Cunobelin wrote:You are making a lot of assumptions that the mother (who was there at the time) has not.
On the contrary I start from first principles rather than accepting the cultural dominance of vehicles.
If you were to hit someone with anything other than a vehicle then it would be entirely uncontroversial that you were at fault.
If you were to operate any potentially dangerous equipment in a public place then you would be entirely responsible for ensuring that no member of the public came to any harm. I see no reason to make an exception for vehicles.
There is such a thing as responsibility.
Indeed, and in my view that increases with the amount of kinetic energy you bring to a situation (ie the potential to cause damage)
Pedestrians are soft slow moving objects that can bump into things without causing any harm, thus bear very little responsibility. We are also very well adapted to avoiding bumping in to slow moving objects so pedestrians are able to move around freely in all directions without any regulation whatsoever.
Once you start to use vehicles to move at speed then you have an increasing potential to do harm and a thus an increasing degree of responsibility to avoid colliding with things. your momentum means that you have less ability to change course in the event of the unexpected so you need to ensure that there is enough clear space in front of you. Now of course cycles are very much less dangerous than motor vehicles so the degree of responsibility is nothing like a great as that for drivers.
I have had pedestrians who are absolutely safe on a pavement and with no indication walk into the side of my bike as I passed - there is no case of negligence, going to fast or failing to brake - apart from actually never moving at all, there is nothing I could have done to prevent this.
Yes there is; don't ride so close to pedestrians.
However, even I would suggest that in the case of a pedestrian bumping into a vehicle it is the pedestrian that is at fault.
As the mother is quite happy in this case, I think I will accept her interpretation rather than an unwarranted and unsubstantiated allegation of bullying and carelessness on the part of the cyclist
If he was riding carefully he would not have hit the toddler, period. Given the width of the shared use path he should not have been passing pedestrians at any more than a fast walking speed.
OK , I can accept that if he was a child himself it was probably was not a bullying attitude, more that he was led astray by the recklessness of the designers of the facilility into believing that riding on the pavement close to pedestrians was a sensible thing to do.
