I can only see a blue plastic thing and a tree branch…The classic excuse from motorists when getting into accidents, including those involving cyclists, is “I didn’t see him!“It hammers home the fact that the bull in the china shop isn’t attentive and therefore we need to take measures that tame the bull. This story takes it to a whole new level: By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS November 5, 2009OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – It’s not unusual to see a deer or a cow crossing Oklahoma’s rural highways. But an elephant? An Oklahoma couple driving home from church nearly slammed into a giant pachyderm that had escaped from a nearby circus late Wednesday.
''Didn't have time to hit the brakes. The elephant blended in with the road,'' driver Bill Carpenter said Thursday. ''At the very last second I said 'elephant!'''
Carpenter, 68, said he swerved his SUV at the last second and ended up sideswiping the 29-year-old female Asian elephant on U.S. 81 in Enid, about 80 miles north of Oklahoma City.
I hope that elephant-sized pedestrian flags will be set up quicksmart at this location and all elephants - and other large mammals - will be given courses in how to wave those flags more aggressively.
Read the full story here. Thanks to Jeff from the League of American Bicyclists for the link.
Addendum: Brett just added this to the comments section. It gets better. Hit-and-run driver claimed he didn't see 6-foot-tall orange rabbit on the pedicabBy Aimee Green, The OregonianOctober 28, 2009, 8:58PMPedicab driver Kate Altermatt still can't believe the driver of a Mercedes didn't see her pedaling down Northwest Fourth Avenue last Easter. Altermatt, who is 6 feet tall, was wearing a bright orange bunny suit, and the Cascadia Pedicab was lit up with reflectors and a blinking red light."I was very visible," she said.The crash sent her flying and totaled the pedicab. She lay stunned on the pavement for a minute, then walked over to the driver's side window. She said she smelled alcohol on his breath."He was like '$100! $100 and I leave,'" Altermatt recalled. "And I was like, no. I started screaming. I said 'You're drunk! You're going to go to jail! I don't want your money!'"Wednesday in Multnomah County Circuit Court, Altermatt finally got to confront the driver, who testified that he didn't see the pedicab because he was fumbling for a dropped cell phone.After a daylong trial, Judge Karin Immergut found Edward Cespedes-Rodriguez guilty of hit-and-run driving for leaving the scene of the crash.But Immergut cleared the 34-year-old Southwest Portland man of recklessly endangering another person. That disappointed Altermatt, who testified that Cespedes-Rodriguez looked her in the eye and intentionally hit her a second time as he sped away sometime after 2 a.m. April 12.
***Brett adds: "The punch line is, he won't even go to jail. Sentence: 25 hours of community service. The judge was a Republican federal attorney under GW Bush. Whatever happened to "personal responsibility" and "law and order" and all those other Republican campaign slogans?"
