It's been a few years since I took a math class, but since when is 3 out of 6 a majority?

As far as I can tell, a "majority" of a half-dozen is 4 or more. 3 Latino/a deaths is less than 4. Or at least it used to be.

by Matt Johnson on May 24, 2010 11:17 am • link • report

Okay, stereotypes are bad, but are you really trying to say that there aren't differences in community access to bike safety information? That there aren't some people better able to afford bike helmets? If better education/awareness/access to safety equipment and reflective strips and bike lights in the Latino and immigrant community comes out of this, I don't think that's a bad thing.

by Robin on May 24, 2010 11:46 am • link • report

Halsey is one of the more memorable nitwits at the Post.

by Rich on May 24, 2010 11:54 am • link • report

Wow. The racial statements here are atrocious and misinformed. I hope someone has to answer for them.

by aaa on May 24, 2010 12:00 pm • link • report

The real problem here is that the article doesn't come out and say anything about their assertion that Latinos are disproportionately affected by accidents. Are they saying that they are less safe riders? Or is it just that Latinos make up a greater proportion of the bike-riding population?

by MLD on May 24, 2010 12:06 pm • link • report

Halsey is himself a serious recreational cyclist. I wonder how much of his article is "we're not to blame for these cyclist deaths," where "we" is the Lycra and racing helmet crew. Rather, "they" are to blame, "they" of course being the working-class guys on their bikes in work clothes and no helmets. "They" don't know the rules of the road like "we" do, "they" don't have the bikes that "we" do, etc.

From my vantage point as a pedestrian in DC, the Anglos are the ones far more likely to blow through stop signs and red lights and cycle at speeds that make it more difficult for them to avoid potential trouble. The Hispanics typically are the ones toodling along on the sidewalks (which is something of an issue for us walkers), and they do stop for traffic rather than try to out-race it.

My observations are very likely incomplete and subject to the usual biases, but I don't see the habits of working-class Hispanic cyclists as a safety issue at all, except for the near-universal lack of helmets.

by Matt W on May 24, 2010 12:30 pm • link • report

I've had any number of friends complain about the mexicans on bike in arlington. Riding on the sidewalk and without any awareness of traffic rules. I suspect the article is an outgrowth of this private talk from the suburbs.

I'm not sure the data really shows much. Riding without a helmet is not a safety issue as much as a class issue in the US. The sidewalk riding is bad, but a lot of bikers do it. The "mexicans" i see do have beater bikes, but the bike themselves look better maintained than the hipster bikes I see downtown in terms of chains, brakes etc.

by charlie on May 24, 2010 12:31 pm • link • report

I think Halsey would probably say the following:

(1) I am actually a daily bicyclist myself.
(2) I was not writing a policy article, but an accident description article. To go beyond the detective's description of most bike incidents themselves and start writing about Fairfax County policies would make it a policy article.

The problem with this argument is that describing the root cause of an "accident" does not make it a policy article, it makes it a more accurately descriptive "accident" article. To ask why working class Latinos are often the victims here, and then report that Fairfax County is not meeting the needs of its new working class immigrants who can't afford cars, is no different than reporting that poor Latinos are biking without helmets or reflective gear. It's just a better, more thorough and accurate description of the accidents themselves.

by Ken Archer on May 24, 2010 12:34 pm • link • report

Aside from teaching those from south of the border the benefits of wearing light-coloured clothing while bicycling at night, as an Arlington resident and frequent Glebe Road driver (both North and South), I just wish someone would teach them the meaning conveyed by a Walk/Don't Walk sign, and the benefits of using a crosswalk instead of dashing into traffic mid-block. Sometimes I feel like an alligator in the Rio Grande.

by ksu499 on May 24, 2010 1:18 pm • link • report

I don't see the habits of working-class Hispanic cyclists as a safety issue at all, except for the near-universal lack of helmets.

And lights??

by David desJardins on May 24, 2010 1:19 pm • link • report

ksu499 -- speaking of generalizations, as a fellow Arlington resident and frequent Glebe Road driver, I just hope the readers of this forum don't think all of us are racist jerks. Or maybe you thought you were being funny? We all have something to wish for, I guess.

by Robin on May 24, 2010 1:51 pm • link • report

Yeah, and lights, or some way of alerting those around them that they are there. Hard to avoid that which you don't know is there.

The helmets and lights thing is a cultural difference. I'm wondering if something like the Mt. Pleasant bike swap might be an appropriate venue for educating Hispanic cyclists about safety concerns in a low-key way.

by Matt W on May 24, 2010 1:55 pm • link • report

Bicyclists in general piss me off. Cutting through traffic, running red lights and stop signs, and generally acting like the rules of the road don't apply to them. Hey morons, if you wanna use the road then follow its laws. Otherwise fuck off.

