From the Strib:

Hug your loved ones.

dragged for several feet, jesus. disgusting

+1 sveden.

Terrible.

How terrible!

I can't believe these things. You may get away from the law... for a while.

Problem being, you'll never get away from your own feelings of guilt.

Hug your loved ones, indeed.

Assuming the person feels guilt. Could have been a drunk driver. That early, it's entirely possible. This makes me feel ill.

....

I saw that all of Excelsior was closed off this morning,
even at 8:00 a.m. It looked like a two-car accident,
but the vehicles on the scene must have been un-marked
police cars.

How very sad. When I heard it was a cyclist I first assumed
that it must have happened during rush hour and that some
driver had passed too closely, but at 4 AM??
There is plenty of room on Excelsior at that time, since there
are two lanes in each direction. I think it was probably a drunk
driver, and I hope they are found and tried.

One would hope they were incapacitated somehow. One hates to think it was a deliberate act of malice (hate crime, as it were). (It could be argued that operating a motorvehicle while intoxicated is an act of malice.) Either way, I hope that the driver is caught and tried. Frankly, I hope for conviction, jail time, and a permanent revocation of driving privileges. Above all, I hope that the driver is not made into the victim.

We need tighter controls on motoring. Motorvehicles are a threat to public safety on orders of magnitude greater than anything else. It ought to be statistically impossible for at least 50% of the population to obtain a license in the first place, much less to be allowed to continue threatening the health and safety of the general public after repeated offenses. I'm not saying this particular driver is a repeat offender, just that there are too many extant drivers who are.

Agreed. A kid gets a license at age 16, and in most cases will never have to take a written or behind-the-wheel test again. I'm not sure most current motorists could pass the written test without studying up.

As for drunk drivers, when I was working in staffing I was shocked at the number of DUIs that showed up on background checks. Something on the order of one in four people had a DUI in their recent past.

MPR ran a story this AM about raising the minimum driving age to 17 or 18:

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2008/09/11/midmorning1/

Of course, there was no mention of reducing the need to drive through better community design as a solution to prevent collisions (they call them "accidents") among teen drivers.

This story makes me so sad... the fact that the poor guy got dragged, and the driver didn't even stop. Makes me sick to my stomach.

I went to court to fight a parking ticket about ten years ago, and had many hours to sit there observing the parade of DUI offenders coming through. Their lawyers would stand there laughing and chatting with the judge about golf, while negotiating the "punishment" for some guy who was on his 10th DUI. (Community service and fines for someone who's likely to kill someone at any moment once he gets out of court!?) It was like a big game.