Seven bicycles, 10 bouquets of flowers, a couple of opened bottles of beer and about 15 visitors were gathered at Empire Grade Road near Heller Drive last Thursday afternoon for a memorial honoring Zachary Parke. Early the morning before, on June 8, the body of the 25-year-old climber, cyclist and courier was found 20 feet from his wrecked bicycle. Pieces of a car headlight were found near Parker’s body; according to the California Highway Patrol, Parke was struck and killed by a driver who fled the scene.
The bike lane at the scene was 8 feet across—wide enough for several bicyclists, though Parke was likely the only one using it at the time of the accident, which occurred shortly after midnight Tuesday. “That kid knew how to use a bike lane too. It was his job,” Kyle Bower said of Parke, who spent his days biking around Santa Cruz and Watsonville working as a courier. Parke was a regular at the Santa Cruz Weekly office, where he hung concert posters in the window as part of Clutch Couriers’ flyer distribution service.
Santa Cruz County has the second-highest bicycle injury-and-fatality rate in the state, according to the California Office of Traffic Safety. The most recent figures available, for 2009, showed that Santa Cruz had more than double the state average—75 incidents per 100,000 people in the county versus 34 per 100,000 in the state that year, according to a report commissioned by the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission. The report also showed the number of incidents on the rise since 2001.
As for the number of hit-and-runs—which primarily involve cyclists and pedestrians but can also involve automobiles—there were 30 involving injury in the city of Santa Cruz in 2010. There have been eight so far this year.
“Both bicycle and pedestrian safety are issues that we continue to work on,” says Steve Clark, deputy chief of the Santa Cruz Police Department. “We work actively in the city of Santa Cruz with a number of different partners around this issue.” Clark names Ecology Action as one such organization with whom the police have teamed up to improve safety for bicycles and pedestrians.
Clark also says traffic safety is a priority for the SCPD. “We spend our extra enforcement time on traffic,” he says. “We gear that toward areas that have a high incidence of collisions, and we look for those accident-causing violations when we’re out targeting our enforcement.”
Because this accident occurred on Empire Grade Road near the UCSC campus, it lies outside city jurisdiction, so CHP has been working the case with help from the Santa Cruz community. “The response that we’ve gotten from the community has been fantastic,” CHP officer Sarah Jackson says. “We’re really thankful that the media has gotten the message out and that the community has been responding. That has produced some really strong leads for us.”
CHP officers are still looking for the car involved, which they believe is a maroon Nissan with front-end damage and missing a side mirror. Anyone with information on the vehicle is asked to call the CHP at 831.622.0511.
With additional reporting by Jacob Pierce.
