The NTSB has taken the highly unusual step of actually investigating a bicycle crash:
The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the Kalamazoo bicycle crash that killed five people and injured four.
Officials with the NTSB confirmed Friday the agency is investigating the crash, and said its team already is in Kalamazoo.
NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said the team will look at all aspects of the incident, including how it happened and how the truck hit the bicyclists. He said the team will reconstruct the crash and find out if there are any safety issues that could be improved, from the vehicles involved to the road.
Weiss said the NTSB is investigating because the agency has taken an interest in the case, and not at the request of local authorities.
“This is such a singular event that we wanted to look at the issues behind it,” said Weiss, who acknowledged it’s unusual for the NTSB to investigate crashes involving bicycles.
Systemic Failure 
It’s certainly a good sign that NTSB or any federal agency is starting to take crashes involving cyclists seriously enough to investigate. Unfortunately, this particular crash sounds like a case of an impaired or highly aggressive driver purposely hitting cyclists. Terrible, but not the kind of issue related to infrastructure or vehicle design that NTSB usually deals with. I’d be happier if they were investigating crashes at notoriously bad intersections or road that have ongoing, high levels of issues more due to their poor design.
But I won’t second guess the NTSB’s motivation here. There must be something about this case serious enough for them to consider worthy of more attention.
[…] blog Systemic Failure relays the news that NTSB is doing something unusual: It is investigating a fatal crash where the […]