Pima County Administrator Chuck Huckelberry was hospitalized in critical but stable condition after he was struck by a car while riding his bike downtown today, according to a county press release.
County spokesperson Mark Evans said Tucson police were investigating the accident.
Tucson police closed Broadway Boulevard between Scott and Church avenues this morning following the collision.
Huckelberry has been county administrator since 1993.
This article appears in Oct 21-27, 2021.
Who in their right mind rides a bicycle downtown?
WHO IN HIS “RIGHT MIND …?”
In reply to Anastasia Beaverhausen:
Some bikers probably have to ride downtown, but Broadway is logically avoided. There are other options.
My guess is Huckelberry rides to be seen more than as a necessary form of transportation. After all, at $6,000/week plus tens of thousands of dollars in perks, including a county car paid for by taxpayers, he’s one of the country’s highest paid politicians … higher than the Vice President, Cabinet Secretaries, Senators, Congressmen, & Governors.
We wish Chuck a speedy recovery, but anybody calling him a “public servant” is way off the mark!
Downtown is a death trap for bicycles, because bicycles (and pedestrians) are an afterthought, because cars rule our transportation infrastructure and therefore our lives.
The engineers and cementheads who design and build roads see bicycles and pedestrians as an annoying side issue that must be dealt with in whichever way is least inconvenient for cars, safety be damned. This narrow, short-sighted, century-old mentality has killed untold numbers of bicyclists and pedestrians over the decades as they try to navigate roads that are increasingly dangerous to them, in that the roads are all about allowing more cars to go faster at all times at all costs.
Until we change that mentality and quit letting automobiles rule our lives, we will continue to see bicyclists and pedestrians injured and killed traveling roads that present enormous obstacles to safe travel with precious little margin for error. The standard “bike lane” is joke–a tiny space that actually makes bicyclists less safe.
The tyranny of automobiles did not happen by accident. It was largely created by the auto manufacturing and fossil fuel industries for their astronomical profits, to the harm and demise of others. Until we grow out of this infantile 20th-century mentality, we will continue to suffer all the other fallout from it as well–climate catastrophe, toxic pollution, oil wars, dysfunctional and corrupt politics, etc.
More misplaced hatred there toothpick man.