Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

awavey
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by awavey »

Nearholmer wrote: 26 Nov 2022, 10:58pm I would defy anybody to distinguish between a motorbike travelling at 30mph and one travelling at 40mph, or indeed a wide range of other speeds, in that circumstance, a near head-on view of an approaching light, so the careful thing to do, which is what the law requires, having spotted an approaching headlight, would be to wait until it passed, then cross the lane. He may not have spotted the light at all, of course, he may have simply “looked past it”, or misinterpreted the green light and not checked.
well based on the prosecution evidence, 150metres in 7 seconds thats 47mph average speed, the bike had slowed to 40mph at impact, we presume calculated by the crash investigators, so its likely the motorbike was travelling much faster than 40mph to begin with certainly at the 150metre visibility point. Can you distinguish between 30mph & 40mph, its not impossible imo even if its probably hard, can you distinguish between 30mph & >47mph, Id say if you cant youll probably sooner or not end up having a similar type of collision as to what happened here
Nearholmer
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Nearholmer »

Can you distinguish between 30mph & 40mph, its not impossible imo even if its probably hard, can you distinguish between 30mph & >47mph, Id say if you cant youll probably sooner or not end up having a similar type of collision as to what happened here
I’d challenge anyone to distinguish speed accurately based on a single approaching headlamp; it is really difficult, across a very wide speed range. Once there are two headlamps,it’s a whole heap easier, because the angle they subtend at the eye changes with distance, and our brains are astonishingly good at calculating approach speed, and distance for an object of known size, that way, which is why we can catch a tennis ball, for instance.

The problem is very well known, and here is one paper about it:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... conditions

Other clues come into play if street lighting allows things like light flickering off a helmet to be spotted, but even that doesn’t help a huge amount in a near head-on view.

With a single headlight approaching, I would suggest that the judgement we all make is a fairly gross one, around whether it is obviously a very long way away, so within the range of imaginable speeds never likely to arrive before we cross the lane, or possibly close enough that it might get to us, so best to wait until it goes by. We don’t, I think “play chicken” based on fine judgement of speed, especially with a sighting distance as short as 150m, which seems to have applied in this case. At 150m, if you can see it, you let it pass.

BTW, the tri-lamp arrangement on modern motorbikes, one main and two subsidiary, was developed to aid judging approach speed, but my personal observation is that it is rendered largely ineffective by the power of modern headlights, which cause the main one to swamp the subsidiaries.
Bonefishblues
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Bonefishblues »

Nearholmer wrote: 27 Nov 2022, 2:00pm
Can you distinguish between 30mph & 40mph, its not impossible imo even if its probably hard, can you distinguish between 30mph & >47mph, Id say if you cant youll probably sooner or not end up having a similar type of collision as to what happened here
I’d challenge anyone to distinguish speed accurately based on a single approaching headlamp; it is really difficult, across a very wide speed range. Once there are two headlamps,it’s a whole heap easier, because the angle they subtend at the eye changes with distance, and our brains are astonishingly good at calculating approach speed, and distance for an object of known size, that way, which is why we can catch a tennis ball, for instance.

The problem is very well known, and here is one paper about it:

https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... conditions

Other clues come into play if street lighting allows things like light flickering off a helmet to be spotted, but even that doesn’t help a huge amount in a near head-on view.

With a single headlight approaching, I would suggest that the judgement we all make is a fairly gross one, around whether it is obviously a very long way away, so within the range of imaginable speeds never likely to arrive before we cross the lane, or possibly close enough that it might get to us, so best to wait until it goes by. We don’t, I think “play chicken” based on fine judgement of speed, especially with a sighting distance as short as 150m, which seems to have applied in this case. At 150m, if you can see it, you let it pass.

BTW, the tri-lamp arrangement on modern motorbikes, one main and two subsidiary, was developed to aid judging approach speed, but my personal observation is that it is rendered largely ineffective by the power of modern headlights, which cause the main one to swamp the subsidiaries.
Out of interest, is there a lot of retro-fitting LEDs & HiDs on bikes, or is that simply what's being delivered on new bikes? I find some of them uncomfortably bright and they seem to focus very high.
Pete Owens
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Pete Owens »

richardfm wrote: 26 Nov 2022, 10:30pm
Pete Owens wrote: 26 Nov 2022, 9:53pm I'm not one to automatically take the side of a cyclist in cases such as this, but I can't see how the excessive speed of the motor cyclist is not a defence in this case.

