Ghost ride in Hamilton planned to honour late cyclist

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Published July 7, 2022 at 12:45 pm

Cyclists in the Hamilton area are planning a ghost ride to honour the 52-year-old man who died in an early-morning crash this week.

A post from Cycle Hamilton said the memorial ride will leave from Southam Park at 5:30 p.m. on Monday (July 11) and go to the crash site on Upper Wentworth St., near the Lincoln M. Alexander Parkway on the Mountain. On Tuesday morning, a man whose name has not been released died after at collision around 5:30 a.m. with the driver of a minivan. The man lacked vital signs when responding officers from Hamilton Police arrived.

The death was the first of a cyclist in Hamilton since March 2021. But the city’s annual collision report shows over three-quarters of cyclists involved in collisions last year — 77.4 per cent — were injured. There was also a year-over-year 5.3-per-cent increase in collisiosn involving cyclists in ’21.

Traditionally, during a ghost ride, riders meet up and ring bike bells as they pedal to the spot where a fellow rider met their end. They leave behind a bike that is painted in white and draped in flowers.

“It’s important that folks come out to honour another one of us lost to road safety failures and to keep each other safe as we take the road to the memorial site,” Cycle Hamilton says.

Hamilton has had 14 traffic deaths so far in 2022. Ten of the victims were either on foot or riding a bicycle. The death on Tuesday was the first of a cyclist since March 2021, when a 47-year-old man from Stoney Creek died after being struck on Eastport Dr. near the Hamilton/Burlington border. (That crash was not counted in city statistics since Eastport is a provincially maintained road.) The nine pedestrian deaths already this year match the toll from 2021, which was a 10-year high.

While the Mountain has a suburban layout, it also has a Mohawk College campus and health-care facilities from both Hamilton-area hospital networks. That means the area has many students and healthcare workers who get around on two human-powered wheels, or are generally more open to doing so.

On Wednesday, city councillors on the public works committee approved a Complete Streets Road Design manual intended to emphasize safety of vulnerable users. At that same meeting, Couns. John-Paul Danko and Esther Pauls (wards 8 and 7 respectively) said they would be pushing add more continuous bike lanes on the Mountain.

Prior to the fatal crash, Ward 14 council candidate Kojo Damptey also called for more protected bike lanes on the West Mountain.

Overall, Hamilton had a huge drop in collisions involving cyclists and pedestrians from 2018 to ’19. But the tally has crept up in each of the last two full years, in spite of a pandemic protection-related drops in overall vehicle traffic volume. That was detailed in the collision report presented yesterday:

The full collision report, which looks at trends from the last five years, is available online.

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