John Markoff writes about how he found the missing memory of why he crashed during a bike ride with GPS data.
My Garmin was unharmed, and when I uploaded the data I could see that in the roughly eight seconds before I crashed, my speed went from 30 to 10 miles per hour — and then 0 —while my heart rate stayed a constant 126. By entering the GPS data into Google Maps, I could see just where I crashed.
I realized I did have several disconnected memories. One was of my hands being thrown off the handlebars violently, but I had no sense of where I was when it happened. With a friend, Bill Duvall, who many years ago also raced for the local bike club Pedali Alpini, I went back to the spot.
La Honda Road cuts a steep and curving path through the redwoods. Just above where the GPS data said I crashed, we could see a long, thin, deep pothole. (It was even visible in Google’s street view.) If my tire hit that, it could easily have taken me down.
And the legal side of it
“It’s a double-edge sword,” said James B. Reed of the Ziff Law Firm in Elmira, N.Y., who often represents cyclists involved in collisions with cars. He noted that GPS technology was altering the way both car and bicycle accident claims are settled.
“It’s important for people who are representing the injured people or the insurance companies to know how to obtain and analyze the data,” he said. “Frankly, it’s probably going to be a booming new industry for experts.”
via @masse
