize.I learned a lot from that accident; always use a light at night, always keep your eye on parked cars and always assume that every door will open into you and that people don't see you and don't care.
The following is an anonymous response to a posting I made yesterday on Craigslist (SF, Politics discussion forum) regarding the danger Car Doors pose to Cyclists. Thank goodness the majority of car drivers don't think the same way this "Liberal" does. —JerryRE:Car Door Politicscar door deathtrapReply to: see belowDate: 2005-03-15, 5:45PM PSTi dig bikes, they don't burn gasoline and they are quietbuthere in SF bike riders don't follow the rules of traffic game...jumping lights, changing lanes or turning without signalling...yadayadaso here's my warning...if you are not following the rules of the road and you get in my way... boom... if you are riding and I am opening my car door boombike riders beware even liberals have had enoughfollow the rules of the road or consider yourself fair game...
Getting Doored...Had my first and only experience of being doored today.When I first moved to Oxford I thought it was a really bike friendly town,and yes, it has more cyclists and cycle lanes than most UK town, but thatdoesn't save us from the almighty door attack!I was riding up St Clements up towards Headington hill on the green cyclelane, the traffic was at a stand still waiting for the light to change.All of a sudden someone opened their car door right in front of me. Icould almost see it open in slow motion. I think my front wheel hit thedoor, and I tumbled over the bike and onto the pavement. Luckily I endedup on the pavement with a bruised leg and slightly mangled knee. The twoguys in the car were super apologetic, and offered to drive me home or toA&E but I didn't think it was necessary. ( I should have got someone's number,because i now have to repair my bike!)Apart from hobbling round for the next few days I'm fine, but I recognise I've got away lucky as hell. It's amazing when you talk to people, even people who don't cycle, how many of them either know someone, or know someone who knows someone who's been harmed or killed by getting doored.This really needs to be be more universally acknowledged as a serious issue.-- Anonymous Cyclist from Oxford Brookes University, England
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Jeepers I've been an urban cyclist for 51 years now and I've never been doored.