The key issue is judging whether there was sufficient time to cross the junction before a motor cyclist visible in the distance arrived. The speed of the motorcyclist is critical in this. The cyclist would not have infringed the priority of a law abiding motor cyclist who would have arrived at the junction several seconds later had they been complying with the speed limit.
Because the cyclist should have seen him coming and not made the manoeuvre.
The cyclist DID see him coming and had sufficient time to make the manoeuvre had the motorcyclist been traveling at a legal speed.
richardfm
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by richardfm »

Pete Owens wrote: 27 Nov 2022, 5:51pm
richardfm wrote: 26 Nov 2022, 10:30pm
Pete Owens wrote: 26 Nov 2022, 9:53pm I'm not one to automatically take the side of a cyclist in cases such as this, but I can't see how the excessive speed of the motor cyclist is not a defence in this case.

The key issue is judging whether there was sufficient time to cross the junction before a motor cyclist visible in the distance arrived. The speed of the motorcyclist is critical in this. The cyclist would not have infringed the priority of a law abiding motor cyclist who would have arrived at the junction several seconds later had they been complying with the speed limit.
Because the cyclist should have seen him coming and not made the manoeuvre.
The cyclist DID see him coming and had sufficient time to make the manoeuvre had the motorcyclist been traveling at a legal speed.
Yes, but the motorcyclist wasn't travelling at a legal speed and the cyclist shouldn't have assumed he was.
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Nearholmer
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Nearholmer »

The cyclist DID see him coming and had sufficient time to make the manoeuvre had the motorcyclist been traveling at a legal speed.
I can’t tell from reading the two reports whether the cyclist saw the motorbike or not. He says he did see lights “but they were in the distance”, which could mean that he saw the motorbike and misjudged how far away it was, or that he looked straight past it at something further away, without registering it.

We also don’t know, if think, whether he would have made it across “in the nick of time” had the motorbike been travelling at 30mph, because we don’t know how far it was from the point of collision when he began to move across the lane (the 150m is the sighting distance, not where the motorbike was), what speed he was moving across the lane at, the position of the motorbike in the lane, or the nature of the collision.

The Judge had the benefit of cctv ‘film’, which will have given him some of the above information, which we don’t, so personally I’d defer to the Judge’s decision.
Nearholmer
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Nearholmer »

You can make a very rough calculation of how far the motorbike might have been away when the cyclist entered the lane if you assume:

- the lane is 5m wide;

- the collision occurred in the centre of the lane;

- the cyclist is travelling at 10kph (2.8 m/s); and,

- the motorcyclist is travelling at 64kph (17.8 m/s).

That gives a travel time of approximately 1s between the cyclist entering the lane and the point of collision, during which the motorbike would travel about 18 metres.

As I say, very approximate, could be out by a factor of two either way, but it makes the point that this was all over in the bat of an eyelid, and that the cyclist almost certainly shouldn’t have commenced the move, whatever speed the motorbike was moving. My instinct is that the motorbike was so close that the cyclist “looked past it”. The judge says that the motorcyclist was “already in the junction” when the cyclist began to cross the lane, which to me implies perhaps even closer than 18m.

Would you commence moving across a lane when there was a vehicle moving along it and only c20 metres away? Only, I suggest, if you were sure that the vehicle was moving at a crawl and if you’d made eye contact with the driver/rider.

[If my calculation is wrong, please correct me]
a.twiddler
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by a.twiddler »

This is in no way a mitigation to anyone involved in this event, but since around 2003 new motorcycles have been fitted with "always on" headlights. Even when motorcycles are fitted with twin headlights, one has generally been used for main beam, and the other for dip. The argument behind this seems to have been that two lit headlights close together could be confused with a distant car rather than a much closer motorcycle, resulting in collisions at junctions.

Now that riding lights are more common, with auxiliary lights spaced out from the main headlamp, other road users are more likely to recognise this configuration as a motorcycle, and some manufacturers use both headlights for main beam and dip now. The riding lights give a "triangle of light" which allow the observer to detect any slight change of course and make it easier to gauge its speed as the relationship between the lights alters as it gets closer and the angle of view changes.

All this could be negated if a badly adjusted blinding headlamp blots out the other lights but would anyone pull out into the path of such a light? It could be a car with a defective headlight. Has anyone else observed that a car with one light out often has the other one badly adjusted against oncoming traffic? Certainly for daytime motorcycle lights, a light that just illuminates the headlight rather than throwing out a blinding beam works better combined with running lights.

This doesn't do away with the issue of "looming" when it is coming directly towards the observer but certainly makes it easier to make judgements about an approaching motorcycle.

I have retro fitted 1w leds to my bikes for the last 14 years in an effort to stand out from the ever increasing numbers of cars with daytime lights and find that near misses have been much less common since -not that they were particularly common before.

