The Bronx will be getting another ghost bike: This morning an unidentified woman was run over by a BX 17 bus heading southbound on Crotona Avenue just before 8:30 a.m. Witnesses say the 57-year-old cyclist, whose name is being withheld for now, rode into the path of the bus after getting doored or swerving to avoid a car door. "The bus was coming and the lady swerved to get out of the way of the car door," passenger Angel Otero tells the Daily News. "It happened so fast. Everybody got off the bus gasping and crying when they saw her."
But NY1, in a report headlined "Cyclist Dies After Striking City Bus," hears that the cyclist "was thrown into the traffic after a motorist opened a car door into the bike." NY1's choice of words has Transportation Alternatives spokesman Wiley Norvell shaking his head; he tells us, "So according to NY1, a cyclist who was knocked into traffic by a car door 'struck' a bus? Note the tense of this verb. A 25,000 lb vehicle collides with a 57 year-old woman on a bike, and she is somehow the one who does the striking?"1010WINS also reports that she was "hit by the bus after she struck the door."
The victim was pronounced dead at the scene when paramedics arrived, and the bus driver was taken to the hospital and treated for shock. A spokesman for the New York City Transit Authority tells the News he'll be given a routine alcohol test, and detectives have interviewed the driver who opened the door of a 2005 Toyota Camry. (Norvell tells us it's illegal to open a car door into the path of a cyclist; in 2007 a 65-year-old man was killed riding his bike to work after he was struck by an open car door in the bike lane on 6th Avenue. No charges were filed.)
Locals say the victim rode her bike on Crotona Avenue every day to go grocery shopping. "She always had a kind word for me. She was a sweetheart," resident Manny Garcia tells the News. "She loved riding that bike. It made her happy."
