“Though data suggest that cycling fatalities have actually fallen nationwide,” reads the LA Times story, “one new study suggests that the injuries cyclists suffer in traffic accidents are becoming more severe.”

In a related stories, advice is given about what motorists can do to minimize the risk of hitting bicyclists, and what bicyclists can do to protecting themselves from being struck.

Here’s one tip for drivers,  ”Give them (bicyclists) space: Recognize that bicycles have a right to the road and may legally take the full lane. Allow at least 3 feet of space while passing.”

Here’s a highlight for cyclists,” Situation: A motorist traveling in the opposite direction turns left directly into your path.

Strategy: Slow down as you approach an intersection, and try to make eye contact with drivers who might turn into your path. Try to anticipate their actions and be ready to take evasive maneuvers. If the car turns into your path, turn with them, in the same direction.”

For any interested cyclists, the East Bay Bicycle Coalition lists classes on bicycle safety , including ones in Fremont Nov. 10 and Berkeley Nov. 14 and 15.
 

Those entering the bridge from Interstate 780 also have a second merging lane to avoid traffic backup.

The new features, finished over the weekend, were in place for the the commute today as Caltrans wraps up a $43.5 renovation of the old Benicia Bridge.

The structure was converted to southbound only motor vehicle traffic in August 2007 when the state opened the new $1.2 billion bridge with five lanes for northbound traffic.

Let us know below what it’s like to drive the renovated bridge. Under the old configuration before the bridge renovation was done, that was some tight squeeze traveling from I-780 to enter the southbound lanes across the bridge. 

Read our blog this month for more information about the pedestrian and biking path across the renovated bridge. The path is scheduled for an Aug. 29 ribbon cutting. Times reporter Lisa White filed this July 23 story on the plan for that path and some hurdles to extend the trail from its south end at Mococo Road to Marina Vista, the gateway to downtown Martinez.  

Here was this deer ambling across the well-traveled old highway during the morning commute. She seemed to know that either cars down the road would stop for her or that someone on a bicycyle was not a threat. I shooed her on. She walked off the road into some brush and disappeared down an embankment leading to the Walnut Creek channel.

It was a taste of nature while commuting by bicycle on the backroads of Contra Costa County.

You see animals, bugs, and scenery much more upclose while pedaling in an open air two-wheeler rather than in a speedy car. I made the bike commute earlier this week because today – the official Bike to Work day –  have to rush off to cover a BART board meeting in Oakland.

Traveling on bike from my Danville home to the Contra Costa Times office in Walnut Creek takes me on Danville Boulevard, the highway through the San Ramon Valley before I-680 was built, the Ironhorse trail, a former railroad route, and the Contra Costa Canal trail.

On my commute home in the evening, tiny gnats or flying bugs over the Ironhorse Trail near Las Lomas High school pelted my face. It’s a reminder of spring time. It also was a reminder why sunglasses are good to wear while riding.

On the canal trail as I wrote by parks, I could hear the resounding crack of a metal bat on a softball during a  game. I also saw many joggers and people walking their dogs.

At the end of the day of the bike commute, I was more tired but more relaxed than if I had driven a car the 13- or 14-mile one way trip   

A recreational cyclist and occasional bike commuter, I like to think of cycling as healthy and refreshing. But reading Oakley’s story reminded me how vulnerable humans on a 25- to 30-pound bicycle are when sharing the roads with a ton or 2-ton vehicle that can squash a rider like a bug.

I’ve seen cyclists do unsafe things like riding on the wrong side of the road.

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I’ve also experienced moments of terror when motorists doing careless things made me feel like a butterfly in a herd of elephants.

About three months ago while I was riding on a wide and well-marked bicycle lane on Danville Boulevard through Alamo, a sport utility vehicle driver traveling in the opposite direction slowed a little, looked my way, and then turned left to cross the road in my path to reach a side street.

I had no time to stop. I averted a crash by braking and making a sharp emergency right turn onto the side street.

