Also, I wonder what the chances are that he waited till he sobered up to turn himself in.
One of the posters also claims to have met the suspect and attributes the "smirk" to some sort of skeleto-muscular deformity, though it's hard to determine validity with anonymous internet posters.
What will be the very next thing that happens if you actually succeed in doing this?
See for instance http://www.autoliv.com/ProductsAndInnovations/ActiveSafetySy... which describes their "vision systems", the features of which include pedestrian-detection.
It's possible that Volvo has its own in-house tech for this, but Autoliv are huge.
When I moved it actually struck me how poorly lit the roads in Durham were, compared to where we come from in Europe. I'm guessing it's a mixture of being much more expensive (wider roads and much longer) and the city organizers not giving pedestrian/cyclists much thought (sidewalks seem to be scattered randomly around the town).
But mediocre roads in Durham are the norm, unfortunately. My least favorite was always University heading South/Southwest through Forest Hills. In a hundred feet, your bike lane disappears and you are suddenly on a narrow two-lane with little shoulder, in a right-hand curve with an uphill elevation. There's precious little visibility in either direction thanks to the trees and curves, and the oncoming traffic (northbound) traffic has an awkward intersection that tends to cause people to creep into the middle of the lane. (I may be misremembering the exact details, but that intersection has really stuck with me.)
The drivers in the Triangle are also pretty awful. I've never been yelled more or had more things thrown at me. The cup of ice landing on you is not so bad (it can even be a little refreshing on a hot day) but the handful of change is pretty frightening.
Durham is a great town in many ways, but its bicycling infrastructure is not one of them. Such a shame that it claimed another life.
Another thing I've noticed is that many US drivers don't know how to, or are uncomfortable dealing with, driving near cyclists. Sometimes they're just careless and hostile toward cyclists - in one instance, I saw a driver attempt to drive a person on bike off the road with his car in an apparent fit of rage.
Also, there are some stretches of road where bicycle clubs seem to frequent. What they do is get a large pack of people, and end up blocking traffic on a 5-mile stretch (they purposely take up the whole lane, probably safer that way I guess, and when there is a bottleneck instead of moving right they take up both lanes). This ends up instilling a large amount of hostility in drivers, so when they see a loan bicycle they tend to be very aggressive (I've had water balloons, even beer bottles thrown at me before, even though I was far right of the white line).
sorry, couldn't resist.
On a serious note, it's not likely more/better reflective clothing would have helped. It sounds like the driver was deliberately and abruptly deviating from the normal lane to bypass traffic. It was not a decision made with the safety of others in mind.
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468102
This was a pretty good example of something similar that happened an year back, and I'm sure there are more examples (I just never bothered to pay attention to them).
And now a useful safety feature is no longer available.
http://www.10news.com/news/driver-cited-for-using-traffic-li...
Don't do this.
Please put a dollar in the douchebag jar.
For what it's worth, I would recommend that everybody have their license suspended at one point or another. I never really knew how to drive safely before I had to drive knowing that any mistake I made might send me to jail.
I can't speak for the man in question, but if he's anything like me, 1) his suspended license may not speak at all as a reflection of his driving ability, and 2) if he was aware of the suspension, would likely have been on his best behavior.
Huh? You drove after you knew you had a suspended license? You had to drive?
If I understand what it means to not have a license, the thing to do in that situation is to have someone else drive your car to a long-term parking spot if it isn't in one already, and just leave it there until you have it reinstated.
At the time, I was working a part time, $7 an hour night-shift job across town, and had just had to expend the paltry savings I had accrued to replace the aforementioned car that I wrecked. In short, I couldn't afford to pay the $50 fine when it was due, and couldn't afford to miss work.
Before I could pay the $50, somebody had broken the window of my new car, broken in, and stolen all my books for class (which were extremely expensive to replace, along with the window. Before I got around to paying the court, they had suspended my driving privileges. Cost to reinstate was $236.74 (I remember it distinctly, even 16 years later as being so reasonable, yet so painfully high at the same time.)
It took me a few months to save that money up, and in the interim, I made a somewhat ill-advised judgement call. It wasn't as though my license had been suspended for any reasons to do with my driving ability, and I needed the job. It was at night, so mass transit wasn't an option, and at the time, none of my friends worked nights, so getting rides wasn't really an option either. My options, as I saw them, was to drive illegally and hope to not get caught, or to relinquish the job I had and dig further into certain financial ruin. I chose the former.