Also, I wonder what the chances are that he waited till he sobered up to turn himself in.
One of the posters also claims to have met the suspect and attributes the "smirk" to some sort of skeleto-muscular deformity, though it's hard to determine validity with anonymous internet posters.
What will be the very next thing that happens if you actually succeed in doing this?
See for instance http://www.autoliv.com/ProductsAndInnovations/ActiveSafetySy... which describes their "vision systems", the features of which include pedestrian-detection.
It's possible that Volvo has its own in-house tech for this, but Autoliv are huge.
When I moved it actually struck me how poorly lit the roads in Durham were, compared to where we come from in Europe. I'm guessing it's a mixture of being much more expensive (wider roads and much longer) and the city organizers not giving pedestrian/cyclists much thought (sidewalks seem to be scattered randomly around the town).
But mediocre roads in Durham are the norm, unfortunately. My least favorite was always University heading South/Southwest through Forest Hills. In a hundred feet, your bike lane disappears and you are suddenly on a narrow two-lane with little shoulder, in a right-hand curve with an uphill elevation. There's precious little visibility in either direction thanks to the trees and curves, and the oncoming traffic (northbound) traffic has an awkward intersection that tends to cause people to creep into the middle of the lane. (I may be misremembering the exact details, but that intersection has really stuck with me.)
The drivers in the Triangle are also pretty awful. I've never been yelled more or had more things thrown at me. The cup of ice landing on you is not so bad (it can even be a little refreshing on a hot day) but the handful of change is pretty frightening.
Durham is a great town in many ways, but its bicycling infrastructure is not one of them. Such a shame that it claimed another life.
Another thing I've noticed is that many US drivers don't know how to, or are uncomfortable dealing with, driving near cyclists. Sometimes they're just careless and hostile toward cyclists - in one instance, I saw a driver attempt to drive a person on bike off the road with his car in an apparent fit of rage.
Also, there are some stretches of road where bicycle clubs seem to frequent. What they do is get a large pack of people, and end up blocking traffic on a 5-mile stretch (they purposely take up the whole lane, probably safer that way I guess, and when there is a bottleneck instead of moving right they take up both lanes). This ends up instilling a large amount of hostility in drivers, so when they see a loan bicycle they tend to be very aggressive (I've had water balloons, even beer bottles thrown at me before, even though I was far right of the white line).
sorry, couldn't resist.
On a serious note, it's not likely more/better reflective clothing would have helped. It sounds like the driver was deliberately and abruptly deviating from the normal lane to bypass traffic. It was not a decision made with the safety of others in mind.
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468102
This was a pretty good example of something similar that happened an year back, and I'm sure there are more examples (I just never bothered to pay attention to them).