I was left shaking. The driver never slowed.

I believe the woman driving the vehicle had to see me, but miscalculated my speed and didn’t realize she was setting a course to splatter me in the middle of a bike lane. If I had been a young child, the driver might have behaved differently.

Part of the friction between cyclists and motorists is that each each group tends to see things differently from their view point of the road.

From the seat or a can or van, it’s harder to realize the speed of a cyclist.

From the seat of a bicycle, it’s can be hard to appreciate that you may not be easily spotted by drivers from some angles.

Off-road paved hiking and biking lanes – like the Iron Horse Regional Trail through Central Contra Costa County and the San Ramon Valley – keep cyclists and cars apart, but there aren’t enough trails like this to get cyclists every where they need to go.

Inevitably, bicyclists and motorists find themselves sharing the roads.

Many people and government officials see greater bicycle use as a way to keep people fit, and reduce congestion, fuel consumption, smog and global warming gases.

So what do we do about the conflict on the road between pedalers and drivers?

Do we change the law to ban bicyclists from some busy roads, as suggested last year by one Southern California newspaper columnist?

Do we follow the example of some European cities like Amsterdam and develop separate dedicated bike lanes along our roads? How would we pay for that?

And how do we prevent more ghost bicycle memorials being placed on our roads because someone who rode a bicycle for fun, fitness or basic transportation didn’t come home alive?    

My Bike-to-Work Day started out really well this year, at least on a personal level.

Last year, I was a total fraud, driving the Honda Civic with the bike shoved in the back so I could use it as a prop to blend in. It’s not easy to get from Point A to B to C in the space of two hours and still report on this thing when you have to pedal a good distance.

But this morning I got off the train at Emeryville at 7:15 a.m., did some reporting at the Civic Center, and managed to get to Oakland City Hall quick enough to spend some quality time with the city’s most notable cyclists.

And a funny thing happened on my way to shrink my carbon footprint.

The traditional bike-to-work story is somewhat fluffy, but in a good way. It’s about the ordinary people who participate, why they do it and how it makes them feel.

But a strange series of events took me off of the path I had mapped out and forced me into the maelstrom of two-wheeled, human-powered politics.

It really started Wednesday night, when a colleague wise in the ways of Emeryville came to me with an e-mail. The writer wanted us to know that the city cares not for the cyclist and wants only to placate they of the internal combustion engine, the parking garage and the grade separation.

So there I was this morning standing in front of that very municipality’s civic center, chatting up a landscaper and a gardener with cute little squash plants in her bag and feeling good about the world and pedal power.

Then I was introduced to Emeryville City Councilman John Fricke and his two adorable twin daughters. Were he not a member of government, the scene would have fit my plan perfectly. All three were sporting propellers atop their bike helmets and arrived upon a bicycle built for three. I yearned for a professional photographer.

The councilman proceeded to tell me almost exactly what the e-mailer had said. That the city, in particular a majority of its council members, were about motor vehicles and when it came to alternative modes of transportation, they did not walk the walk.

While this pleased the muckraking journalist pounding on inner recesses of my cranium, it did little to advance the warm and fuzzy theme of my story.

I proceeded south on Mandela Parkway through West Oakland, and thought about how a mighty freeway once stood here but through force of community solidarity was banished after its tragic collapse in the Loma Prieta Earthquake.

And as I was also noticing it was getting difficult to dodge the broken glass in the bike lane, I heard a wicked ka-SPRONGG beneath my skinny high-pressure tires. It was such a sound that I had to turn around and investigate. It turned out to be a steak knife, but luckily, it was laying flat and my tires were intact.

It also occurred to me that this was a route I’d pedaled down before, to get from the train station to Burma Road in the Port of Oakland, and Caltrans’ media office for the Bay Bridge project. The last part of that is one of the more challenging ridest in town, from a cheating-death-among-the-tractor-trailers standpoint.

