Maria, 15, was training on a bicycle when a Ford Mondeo rammed her as it overtook her, knocking her 35 meters away.
It happened on the road from Soria to Logroño.
Neither her helmet nor her reflective clothing that she wore prevented the tragedy.
She died on the spot.
“Witnesses saw a doll flying.
That doll was my girl, ”says her mother, Magdalena Rubio, with a broken voice, a decade later.
The driver had been drinking, but did not exceed the BAC level.
He was sentenced to two years for reckless driving, since he had not respected the safety distance, but he never entered prison.
“It is a tremendous emotional drain.
over you.
Cyclists are human with people waiting for them at home.
There are many broken families”, laments her mother.
Like her daughter, 236 cyclists died between 2018 and 2021,
according to a calculation by this newspaper based on data from the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) and the Catalan Transit Service (SCT).
Of those, 205 died between 2018 and 2020 within 30 days of the accident.
In addition, 31 died in 2021 in the following 24 hours on interurban roads, although the data for this year is still provisional.
By autonomous community, Catalonia is the community with the highest cyclist accident rate: 39 deaths between 2018 and 2020, according to data provided by the SCT.
It is followed by Andalucía (34), Comunidad Valenciana (31), Castilla y León (20), the Canary Islands (14) and Madrid (13), as indicated by the DGT data.
“Mobility was radically restricted in the year of the pandemic and with it accidents.
But now we are going through a horrible time again, ”says Alfonso Triviño, general secretary of the National Association of Professional Cyclists.
The number of accidents went from 5,391 in 2018 to 5,499 in 2020, not counting Catalonia, which uses a different methodology than the DGT in this parameter.
The experts consulted attribute the accidents to the increase in bicycle trips and the lack of infrastructure adapted for cyclists, and sufficiently safe.
To which they add other causes such as stress while driving and distractions behind the wheel of drivers.
"When people are in a bad mood, they don't pay attention, there are more mistakes and they drive much more carelessly," explains Triviño.
The severity of accidents is measured by the force of the impact caused by the mass and speed of the vehicle.
Fatal accidents usually occur on intercity roads where there are few cars and people drive at higher speeds.
From 2018 to 2020 there were 138 deaths on roads outside of towns and 67 on urban roads, according to the sum of the data from the DGT and the SCT.
As happened to David Saiz, 48, who was hit by a car on Bravo Murillo street, in Madrid.
The bike went flying.
After levitating a few seconds in the air, he hit the vehicle.
It was 10 pm.
He was wearing a helmet, side lights and a reflective vest.
"I didn't even know what had happened, I was totally confused and knocked out," he recalls.
He never knew what the car that hit him was like, because the driver fled after the accident.
Three hours later, the Civil Guard found the fugitive in his house, where he tripled the permitted level of alcohol.
Two years later, still terrified, Saiz recounts that he spent five days in bed unable to move, his skin covered in bruises.
He was not able to resume his habit of cycling until nine months later: “I would take the bike, I would hear a car behind me and I would get anxious.
The doctor told me that if it hit me five centimeters higher, I could have stayed in a wheelchair.”
"When the road is jammed, the impacts are milder, although they can cause a serious risk due to a bad fall," explains Miguel de Andrés, president of the Pedalibre association.
"Although sometimes imprudence is committed, it is often said that the cyclist has interfered without considering their right to circulate on the streets," he denounces, assuring that they feel unprotected in the face of what he describes as hostile cities, such as Madrid, where, In his opinion, safe bike lanes are lacking, and cyclists are often forced to share space with trucks, buses and cars.
This is what led to the accident of Mirari Azcarate, 39, who was riding her bicycle to the institute where she teaches in Arganda del Rey (Madrid) when a car hit her from the left when accessing a roundabout.
She was left unconscious on the road.
"The neurologist told me that the helmet I was wearing saved my life," she recalls, moved, three years later.
"The driver said that she did not see me," explains the cyclist, who suffered a cranioencephalic hematoma and injuries from having dragged on the asphalt.
"My face was completely disfigured by the blow," she says.
After she was run over, she was transferred to the ICU of the Gregorio Marañón hospital, where she spent two days under observation.
Azcarate managed to recover and the case was filed: “As the blow did not cause permanent injuries, it is as if it had not happened.
It's unfair and painful."
In March, the new Law on Traffic and Road Safety came into force, which reserves a special section for the protection of cyclists.
On roads with more than one lane in each direction, it is already mandatory to change lanes to overtake, and the penalty for failing to comply with the mandatory minimum separation of 1.5 meters has increased from four to six points.
But for cyclists there is still a pending task: to punish accidents more harshly.
Last July, the PSOE presented a proposal for a law to amend the Penal Code on imprudence in driving motor vehicles or mopeds.
The document explains the objective: “To prevent less serious negligence from being filed when injuries or deaths occur after the commission of an infraction considered serious in the Road Safety Law and that, routinely, the courts consider as minor and, therefore, devoid of criminal responsibility.”
A proposal that PP, Vox and PNV oppose, as explained by the National Association of Professional Cyclists.
“It is an injustice that someone who has caused damage after breaking a rule gets away with it.
Road safety is being tightened with fines, but if there are victims, everything is free.
It is a contradiction”, denounces its general secretary, waiting for measures that reduce the risk of cyclists on the roads.
In the end,
A thousand cyclists protest against the outrages in Terrassa
In Catalonia, the statistics continue to show a sinister trail beyond 2021. So far this year, the SCT reports three cyclists killed on interurban roads in the community.
And bicycle users demand urgent measures.
On March 26 there was a milestone in the demands of the group: more than 1,000 people participated in a rally in Terrassa (Barcelona) to protest the high rate of cyclist mortality, and to demand judicial harshness against those drivers who flee after causing an accident.
The death of Raúl Zarzuelo, a 44-year-old amateur cyclist who was run over by a car on March 19 at a bend in the Castellar del Vallès road, was the seed of the massive mobilization.
At the wheel of the car that killed him was a young man who tested positive for drugs.
He also had his faculties diminished, in that case the positive was due to alcohol consumption, the driver who in October last year hit Tina Vilanova, a 35-year-old cyclist who in October climbed Els Àngels, a popular mountain pass in Girona .
The driver of the car fled and the outrage has led to an initiative to demand the restriction of traffic on this road on Sunday mornings, so that cyclists can pedal in peace.
--MARC ROVIRA