A Bike Ride That Cost a Pinky Finger
Grant Hamilton, shortly after losing his pinky finger in a crash where a vehicle struck his bike. (Source: Grant Hamilton.)
On a summer evening, as the sun dipped past the horizon, Grant Hamilton and his wife biked a few blocks home from a family birthday party. What started out as a normal, happy day, transformed into a night that changed the trajectory of Hamilton’s life. As he entered a familiar intersection, thinking it was safe, a car made an unexpected turn and struck him.
“I tried to swerve, I tried to brake and get out of the way and it just didn’t happen,” said Hamilton. “I remember the car hitting me and sort of twisting my wheel around.” He then tumbled over the hood and fell back to the ground. In the chaos, he lost his pinky finger and suffered numerous minor injuries. While the event was no less than traumatic, Hamilton doesn’t blame the driver or himself for the crash. Instead, he's advocating for safer streets in his town of Brandon, Manitoba, Canada.
“I don't think it's necessarily [the driver's] fault,” said Hamilton. “For whatever reason, he didn't see me there. And he thought he was safe turning. We both felt safe entering that intersection and in the end, it wasn't safe. So there's some underlying thing there that is not my fault and not his fault. I think that maybe there is a deeper cause to this.”
Hamilton said people in the community were curious about the crash, and what caused it. When the police report released that the driver was unlicensed, it made the reason for the crash seem clear: reckless driving. But Hamilton felt that didn’t encapsulate the whole story, so he decided to clear things up and create a Tweet. His Twitter updates became a way to inform his circle about what happened to him, how he was recovering, and his thoughts on safe street design.
When Hamilton sent out that first Tweet, he wasn’t thinking directly about the advocacy his experience would become. More so, he just wanted to share his story. In the years prior to the crash, Hamilton had written about bike and street safety for his local newspaper, The Brandon Sun. But it wasn’t until after the crash that he felt a need to take serious action toward creating an awareness for better transportation opportunities.
It took a few months before Hamilton was able to get back on his bike. During Hamilton’s recovery, he spent many hours resting and unable to partake in physical work activities. For a while, even holding a phone up to his ear was too straining.
“Honestly, I was lucky that it was a car that I could go up and over rather than a big truck or an SUV that I might have gone down and under,” said Hamilton. “That could have been a really different outcome.”
Once he was physically able, despite the nervousness to bike again, Hamilton pedaled out. This time, he invited city council candidates and residents to take an in-person look at gaps in Brandon’s cycling infrastructure. With the new election season filling up the political environment at the time, Hamilton thought it the perfect opportunity to weave street safety into the thoughts of potential city officials.
“I could have easily gone to the council and done a delegation with PowerPoint and say, here's an area where there's no [pedestrian] connection,” said Hamilton. “But to lead them there and say, hey, we need to get across the street here, but I can barely talk to you because the cars are roaring past.”
The ride included about 16 kilometers (about 10 miles) throughout the city. According to Hamilton, Brandon has a pretty good multi-use transportation system on the outskirts and suburban areas of the city. But if a person wanted to walk or bike for more than just an enjoyable ride around neighborhoods, like getting into the inner part of the city for work or entertainment, they’d find themselves in more potentially unsafe scenarios.
Cycling enthusiasts and city council candidates pose for a photo before departing on a tour of Brandon's various multi-use recreational paths. (Source: The Brandon Sun/Kyle Darbyson, used with permission.)
Hamilton (right) discusses bike safety and cycling infrastructure outside Brandon city hall. (Source: The Brandon Sun/Kyle Darbyson, used with permission.)
“We have some really big gaps in our transportation, and I think getting them [council candidates] out there and experiencing that on two wheels opened their eyes in a way that was maybe more tangible,” said Hamilton.
Since the crash, Hamilton is understandably more aware of “close calls.” Whether biking, walking, or even driving, he is more alert to his transportation surroundings. Yet even with this heightened awareness, he still experienced a situation where he nearly got hit a second time.
Luckily, this time, the driver noticed him and stomped on the brakes. The near miss left both parties startled.
“But I can’t get it out of my head,” Hamilton tweeted a week later. “Once again, this driver didn’t do anything obviously wrong. She simply didn’t see me. And once again, I was doing everything right—biking to the traffic laws, in a designed cycling space. But the system left me totally unprotected. And this was in a school zone, where things are supposed to be at their safest.”
Hamilton, and the city of Brandon, are becoming more and more aware that crashes and “close calls” are not always the result of “reckless driving.” Instead, it is the design of streets that affect human behavior and determine the actions people take. Over the past year, Brandon has adopted a Vision Zero plan to address this and reduce crash deaths and serious injuries. Their guiding principle, according to the manager of strategic infrastructure, Jennifer Coey, is that “in every situation a person might fail, the road system should not.”
“People drive, walk, or bike through intersections all the time and never think twice,” said Hamilton, “but it's not always safe. Even if it appears safe, we're just used to [a level of danger] and it's common. But if there's some way that we can make it safer, why don’t we do that?”
What can communities do differently to make streets safer? Join us in the Crash Analysis Studio, where we (with the help of advocates like Grant Hamilton) model a new standard of care for cities, towns, and neighborhoods concerned about automobile fatalities. We can move beyond the myth of “driver error” to create a more thorough framework for analyzing—and then reducing—car crashes.
Bike Talk is a Los Angeles-based radio show dedicated to the idea that we need to prioritize bikes as a form of public transportation, and they recently invited Strong Towns President Chuck Marohn to appear on an episode.