Arriving at Oakland City Hall, who should I run into but Bijan Sartipi, Caltrans director for the Bay Area district. Next thing you know, we’re talking about the quest for a safe route to the Bay Bridge, which after all the fuss about building a new East Span, complete with a add-on bike lane, still hasn’t been figured out.

And after 2 1/2 years on the transportation beat, it seems that half the officials at this event knew me, and kept coming up to chat. It was kinda nice, although we journalists like people to think that everyone despises us, or else maybe we’ve grown too soft.

Still, it was interesting. I learned that Oakland has a major bike parking crisis, caused by move to electronic parking meters (who knew?). For you non-bicyclists (and that means you, Mayor Dellums and Attorney General Brown), I need to explain that old-fashioned coin-operated parking meters were perfect for U-locking a bike to, and because they were everywhere in Oakland (and nowhere in Emeryville, Councilman Fricke explained), you could secure your bike even more easily than drivers could find a parking place.

I also learned more about the looming battle over transit funding in Sacramento, that advocates have been reduced to asking for half of the nearly billion in gas tax “spillover” that the law would ordinarily reserve for city buses, trains and ferries.

I also realized that I was neglectful in not mentioning that Robert Raburn, executive director of the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, is trying to convince our local courts to formalize a program of teaching good, safe, law-abiding riding habits to cyclists who run stop signs or red lights. I quoted him saying he longs for the day cyclists are treated equally by authorities, but I left out the more positive aspects of that philosophy.

All-in-all, not a bad Bike-to-Work Day, even if I didn’t connect with the human-powered proletariat the way I’d planned. I got some riding in, I’d learned some new things about two of the East Bay’s fine cities and the next time I’m feverishly pedaling over the West Grand Street viaduct with a container-toting 18-wheel rig bearing down on me, I can take comfort that someone in the recesses of Caltrans District 4 headquarters at the other end of the same street is puzzling over how to save my life. 

Many thanks to John Fricke and two very special young ladies for lending me a digital camera and e-mailing the results.

So, rather than firing off one of my usual unsupported assertions on the blog, I spent way too much time yesterday trying to figure out how much carbon and other nasty stuff is emitted by the locomotive currently dragging me to work.

Regrettably, I can only say at this point that it’s a diesel electric, which means that it’s a ginormous diesel engine that doesn’t actually turn the gears that turn the wheels, like in a regular car, but turns a generator that powers an electric motor that makes the wheels turn. I have calls in to the EPA and several other entities, but the blogosphere waits not for laggards in pursuit of the truth. I’ll delay no further, and update when I (or one of you smart people) locate the data.

My assertion, in theory, was that I had done what Gov. Schwarzenegger had done, but with sweat instead of cash.

As many of you no doubt know, our green governor was called to account for jetting around the world to promote his anti-global warming campaign. To atone for his oversized carbon footprint, he paid indulgences to a “carbon forest” in the upper reaches of California. KQED’s California Report recently did a report on what the governor and first lady Maria Shriver’s carbon credits are accomplishing.

Thanks to the fact that my regular Capitol Corridor’s last stop is Oakland Coliseum, and that people haven’t caught on to the idea that it’s a convenient way to get to Oakland International Airport for those midday flights, I have the power to shrink my carbon footprint _ and the Bay Area’s _ on a regular basis

It happens when I’m the only person going to Coliseum. The train goes out of service there and returns to the yard in West Oakland until the afternoon. Thus, the entire mega-ton train, spewing particulates and carbon into the air, travels 10 minutes down and 10 minutes back just for yours truly.

Now, I ride the train in part to reduce my long commute’s impact on the environment. It’s disturbing when I’m the only thing that gets transported to Coliseum, especially after finding out that when no one is riding down there, the train will routinely go to the yard directly from Jack London Square.

So I am in the habit of asking one of the conductors, “Am I the only one?”

