Crash in Cottesloe – but I’m ok

16 Comments

by dr ronny

I just got home. It’s 7:05am on Thursday 20th January 2011. I’m oriented to time, place and person. Check.  The Prime Minister is Julia Guillard.

I met the group at Swanbourne this morning at 5:50am to make about 10 riders and joined the back of the group next to Jordan.  As we came up the last little rise on North St heading towards Marine Parade, I let the guys know that there was a car behind us just before we got onto the downhill to the roundabout. We turned left at the roundabout onto Marine Parade. I went single file behind Jordan as a couple of guys towards the front took a few seconds to get to the left. We had eased to a steady pace of about 25kph to let the ute pass as he came up the middle of the road. He  reached the front of the group as we were passing through a pedestrian island. I couldn’t see how much space there was but there didn’t look like there was a lot for the ute and the front riders to squeeze through.  A few words were exchanged (I couldn’t make out what they were) and I was thankful to see that the ute had passed everyone without incident. It was now in front of the group, clear of every single rider.

I looked over my right shoulder to check if there was anybody else behind. When I looked ahead, there was nowhere to go as Jordan and Jamie had come to a near complete stop in front of me. Jordan’s rear wheel was only about 1 meter away and there was no time at all to brake. A split second later, I found myself  looking at the sky flat on my back in the middle of the road.

The car behind us stopped and I was glad I hadn’t gone under it. Several walkers/joggers came up to see if  everyone was ok. People started saying things like “he was a maniac” and telling us they had his rego number.

When I had collected myself, I found out that the driver, once he had passed us, had stopped dead in the middle of the road and got out of his car looking for an altercation. Apparently when he saw the crash, he got back into his car and sped off. That was pretty stupid. At least 3 people got his rego plate and there were about 15 witnesses to the incident. Jordan exchanged details with the car behind us who had witnessed the whole thing.

I started to feel a little sore by this stage. My face began to sting and the right side of my body was starting to ache. I got back on the bike after a couple of minutes and tucked my clear glasses into my jersey. When we got to the other side of the shops, they fell off my jersey and onto the road and I told Jordan to head on with the rest of the guys. It just wasn’t my morning.

I went back and picked up my glasses, put them on and then rode towards home. As I was riding home, the following things began running through my mind: “My right knee hurts…My hip is sore…My face stings….Emma is going to kill me…..I just got passed by a lady on a flat bar commuter with panniers….Oh, I’m going 12.6 kph…..12.9kph…..ouch…..My knee hurts. My hip is sore. My face stings.”

Another half hour of this and I was home. I got more sympathy from Emma than I was expecting and made myself some toast with the bread I had made last night and covered it with an inch of peanut butter. Then I had another one. And another. Hmmmmm……..comfort eating.

In the end, another close call. Too close. I’ll let you guys know how it goes with the police report and the recovery. Ride safe. Go home to your kids and peanut butter toast.

16 thoughts on “Crash in Cottesloe – but I’m ok”

  1. Far out Ronnie, thats not cool at all. Chill out and hope you feel better. We can all share the road comfortably I dont understand the need for so much aggression. I hope kharma catches up with the rat bag.

  2. Ouchies.

    Glad to hear you got home more or less in one piece. I’ve sent the details of the car and witness to Pete to forward on to you.

    It was a weird ride. After all of this, when we were on Preston Pt Road, Jamie and I were on the front, and about 50 metres in front of us, there were two cyclists just riding along. All of a sudden one of the guys in front just clipped his friends wheel and went down in a heap (he seemed to be ok and didn’t want/need our help).

    The cycling gods were clearly angry this morning.

  3. Hi guys, I’m after a better description of the car and the driver for the police. Also, if anyone can remember the license plate, can they let me know. The one we have is for a landrover (??) If anyone (like Gus) can help, that would be great.

    Cheers
    Ronny

  4. Hi Ronny, glad to here your ok, the ute was white, aluminium tray ,std tradesman style, not sure what make , the guy was white Caucasian short hair not sure on colour … He was to busying yelling at us ” to get off the road usual it’s not a bike path etc.. to notice the island ,so nearly took us out at the front…

  8. Surely they have enough information on the plate and the car to be able to narrow that down.

    You can get small thumb drive video cams that would fit under the handle bars with out being in the way mark.

  9. That’s what the driver in the car behind said too. Only thing is that that licence plate belongs to a landcruiser. I’ve made a report and the police will investigate it. The officers at Cottesloe police station were next to useless. They didn’t help at all and told me to ring a traffic hotline. I spoke to an officer in Midland at a call center who was FANTASTIC. The matter has been referred to my local police station and they will investigate the matter (ie. call the owner of the vehicle with that license plate etc). I’ll let you know when I hear something. Hopefully it won’t be Cottesloe that will be investigating it.

  10. sorry to hear about the crash ronny. hope you feel better soon and see you on saturday.

    could be the plates are ripped off a landcruiser and put onto the ute (i.e. illegal plates?)

    white tradey ute with a metal tray is usually a colorado or a hilux in my on site experience (cheaper ones are great wall)

  11. Glad to hear you’re alright Ronny. I agree with Jason – sounds like the plates are illegal. There’s alot more illigle drivers out there than you think. The blitz by police one night pulled over 100 drivers unlicensed! Could also be Isuzu D-Max (same as Holden Colorado), Nissan Navarra, Mitsubishi Triton… Hilux probably most common. Actually if the plates are for landcruiser, it may be a H75 Landcruiser with trayback?

  12. Sorry to hear someone in an idiot tinbox caused you to crash ronny. Karma will one day catch up to the moron! May he drive into a river & have to face you in hospital!

    Take care & hopefully you’ll be cool for saturday!

  13. sort to hear about your fall Ronny, good you were not hurt further. a bike rode into the back of me on the bike path this morning and he went down. lucky he did not hurt himself more. he left a hole in my knicks and in my bottom.

    cycle gods definitely unhappy today..

    stay safe everyone.

  14. If there is only one thing to be learned from this, keep cool and some body commit the rego plate to memory and better still write down on your mobile phone. Its very easy for one person to get the first lot of letters and another to get the numbers. Accurate description of the vehicle is always a bonus. A visual of the driver is even better and a photo is priceless.

  15. for a real cheap bike cam i grabbed a Swann Thumbcam from Dick Smith’s for $61.
    Cat No. “DVR-415”. Then you need to buy an 8Gb microSD memory chip for around
    $45.

    It’s colour with audio and a reasonably good quality of picture provided you get a nice firm stable mounting arrangement onto the bike – the tricky bit. I’ve mounted mine to my disfunctional computer which is really disfunctional now i’ve drilled two mounting holes into it.

    Provides approx 1 hour of video and is loaded up onto pc just like a file super easy.

    Tested it out today – would be certainly useful in the instance of an incident like the above, though not able to get the rego’s from any distance or at speed.

    Otherwise for fancy high resolution stuff there’s the more XC Go-Pro’s.

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