Even motorcyclists seem to care more about the rules of the road and their own life & limb than bicyclists.

by Martin on May 24, 2010 2:09 pm • link • report

Not sure how we're blaming cyclists here. This isn't a sharing-the-road or sidewalk or helmet or racial issue. The guy who died was on an off-road bike path, and the driver was going fast enough that no amount of protective gear would have saved him.

If the out-of-control car swerved into a cafe instead, would we blame the patrons for recklessly enjoying their coffee near the window without helmets on?

by andrew on May 24, 2010 2:40 pm • link • report

When I read the article, in addition to being sad about Abdelouahid Chadli and his family, I was thinking -- here, at least, is a bicycle-car collision where surely nobody could possibly blame the cyclist. But I guess not. Other cyclists, under completely different conditions, have also died in bicycle-car collisions, and apparently this is somehow relevant to Chadli's death.

by Miriam on May 24, 2010 2:55 pm • link • report

@Martin

Motorists in general piss me off. Cutting through traffic, running red lights and stop signs, and generally acting like the rules of the road don't apply to them. Hey morons, if you wanna use the road then follow its laws. Otherwise fuck off.

Even motorcyclists seem to care more about the rules of the road and their own life & limb than drivers.

by Matthias on May 24, 2010 3:14 pm • link • report

one possible explanation/reasoning behind trying to say that latinos are involved in the majority of these types of accidents is that, from what i have observed, who are the people most likely to be biking to and from suburban places like strip malls? folks who don't have cars to drive there. having lived in hattsville for a couple years, most of the people who i saw biking on busy wide roads, for example, bladensburg road, were people who maybe their only other option would be to wait for a bus that only comes once every 40 minutes. and these places are just about the least bike-friendly places i can think of.

by kate on May 24, 2010 3:20 pm • link • report

I don't see the journalistic malpractice here. What you have is a reporter on tight deadline putting together a pretty damn good piece of news reporting. I'll concede the point about the math involved in "majority," but there's no stereotyping here whatsoever. Halsey is trafficking mainly in facts and is putting them out there for context. Reggie White was guilty of stereotyping; Halsey is guilty only of collecting relevant information and putting it in front of his readers. Lighten up.

by Erik Wemple on May 24, 2010 5:53 pm • link • report

Erik,

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I agree the first part is good, but am not willing to just chalk this up to collecting information. To me the article amounts to: "A driver killed himself and a cyclist. The cyclist was north African. Meanwhile, some Fairfax officer said it's all those damn Latinos."

Context is everything. It's important what facts are selected. If the piece was just reporting the news, don't go making a really sketchy racial generalization on the side. If you're looking at the racial issue, make sure to get more than one officer's reaction.

by David Alpert on May 24, 2010 6:10 pm • link • report

SmartCycle.

Gets right to the point and there's no fluff involved.

May not be totally obvious to newcomers, but hey, there's a biking program you can learn about!

by C. R. on May 24, 2010 11:32 pm • link • report

You must remember it is the Halsey the "III". Don't forget the smugness.

The article was half-baked.

However, independent of this article, if you drive North/South on Georgia Avenue from Conn Avenue to Aspen Hill after hours you see people darting across the road -- from all angles and directions -- usually dressed in dark clothes.

Not to say this is "socioeconomic" phenom -- but the same is true when you drive down certain strips of DC. The behavior you observe in crossing the street, let's say at Good Hope Rd SE or Georgia Avenue NW -- is noticeably different than what occurs on let's say Wisconsin Avenue.

Just an observation.

by Johnny Uptown on May 25, 2010 10:19 am • link • report

Great to be on your site, David. I still disagree on this issue, though. "Sketchy" is a word that really shouldn't be mixed up with what Halsey and the Post did here. Nor should "stereotyping." Racial stereotyping is when you say offensive things about a given group's tendencies or tastes or predilections, in ways that tend to diminish the group. That's not even close to what's happening here. Halsey is just writing here that latinos appear to bear a disproportionate share of victimhood in bicycle accidents. That's not a sketchy assessment or an example of stereotyping. In fact, it's the very opposite: It's an example of the newspaper showing a social conscience.

by Erik Wemple on May 25, 2010 1:55 pm • link • report

@Erik W., as another commenter pointed out there is no data (reliable or otherwise) presented in the article to indicate Latino's are disproportionately affected. If you think that's the message then please tell us what proportion of bikers are Latino and what proportion of bike crashes involve Latino bikers. Thats the only way we'll know if Latinos are disproportionetly represented in bike crashes.

by Bianchi on May 25, 2010 2:13 pm • link • report

Wemple's hood pass is still revoked.

