Bonefishblues wrote: ↑6 Aug 2022, 10:31pmhe continued, without slowing, towards Mrs Briggs, simply shouting a foul expletive towards her, who, shocked, moved back into his path and was struck and killed
That's interesting because I did not know it, but asked precisely what that same phenomenon was, in a post above. I've seen it happen more than once, and even got knocked off once coming round a corner when a pedestrian did precisely the same (
I couldn't have braked but swung out wider to miss them, if they'd kept on going in their chosen direction there wouldn't have been a collision).
You fudged one fact though, the woman didn't "cross contrary to a red signal", she jaywalked a short distance away from a pedestrian crossing, something else which most of us will see daily in a city with pedestrians taking a diagonal shortcut rather than walking a few additional metres, so there would be a stronger argument to say, "if only she'd used the nearby pedestrian crossing rather than stepped out onto a business street, she would still be alive today".
Again, there's a high degree of culpability on her behalf.
Now, there, two other factors come into play, one which I remember from my motorcycling days, and that is the theory that motorists don't 'see' motorcyclists and account for their speed prior to a collision, because what the see is the outline of a pedestrian which the brain calculates at walking speed. I'd put in a guess that a similar phenomenon was at play here, e.g. that if she saw him, she did not perceived him at traveling at 18mph.
(Fun facts, males can run at an average speed of 8 mph and women at 6.5 mph, however, people running for their lives, not for recreational purposes, can run at an average speed of 12 mph. The fastest recorded running speed, clocked by Usain Bolt, was 27.78 mph).
The second falls on the cyclist, a tendency to go where you're fixated upon or staring it, e.g. in a critical situation people tend to freeze up or the advice to look around a corner to where you want to go. However, I've not seen the CCTV so I've no idea if the rider attempted evasive manoeuvres, e.g. to ride behind her which she then screwed up by walking backwards into him.
And, sorry, but a) 'right of way' versus 'priority' is just pedantic semantics, and b) in the run up to an obvious collision, there's just not the time for "please" and "thank you" manners, whereas as simple, single syllable, Anglo-Saxon instructions, comprising mainly of hard consonants, work very well.
I don't hold the judges opinion to mean very much. Ours is an adversarial system, there was already a full blown moral panic going on, and my recollection is that the young man didn't have expert legal representation. I remember one legal expert's opinion being published that calculated, given the speed and distances, brakes wouldn't have made any difference.
I think the husband just can't come to terms that his wife died due to her own negligence, doing what they would have both chided their children for doing - running into the road rather than using the nearest pedestrian crossing - and is looking for someone else to blame for it.
He needs/needed therapy more than we need more laws and fines, and my prediction is that more laws and fines are going to be bundled into this reaction to pacify the baying anti-cyclist hounds, e.g. Tory voting, taxi driving, Daily Express readers.