Some days, when I’m on a later train and simply can’t take the extra time, I have to accept my inconvenient truth and keep riding. As I exit at Coliseum, I look up and down the train, hoping to see someone else “de-training,” as they say. If I’m alone, I’m bummed, for the planet and my celestial ledger sheet.

But yesterday, I was on the right train and, in fact, I was alone. I announced my intent to get off at Jack London Square and assured the conductor, who insisted that it wasn’t necessary, that I had done this before and it was no problem.

The first time I mentioned this arrangement to Gene Skoropowski, who runs the Capitol Corridor on behalf of the multi-transit-agency CC Joint Powers Authority, I could tell he was not entirely happy. The CCJPA had gone to some trouble to build that platform at Coliseum and would like people to use it.

I couldn’t agree more. First off, people do use it, just not at the late hour that I do. Secondly, I can envision people getting off at Coliseum in good numbers throughout the day.  But right now, on Train #529, it occasionally ends up being me or no one.

And those of you who view rail as the highly inefficient tool of the privileged classes will no doubt point to this as another case proving your point. The key questions in this debate is, how many riders need to be on the train to make it more environmentally friendly than the same number of Ford Tauruses? And then there’s the marginal traffic congestion relief, which could already be making a big difference.

But for one day this week, it didn’t have to go, and that power was in my hands. It felt good. My own carbon credit, my own train-hauling locomotive, probably on the EPA’s lowest emissions tier for locomotives (as, I’m told, are most passenger engines in the Golden State), was parked and shut down for another 30 minutes on my say-so.

Until the aforementioned data comes back, I’ll guess that this single act (Am I smug? You bet!) will balance out all of my car trips in my Toyota Matrix for the rest of the month. If not from a CO2 emissions standpoint, then from a particulate emissions standpoint, since I don’t drive a diesel.

In any case, I will update this post when I find out what the actual impact of this act was.

What made it all the more satisfying was that I decided to try biking the rest of the way rather than biking to Lake Merritt BART and then from Coliseum BART to work. It won’t win me any triathelon medals or alter my carbon footprint any further, but I probably burned off half of that egg-and-cheese burrito I had on the train.

It’s starting to look like the wind is behind this thing, what with college students campaigning for it all over the state from now until November, when voters will have to decide whether they like the $10 billion bullet train bond measure or not.

I’m still waiting to see what sort of borrowing plan Sacramento will cook up to get us through the current budget crunch. I get the sense, however, that even that won’t stop the bullet train measure from going before voters.

Tomorrow between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., students on UC Berkeley’s famous Sproul Plaza will be riding tricycles, jumping on pogo sticks and walking on stilts while wearing “I’d rather be riding high-speed rail” t-shirts.

These students, sold on the idea that the bullet train is public transportation’s answer to the Prius and a major way of fighting global warming, have been pulling off stunts like this up and down the state. While the students’ enthusiasm at first blush might evoke comparisons to Barack Obama’s youthful appeal, I see it a bit differently.

The presidential parallel I see in the bullet train’s renaissance resides in John McCain’s candidacy. Obama, after all, is a fresh face, a new hope, if you will. Like John McCain, high-speed rail is an idea that became popular in the past, then faded from the public’s imagination as we all got on with our miserable, gas-guzzling lives.

Now this rather old idea, which came of age during the Vietnam War on foreign soil, is suddenly and unexpectedly on the ballot for real this time.

The timing couldn’t be better. In the past, high-speed rail seemed like a passing fancy, a groovy idea but not too compatible with a 90-cent-a-gallon gas, 1974 Chevy Impala-driving  society.

Since then, we’ve been on the roller-coaster of oil crises, economy cars, cheap gas and my-4-by-4’s-bigger-than-yours.

Today we live in a world where Iran has gasoline riots, where the law of supply-and-demand has finally kicked in at California gas-n-gos and a lot of us know people who face death daily trying to keep one of our major oil suppliers from falling to pieces.

And a growing number of Californians are almost literally warming to the idea that an investment of tens of billions of dollars might be justified to make a major stab at carbon emissions from the millions of vehicles that sputter up and down I-5 and U.S. 101 between two of America’s megaregions.

