The Adventures of Super Grandpa, the Newest Action Hero!
In the spirit of Don Quixote, he attacks cars with nothing but his bicycle!
Yesterday, at roughly 8:30 am, I took a chance on the weather and got on my bike to go for a ride. I’ve been biking an average of two to three hours a day for the past year and a half, since retiring from the computer industry; yesterday was no different. I was hit by a car within half a mile of our home while going downhill at about 15 mph on a quiet street.
The Tesla driver, coming up the hill from the opposite direction, “had the sun in her eyes” and never saw me as she turned directly into my path. I hit the brakes as hard as I could but it wasn’t enough to stop me in time. I ended up hitting the Tesla on its front right bumper as it came to a halt.
I rammed head on into the car, flew off the bike, jammed my right knee into the windshield, somersaulted over the vehicle, and landed behind it. In my mind was the image of a new Superhero, Super Grandpa, leaping into the air, executing a perfect double twist, and landing gracefully. All that was missing from the picture was my flowing cape and Depends adult diapers.
I suspect a video of the event would look a bit different, showing me clumsily grasping at the brakes, then tumbling head over heels while screaming and flailing my arms, finally coming to rest behind the vehicle in a heap.
I prefer my version.
The Tesla driver was so distraught that she jumped out of her car, forgetting to put it in Park. I had to tell her to go back in and stop the car before it rolled backwards on top of me!
I was surprisingly alert, never lost consciousness, and was up and walking within a few seconds. My right knee and left shoulder were banged up from the impact, respectively, with the windshield and the ground but no other part of my body seemed to have even touched any surfaces. There were quite a few scratches but no pain whatsoever. Later X-Rays and CT Scans at the hospital confirmed there were no broken bones, no concussions, not even any major injuries. I had walked away with barely a scratch.
A few hours later, after getting home from the hospital, I posted the above photos on Facebook with a quick note (“Broke my bike in half but you should see what I did to the Tesla with my right knee as I somersaulted over the top!”) and went off to give a previously scheduled talk in San Francisco. Did I mention my superpower is stubbornness?
By the time I got home later that night, dozens of friends and family had commented and texted, telling me how lucky I was, thanking God, and telling me to count my blessings. As I thought about the event, though, I slowly came to the realization that luck had absolutely nothing to do with what happened.
I walked away from the accident not due to luck but because I’ve been biking three hours a day every day; my body was in a fit enough condition to deal with the trauma. The police officer was surprised at how calm I was, offering emotional support to the Tesla driver. The doctor in the Trauma Center couldn’t believe my resting heart rate was 40 beats per minute.
Ten milliseconds sooner, five miles per hour faster, a different turning radius, twenty more pounds of weight around my waist, and the results would have been very different. But is that luck? Or is luck just our brains rationalizing about what “could” have happened?
It’s important to distinguish fact from fiction. A lion failing to bring down a gazelle in the Sahara doesn’t blame his bad luck nor does the gazelle exchange high fives with his buddies for his good luck. It is only us, homo sapiens, that imbue experiences with fictions, constructs of our minds, blaming and thanking everything from luck to karma to God— entities that have no physical existence anywhere other than in our collective minds — for physical events.
The facts of the matter are clear: I was traveling at x miles an hour going down a hill of y degrees, sun coming up at an angle of z degrees, car travelling at w mph, etc. We can painfully go through every factor that led up to the accident and nowhere in there, I claim, will you find luck, karma, or God. There are no such things in the universe except in the minds of men.
I racked up over 6000 miles on my bike last year. Statistically speaking, sooner or later, I was bound to have an accident. I’m not going to stop biking but I do hope (and believe) we can make the roads a lot safer for cyclists and pedestrians — and luck has nothing to do with it.
If the auto-pilot and emergency braking systems in Tesla’s and other future automotive platforms are smart enough to detect and avoid accidents between vehicles traveling at 70 mph, there is no reason why they can’t do the same with a bicycle going 15 mph. The latter is even more important because the cyclist is not protected by two tons of steel.
There were many seconds during which an automated braking system with intelligent image recognition could have detected and prevented the accident yesterday. Clearly that didn’t happen in this case even though I must have been visible to the Tesla’s sensors for several seconds before the collision.
As my alter-ego, Super Grandpa, I like nothing better than battling cars with my bicycle and my right knee. But, as a real person in the real world, I’d love to see the video and sensor data from Tesla from the accident yesterday. I’m sure it can be used to improve existing algorithms to save lives and money in similar situations in the future. Others may not be as “lucky” as I was.
