Tragic Accident on a Beautiful Night in Paris

Iron poles along Paris streets prevent parking on the sidewalk. 

A human body flying into one of these poles from a scooter is instantly  broken.

Last night, walking in Paris, I happened on a scene of agony I found terribly familiar. A motor scooter was lying on its side, bent and broken, several feet from the road on the sidewalk. The rider was a dozen feet away, also on the sidewalk. The passenger was against the curb, in the street, partly underneath a parked truck. 

A few feet from the battered scooter, a Honda Civic with a dent and scrape on its left front fender was parked on the sidewalk, its emergency flashing lights adding orange bursts to the red and blue lights from the two ambulances already on the scene. A half dozen medics worked to move the rider and the passenger onto stretchers and into the ambulance. They moved the rider first. I could hear the deep pain in his moans as three medics moved him onto the backboard, then onto a gurney. 

 Last year I yelled and groaned in that same agony when a medic named Mohammed lifted me onto the backboard after warning me how much it would hurt. A woman on the medic team was talking into the ear of the woman under the front of the truck. The scooter passenger was partly covered with a blanket, but I could the white sneaker on her right leg twisted at an impossible angle. 

I did not want to remain among the gawkers longer, and a moment later a policemen pointed and told me to move. I left. From what I could gather watching the witnesses, the car and the scooter were both driving downhill from the Pantheon toward the traffic light opposite Luxembourg Garden. The car made a legal, but possibly unexpected left turn toward an underground parking garage. 

The scooter, I am guessing by the dent on the car, was passing the car on the left, on the wrong side of the road, thinking the left turn signal was for the upcoming intersection rather than the garage entrance thirty feet before the intersection. Scooters often swerve around cars briefly to get to the front at traffic lights. In all of my motorcycle and bicycle accidents 

I have had the amazing good fortune not to hit anything solid: no cars, no curbstones, no iron poles along the edge of the sidewalk that prevent parking on the sidewalk in Paris. The unfortunate riders hit all of these. Worse, I did not see a helmet anywhere. 

As I walked away, a third ambulance pulled up. I think it was a fire department rescue team. Extracting that poor, broken woman from under the truck was going to be awful. 

I continued to walk on a beautiful night in the City of Light hoping the scooter riders would survive the night.