This year my house was picked for the Census Bureau’s annual Community Survey, in which a large sampling of the populace is asked a host of demographic questions which are then extrapolated into data representing the population as a whole.

This year’s theme seems to be commuting distances. I was asked where I start and finish and how many minutes I commute. I had to think about this one, because last week, as you may have read, I ended up driving when I didn’t want to because my NOT high-speed train got stuck behind a freight train for two hours plus.

It asked the mode used last week that covered the most distance, so I had to say train, because an aggregate of three out of five days were train commutes.

I also had to do some soul searching to report the minutes of my typical commute. I wanted to say two hours, as I normally tell people. But that’s really just the normal train trip. From the time I leave my house to the time I arrive at work is really closer to 2:20.

I’m not going to belabor my reasons for living way out in the Central Valley, other than I did it for love. But I am where I am, and that puts me on one of those pogo sticks, from a couple of perspectives, wearing one of those HSR t-shirts.

But I don’t think it’s just me that pines for an alternative to driving-as-usual. The entire nation is talking about high speed rail. There are communities in Arkansas lobbying for Texas’ high-speed rail to come on by. It seems like every state with a major city has some sort of effort in the works, to say nothing of other nations, such as Morocco and India.

The problem is that this isn’t China, where leaders can get up in the morning, rub their eyes and decide to spend billions on maglev. This isn’t socialist-leaning Europe, where citizens are used to giving up half their incomes to taxes and government spending involves a bit more wiggle room.

But this is the land of fearless indebtedness, so we may well plunk down our collective Visa card and take this baby for a spin in 2020 or so.

On my way home last night, I fancied that I was going to blog about the latest bit of transportation research to come out of the Cato Institute, an inside-the-Beltway limited-government think-tank.

I was going to write about the study, Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Emissions?, as I quaffed a $4.50 micro-brew on the Capitol Corridor. If you know anything about the Cato Institute, you can probably guess what it says: 

Far from protecting the environment, most rail transit lines use more energy per passenger mile, and many generate more greenhouse gases, than the average passenger automobile. Rail transit provides no guarantee that a city will save energy or meet greenhouse gas targets.

While most rail transit uses less energy than buses, rail transit does not operate in a vacuum: transit agencies supplement it with extensive feeder bus operations. Those feeder buses tend to have low ridership, so they have high energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger mile. The result is that, when new rail transit lines open, the transit systems as a whole can end up consuming more energy, per passenger mile, than they did before.

This will be some comfort to regular readers of this blog, at least those who believe that rail transit, commuter rail in particular, is on par, if you will, with whites-only country clubs of pre-1970s suburbia.

I was all set to set up my laptop on a little fold-down table and spend my first hour on the train writing what I thought of this study and its results. Then I was going to pedal home from the train station and post that essay and wait for you to respond.

But that’s not what happened.

On the way to writing that post, I lost all objectivity about rail commuting, and the Capitol Corridor in particular.

I’m not a prompt person, as my editor and the IRS already know, but yesterday I was determined to give myself a little breathing room in achieving my multi-modal commute. I made it past the security guard before 6:30 p.m., which means I didn’t have to sign out, even though I had taken time to check www.amtrak.com to learn that train #544 was projected to arrive at 6:46 — two minutes late.

Although I took a bit longer to get dolled up in my helmet, jacket and ski gloves against the chill evening air, I still had a good 10 minutes to ride to the station, a trip that normally takes about seven.

But long before I pedaled off on my 1.7- mile hop to the station, before I checked the railroad’s website, someone at the Capitol Corridor’s customer information office received an advisory from Amtrak. That was at 6:16 p.m., I learned 90 minutes later.

All I could see, however, were two very discouraging messages. The first one, which was flashing on the message board above the platform as soon as I arrived at 6:42, was that train congestion was delaying trains between Richmond and Martinez. Another message said it was because of a trespasser incident, in other words, someone killed by a train.

