Peter Flax loved bikes. His father taught him to ride without training wheels when he was five or six, and he convinced his parents to get him a bike with drop bars when Gerald Ford was still president. That feeling of freedom he got from riding around the neighborhood as a kid—it never went away. He rode to school, he rode to work, he rode from Seattle to New York one time.

He died on his bike one night in early May. He was just beginning his daily commute home on Olympic Boulevard in Los Angeles. Most of his 16-mile route was pretty safe—in bike lanes, down quiet side streets, or on bike paths—with most of the risk contained to a half-dozen sectors of distilled chaos. Crossing Olympic was one of them: in L.A.’s mid-Wilshire district, the boulevard is seven lanes wide and has fewer traffic lights than other nearby east-west thoroughfares. The posted speed limit is 35 miles per hour but traffic tends to flow at 50 or faster.

On the night in question, he had waited for a safe moment to cross at an intersection midway between two lights. It was dark, meaning no one had the sun in their eyes and it was easy to spot headlights and tail lights. Traffic lights in both directions turned red. There were no cars heading westbound and only one going eastbound. At the moment that car passed the corner where he straddled his bike, he did a final look both ways—clear, clear—and rolled into the street.