http://thewashingtonsyndicate.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/erik-wemple-and-the-city-papers-hood-pass-revoked/

by Johnny Uptown on May 25, 2010 2:19 pm • link • report

David, et al:
There's been a lot of thoughtful commentary on the piece.
A couple of points need clarification. Neville isn't either anti-cycling or racist. If my first piece left anyone with the impression that he was anti-cycling they should read his quote with a more objective eye. His point was that recreational cyclists/commuters tend to exhibit safer biking habits than those who are riding through necessity and who may be less familiar with traffic and the rules of the road.
As to the second point and the piece about Friday's fatal, its intent has been misread by enough people to convince me that I did Neville a disservice and muddled the point which I intended to make.
First, the background. For the intial piece, which was published Thursday, I reviewed every bike crash fatality in the region since 2006. I followed up by asking to interview the investigating officers for most of them. Montgomery County police sought to be as unhelpful as they could, but Fairfax arranged for me to talk with Neville and we spent a morning reviewing the files.
One of the things that already had surprised me in reviewing the overall regional bike fatality cases was that so many of them happened at night, particularly at times when few recreational/commuter cyclists are on the road.
I asked Neville about that, and his files provided the answer. His comment, which appeared in the story about Friday's bike fatal, was in response to my question about why there were so many nighttime bike fatals.
Now, getting to the story which you find troubling. I need to take you inside the sausage factory. Please don't take what follows as a defense of it, because I offer it by way of explanation only. The story is what it is, and the points that you and others have raised are well made and well taken by me.
The crash occurred just after 4 p.m. and the story was being posted live to our website with every bit of new information I could get from various police contacts in Fairfax. It grew sentence by sentence, and is often the case, some of the early information had to be corrected when more accurate stuff became available.
On the fly, and less artfully than (in hindsight) I would have liked, I did a notebook dump in the second half of the piece, with the goal of pointing out how this accident was distinctly different than most of the recent bike fatals in Fairfax. It happened in daylight, and the cyclist was on a bike path.
There wasn't any intent to blame the cyclist, as some have suggested, or raise false issue of ethnicity. The story, as Erik has pointed out, didn't intend to diminish Latinos by relating the frequency with which they have died, but, instead, to point out the vulnerability that their circumstances create. A guy doesn't ride a kids bike home in the dark after midnight on a frigid night because that's he's first choice. I wish I'd done a better job of making that point clear.
Finally, we anticipated a late-night update from Fairfax that would result in a complete write-thru of the piece. Through no fault of the police, the update never came, and that banged-out-in-a-hurry piece stood. Had I thought that was going to happen I would have gone back into it to smooth out the bumps.
In hindsight, I wish I had.
Best,
Ashley
(Two personal notes: using the III in my byline reflects not an attitude, but a desire that the few people who notice bylines might be clued in to the fact that I'm a guy. And, yes, I ride. I'm certified as a cycling coach by USACyling and USAT.)

by Ashley Halsey on May 25, 2010 3:03 pm • link • report

@Ashley, I'm not at all surprised you found more bike crashes at night. I'm surprised that you were surprised. I'll hypothesize that diminshed visibility at night contributes significantly to the observation that more bike crashes happen at night (if that's the case). Otherwise, knowing how many crashes happened and the ethnicities of those involved in crashes does not tell us that any one ethnicity is disproportionately involved in crashes. To make that statement we must know the distribution of ethnicities among all bike riders. Those in a crash/those at risk for a crash. It may be that Latino's are represented proportionately in crashes to what portion of all bike riders they make up.

by Bianchi on May 25, 2010 3:26 pm • link • report

Ashley,

Thank you so much for stopping by and giving us your perspectives.

I understand completely how articles can be rushed and not come out as we hope. Believe me, I've written plenty of articles on the blog here which I later realized didn't come out as I intended.

Usually when that happens, I realize it because other people post in the comments to say that they think I was off base. I hope that the feedback from this forum provided a similar value.

Perhaps I should make it more clear more frequently, but I really appreciate the work that our area's reporters do, and I have enjoyed many of your articles, as I've said before. I know it's not an easy job to get the "first draft of history" correct.

Thanks for giving us your thoughts and for taking the feedback in the spirit of constructive improvement. (And if and when I write something that's worthy of some criticism as well, please feel free to let me know!)

by David Alpert on May 25, 2010 3:39 pm • link • report

Of course I can't speak for the details involved but two of the three crashes that Halsey listed involved an underage drunk driver and a driver who hit the cyclist in a crosswalk. In either of those two instances, the Latino cyclist could hypothetically been replaced with a young, white, college educated professional, or a brain surgeon with four kids. I fail to see how one can stereotype victims based on accidents that were clearly caused by reckless drivers.

by Scoot on May 25, 2010 4:38 pm • link • report