I called one of my colleagues to find out if they knew about the incident, and was told that it had happened several hours earlier and was an apparent suicide. After trying to add up all the people who had been killed by trains recently in the Bay Area, I determined that I need to write about this. I also determined that the trains might actually be moving again.

The other message appeared about 10 minutes after I arrived at the Oakland Coliseum station. It said that a disabled train was causing delays for my train between Great America and Fremont. As far as my prospects of getting home on the train were concerned, this was more troubling.

I called the Capitol Corridor’s new automated information line. It told that my train had already departed Coliseum. Thanks, guys.

At this point, I noticed that the only other passenger waiting for the train at Coliseum had also called, but had waited to speak to an actual person. We began chatting and I asked if he had learned anything. A freight train had gotten stuck, somehow across both sets of tracks, and everything was blocked.

Normally, such news would have prompted me to switch to Plan B, which is to jump on BART, take it to Lake Merritt and pedal to the safety and climate-control of Jack London Square. If it appears the train will be delayed for hours, there’s also Plan C, which is to pedal back to work and take my car home.

Plan C is particularly annoying. I’m certainly not suffering like my fellow commuters who don’t have a car handy, but I’m paying another $20 for gas and toll and my monthly train pass (which works out to nearly $20 a workday) at the same time. If I’m lucky, the Corridor will offer a discount some later month to atone for the inconvenience, and maybe free wine and cheese on the train.

But now I had come to find out that my fellow traveler, an accountant named Steve who lives in Sacramento, was completely at the mercy of the train. Not only that, but he’d not expected the chilly evening, and was shivering as we kvetched about our love-hate relationship with the railroad.

An hour past time for the train to arrive, and I found myself calling an actual person at the Capitol Corridor’s info line. She told me again about the stalled freight train. I asked if she had any indication when it would be cleared up, and she revealed that her last “update” had come at 6:16 p.m. The time was 7:44 p.m.

So I finally jumped on my bike, started pedaling and Steve hollers at me, “The train’s coming!” I curved back around, rode up onto the platform, and sure enough, there was a bright, single light shining in the dusk, about a half-mile down the tracks.

But then it went dark. We puzzled over this for another 10 minutes, and I tucked in my pant leg again and set off back to work.

A simple plan. I was going to pedal the 1.7 miles back to the parking lot, lock up my bike on the bike rack, and drive back to the station and pick up Steve, whose wife would come pick him up from my quiet Central Valley enclave.

My plans always seem simple on paper. After I locked the bike, I decided I need to make a pit stop in the office building, so I parked the car out front. As I was getting out, seeming gale-force winds pulled the door out of my hand and whipped it into the car next to mine.

The car was dented and I was mortified. I went inside, visited the bathroom, and got a Post-it from the guard to write my name and number down for the driver of the — get this — navy blue Infiniti connected to the door I had just dented.

By the time I got back to the station, Steve still hadn’t got any new information on the train. It was about 8:25 at this point. When he got into the car, he was in one of those stick-your-fingers-in-the-heating-vents conditions. I blasted the heat, directed all the vents in his direction and we were nearly in Crockett before he was ready to let me adjust the heat to something normal.

When I got home, I went online and found that the train had come 2 hours and 17 minutes late. We were ahead of it by an hour an hopefully, Steve still has feeling in all of his fingers and toes.

So I never got to sit on the train and write about the Cato study. Now I can’t, not without injecting my perspective with an unhealthy dose of bias or even malice (there, I said it).

Speaking of numbness, it appears that if I leave now, I might get the station without having to break a sweat…

Clearly, I haven’t written about this enough, if at all.

Remember walking? It’s how we Baby Boomers used to get to school, or to the bus stop.

But that was a different time, a time when there were a fraction of the number of cars on the road, when there weren’t so many head cases wandering the streets and when weight loss wasn’t a multi-billion-dollar industry.

