Bicylist Struck by Car on Key Blvd

[S. Arlington Observer]

Just saw this on ARLNow as well. I never assume a driver will actually stop at a stop sign.

[Tania]

“According to scanner traffic, the victim rolled over the hood of the car and onto its windshield, cracking it on the passenger side.”

That’s more than a cracked windshield…Holy crap.

[mstone]

@Tania 129522 wrote:

That’s more than a cracked windshield…Holy crap.

To be fair, windshields are actually designed to do that on impact: it hurts less than hitting glass that’s hard as a sheet of steel.

[wheelswings]

@mstone 129528 wrote:

To be fair, windshields are actually designed to do that on impact: it hurts less than hitting glass that’s hard as a sheet of steel.

Exactly right. We can thank Ralph Nader for the improved windshield design.

Before Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe at Any Speed, car dashboards were usually made of metal. Seat belts were available only at exotic auto parts stores, where they were expensive and customers had to bolt them to the car’s floorboards. Even at low speeds, a car wreck could propel passengers into the metal dashboard or snap the driver’s neck on the metal steering wheel. At mid-speed wrecks (say, 20 miles an hour), passengers could be thrown into the windshield, which was made of “safety glass” that could chisel a passenger’s face and body. Car doors were not attached to the car’s body firmly enough to withstand collision forces, and would often pop open or off in an accident, which would instantly make the car’s frame (and the passengers inside) much more likely to be crumpled by the crash.
http://www.nndb.com/people/788/000023719/

[jrenaut]

@mstone 129528 wrote:

To be fair, windshields are actually designed to do that on impact: it hurts less than hitting glass that’s hard as a sheet of steel.

To be fair, journalists are actually trained to choose words precisely…

[mstone]

@jrenaut 129533 wrote:

To be fair, journalists are actually trained to choose words precisely…

I’m pretty sure that the windshield is, in fact, cracked. (Dictionary says “To break or burst, with or without entire separation of the parts”.) It’s not technically shattered because it’s still in one piece. Perhaps “crazed and deformed” is a better description, though a bit over-wordy? At any rate, I was responding more to the “holy crap” part of the original post than to the word choice, and meant to address whether the state of the windshield reflected a particularly violent collision. (That is, the a modern windshield is intended to deform under relatively low force, so judging an impact by the state of a window it isn’t the same as judging a multi car collision by how bent they are. IIRC, modern bumpers & hoods are actually expected to roll a pedestrian into the window, which then collapses to lessen the transmitted force. In a really bad pedestrian collision you’d also get crumpling of the sheet metal, but the picture is cropped too tightly to see if that happened here–which somewhat implies that it didn’t because that would be good tabloid imagery. TL;DR: it may look worse than it is.)

[jrenaut]

@mstone 129538 wrote:

I’m pretty sure that the windshield is, in fact, cracked.

Yeah, I get your point and wasn’t really disagreeing, but as far as windshields go, “cracked” means “you can still drive the car and maybe if you get pulled over you’ll be forced to fix it”, and what happened to that windshield is well beyond that.

All that to say I hope the cyclist is okay and the responsible party is appropriately punished.

[Steve O]

@jrenaut 129541 wrote:

responsible party is appropriately punished.

Right now the only people being punished are morons like me who start reading the ArlNow comments.

[mstone]

@Steve O 129550 wrote:

Right now the only people being punished are morons like me who start reading the ArlNow comments.

dude, don’t read the comments. ever.

[Author]

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