As Nina Shapiro reported on Monday, well-known Seattle attorney Mickey Gendler has settled his lawsuit against the state of Washington over a bike accident on the Montlake Bridge that left him a quadriplegic. Today the Seattle Times put the story on its front page , with the slightly absurd, stating-the-obvious headline: “He’d trade $8 million settlement to get his life back.” The Times story is something of a repeat of a piece the same reporter did on Gendler in 2008 (headlined “A cyclist’s uphill battle to get his life back”). And, like that earlier piece, the story leaves out a rather key detail of the tale–one that Nina included and that virtually all the commenters on the Times story recognize as pivotal.That is: At the time Gendler’s tire got caught in the metal grating of the drawbridge, sending him over the handlebars, he was riding down the bridge’s center lanes. He did not take the paved, raised sidewalks along the edges of the bridge, which is where every responsible cyclist knows to go (and where pretty much every cyclist does go). You’d never know that from the Times story, which simply recounts that “Gendler and a friend were riding across the bridge toward the Washington Park Arboretum when Gendler’s tire suddenly lodged in an inch-wide gap between sections of metal grating.” No mention of the fact that the inch-wide gap was harmless to cars but only a threat to bicyclists who would ignore the safer lanes made available to them just a few feet away.Times commenters, however, thanks to Nina’s story, are very aware of this missing fact, and it’s at the center of their debate on the balance between state and personal responsibility–a debate that this case, seemingly unbeknownst to the Times, raises quite clearly.