One very blessed and quick reflexed motorcycle rider was struck by a car last Wednesday that ran a red light on Ellis and Cyril Magnin near Union Square. The crash totaled his bike and flipping the rider into the air, but miraculously, he managed to land neatly on his feet after flipping 360 degrees, like the ninja he secretly is. Luckily for us, this amazing event was caught on the rider’s helmet cam, which he posted to Reddit as proof of his invincibility and SF’s terrible driver issues. What’s even more amazing is that if you look carefully, pedestrians had already started crossing the street in front of the red-light-running driver, and had the agile 2011 Daytona 675 rider not taken the hit, this could’ve been a much more serious, and sadly, a much more common type of accident.
Getting hit by cars in San Francisco is somehow insanely regular, where on average, three pedestrians are struck by cars or trucks every day, and that’s not even counting bike riders, or motorcyclists like in the video. And while our city is trying to bring down the number of traffic deaths to zero with the appropriately titled “Vision Zero” initiative, at the very least we can take solace in our good natured inclination to help. You can see that following the crash, pedestrians rush over to see if the biker is okay, despite his unbelievable, catlike dismount. A nurse comes over within seconds and asks if he needs an ambulance and stays with him while someone else runs to get him a chair. Even the driver of the car that hit him is there, wearing a baseball hat, and puts his hand on the biker’s knee to reassure him he’s alright.
SFist snagged a picture of the broken bike before the original poster deleted his account and took down the image (although not the video). In the video description, the rider credits his survival to ATGAT, which stands for “all the gear all the time,” a nice reminder for other motorcyclists, especially those without lightning fast reflexes and crazy good luck. SF is an unnecessarily dangerous city. Ride, walk and drive carefully.
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