Kristin [IRL]
Sent this gem to the City of Pleasant Hill today:
I am writing to voice a complaint about the sewer grates along Buskirk Avenue. A bicycle accident last Wednesday, July 23rd, landed me in the hospital for 4 nights with a liver laceration and the need for stitches in my chin. While cycling through the streets of your city, en route to dine at one of the seemingly few restaurants left in your city, my front bicycle tire slipped COMPLETELY into the vertical sewer grate across from the Chevron and Best Buy on the Southbound side of Buskirk Ave., just before Oak Park Blvd.
As a result of this hazard I was ejected from my bicycle and thrown to the pavement amidst moving traffic. Once I was able to move myself to the sidewalk, the “softest” thing I could find to rest my twisted body on was a 2.5 foot wide patch of gravel, littered with broken glass and infested with ants. As my friends were scrambling to get my bicycle out of the street we were passed by a Pleasant Hill Patrol Officer who proceeded to ignore our emergency transgressing on the “sidewalk” and instead pulled into the Best Buy parking lot, never to be seen again.
Because of the width of the spaces between the vertical lines in the grate, and the fact that the lines run in the same direction as moving bicyclists, some with tires thin enough to slip between the grates, your road appears to be UNSAFE for bicycle activity.
While I am not an avid cyclist, some of the major streets in your city comprise my daily route to school and also provide access to the popular Iron Horse Trail. After this FREAK accident, I fear getting back onto my bicycle and riding on streets dotted with the same dangerous vertical grates that caused my injuries.
Please SERIOUSLY consider making your streets more friendly to the many cyclists who frequent them. Not only did the grates prove to be dangerous and problematic on this street, it was heartbreaking to stare at the safety afforded to the northbound bicyclists through the provision of a bicycle lane as I lay injured among glass and ants on the bicycle-lane-less southbound side.
Please contact me with any replies, questions, comments, or shared concerns.
Walnut Creek Resident/Pleasant Hill Student,
Kristin Jacobson