And here in California, we barely even use school buses anymore. My son rode a bus to school in Central Maryland and on Long Island. When he started fifth grade in Southern California, I was dumbfounded to discover that nearly all the kids at his elementary school were dropped off by a conga line of minivans, SUVs and station wagons.

Luckily, the local middle school in our tony hilltop neighborhood was on the same boulevard that ran past our apartment complex, so my son was able to walk home from school during sixth and seventh grades. Sometimes, we could even chase him out the door early enough to walk to school.

Today, after a half-century of neglecting the way of the foot, we’re finally taking baby steps back to where we started.

Today I received notice that our fair state’s transportation department, Caltrans, was giving out $52 million for a program called Safe Routes to School. It spreads out grants in the vicinity of $300,000 to $500,000 to create things like crosswalks (there’s a concept!), pedestrian crossing signals that count down and “radar feedback signs” that tell motorists how fast they’re going Ocean View Elementary School in Albany.

 A couple months back, I heard about this in a presentation by the Alameda County Transportation Improvement Authority, which is using some of its half-cent transportation sales tax to match Caltrans’ funds.

For Caltrans and even ACTIA, it’s a drop in the bucket. For the parents of Ocean View students, its a major improvement.

And there will be a $350,000 check to pay for half of a project to put in sidewalks, create a bicycle boulevard and impose traffic calming measures near Springhill Elementary, Stanley Middle and Acalanes High schools in Lafayette.

My favorite improvement is the pedestrian “refuge,” such as the one planned as part of a $900,000 project near Oakland Technical High School, the Castlemont Community of Small Schools, and the E.C. Reems Academy in Oakland. It’s basically a median island where kids crossing the street can stay if they don’t make it all the way across before the light changes.

I know that I tend to think of pedestrian-only downtown shopping districts as the prime examples of how our society is moving back to a time when cars did not rule our lives. Those are big improvements, to be sure, but connecting our homes with schools, transit and local services so we can start walking again have a much better shot at changing and improving our lives. 

News item:

OAKLAND _ A Capitol Corridor commuter train struck a car near the Jack London Square Amtrak station Monday evening, prompting an AC Transit bus to illegally pass railroad crossing gates and become jackknifed on the tracks.

Several trains were delayed, the worst an hour and fifteen minutes on the train that hit the car, which made an illegal turn in front of the train, an Amtrak spokeswoman said.

Oakland police said the driver of the car was not seriously injured and refused medical attention. No other injuries were reported.

Trying my level best to maintain my journalistic objectivity, I tried to imagine how this incident could have been the railroad’s fault.

First, there’s the whole Embarcadero issue. Here’s a street that also serves as something like a half-mile of railroad. It’s like the mother of all railroad crossings. Each intersection is gated, but the gates could be open when you enter the street, but close while you’re still driving along it.

I was on an AC Transit bus that came up to that very same intersection where the car was thrown off the tracks. The lights started flashing, and the driver sped up to get onto the Embarcadero before the gates came down.

Thus I had no trouble envisioning Monday’s bus screw-up, although I’m still a little unclear how the two sections of the bus jackknifed.

Luckily, reader Susan Bohan has a quick trigger finger and sent me a photo of the bus and Capitol Corridor.

“I saw this last night and couldn’t figure out how that bus got there,” she told me in an e-mail.

It wasn’t until the next morning, riding my bike from the Coliseum Amtrak station, that I got a better understanding of how such things happen.

I was about to cross the same tracks I had just arrived on, and the red lights started flashing and the bells started clanging. I looked down the tracks at the train I had just gotten off of, and it wasn’t moving. I looked the other way, and nothing. The gates were not closing.

At this point, cars and trucks are stopping at the tracks, then gunning across when it appears nothing’s coming.

As it happened, a certain bicyclist became a raving hypocrite at that point.

Before I continued on my way to work, I stopped to snap a photo of a pair of trucks crossing as the lights and bells continued.