If you’ve ever seen someone biking around town pulling a bright yellow cello case in a bike trailer, you’ve seen Bradley Hawkins. Even without his cello, he’s a self-identified “die-hard bicycle dude” who has been biking pretty much everywhere for a long time. But all that could have easily come to an end last week when someone driving a Hyundai Elantra ran into him from behind while he was biking on Lake Washington Boulevard on a section of road where the city under Mayor Bruce Harrell’s leadership recently cut some planned speed humps and intersection safety improvements. The person responsible never stopped, fleeing the scene and leaving behind a pile of broken car parts and a seriously injured Hawkins.
“I feel really lucky,” said a mobile but bandaged-up Hawkins when I spoke to him in his home a few days after the collision. Hawkins is a longtime reader and friend of the blog. His bike is damaged well beyond repair, but he somehow didn’t have any broken bones. He has pain between his shoulders and in his lower back, and he has scrapes and bruises all over, but it could have been a lot worse.
“If I had had the cello behind, I bet I wouldn’t have gotten hit,” Hawkins joked (or maybe he was serious, he did bike his cello to Friday Harbor once). But he was on his way home from a long three-day tour of Oregon and Washington “to see as many volcanoes as I could.” He started in Breitenbush and rode to Mounts Jefferson, Hood, Adams, St. Helens and Rainier. On August 13, he woke up on St. Helens and rode to Rainier before heading back to Seattle…