This might seem off topic but it's surprising what non motorcyclists assume about motorcycles. I remember coming up against a large SUV in a narrow lane a few years ago. The lady occupant seemed to believe that I had a reverse gear. "I say! If you could reverse into that gateway there, I could get past!" "Madam, I would if I could, but it's just not possible!"
pete75
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by pete75 »

Pete Owens wrote: 27 Nov 2022, 5:51pm
The cyclist DID see him coming and had sufficient time to make the manoeuvre had the motorcyclist been traveling at a legal speed.
Your eveidence that he had sufficient time is what?
'Give me my bike, a bit of sunshine - and a stop-off for a lunchtime pint - and I'm a happy man.' - Reg Baker
thirdcrank
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by thirdcrank »

Before this thread drops off the radar:-

I wonder of the local reporter wasn't an experienced court reporter. I get the impression that they may have only picked up some snippets that they found significant. If so, the report in the local rag I linked may not be a strong foundation for a discussion.

Lawyers like to trot out
He who represents himself has a fool for a client.
They would say that, wouldn't they? But on checking I see it's attributed to Abraham Lincoln.

Depending on what may be a dubious media report, I've jumped to the conclusion that the defendant represented himself here. If so, this seems to illustrate why Abe may have been right. I don't know much about eligibility for criminal legal aid in summary proceedings but I fancy the cost of financing it yourself may outweigh the maximum financial penalty, Without labouring this, a decent lawyer carries out a lot of roles, while an unrepresented defendant may end up being little more than an unguided (?) witness. Somebody needs to establish the reasonable doubts in the prosecution case
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Sum
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Sum »

I've noticed the article in the Bournemouth Echo has been changed - the fine the cyclist received was £1,000, not £2,500 as previously reported. The correction at the bottom of the article says:
https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/23147462.cyclist-found-guilty-riding-bike-carelessly-fatal-crash/ wrote:Note: An earlier version of this article said the defendant was fined £2,500. This was the figure given by the judge, however, the court later stated the maximum fine available was in fact £1,000.
thirdcrank
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by thirdcrank »

Sum wrote: 2 Dec 2022, 6:35pm I've noticed the article in the Bournemouth Echo has been changed - the fine the cyclist received was £1,000, not £2,500 as previously reported. The correction at the bottom of the article says:
https://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/23147462.cyclist-found-guilty-riding-bike-carelessly-fatal-crash/ wrote:Note: An earlier version of this article said the defendant was fined £2,500. This was the figure given by the judge, however, the court later stated the maximum fine available was in fact £1,000.
Well spotted and thanks for posting it.

I don't think any lawyer involved in these proceedings emerges with a shred of credit. I didn't look it up because I naively assumed a district judge would get it right. The offence here was careless/inconsiderate cycling under s 29 RTA 1988

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/52/section/29

The maximum punishment is Level three on the Standard Scale (It's necessry to scroll down schedule 2 RT (Offenders) Act 1988 here:

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/53/schedule/2

A Level Three fine is listed in s 122 of the Sentencing Act 2020 as £1,000

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/20 ... 22/enacted
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Sum
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Sum »

TBH I was reading your previous post, and the comment about whether the defendant represented himself or not prompted me to go back and check the news article for myself, so some of the credit for checking goes to you thirdcrank. Also, thanks for pointing out where the fines can be found - I tried looking them up myself without success (and now I understand why!)

I note that a fine of £2,500 corresponds to a level 4 fine on the standard scale, which coincidentally is the maximum punishment for dangerous cycling. I wonder if that is somehow related to the judge giving the wrong figure during sentencing.
thirdcrank
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by thirdcrank »

There are some things we know or can quickly discover without depending on what may be a patchy report in local media. Callum Clements (the motorcyclist) died as a result of this crash and Garry Kopanycia-Reynolds (the cyclist) was seriously injured. Then, the absence of specific offences of "causing death by dangerous/careless cycling" is controversial and has been the subject of a campaign by Matthew Briggs since his wife Kim was killed in a crash with Charlie Alliston.

viewtopic.php?p=1714224#p1714224

Not run-of-the-mill magistrates' court business.

It's probably not a coincidence, therefore, that the CPS and the court administration seem to have ensured that the hearing was in experienced hands. The prosecutor was a CPS barrister "called" in 1989 ie some 33 years' experience. Ignore the ads financing this site but it lists a long cv

https://www.thelawpages.com/legal-direc ... 3691-3.law

I can only find one District Judge Michael Snow and he's normally based in the London Circuit where he seems to have dealt with some high-profile cases. Appointed in 2004 he is one of the handful of longest-serving district judges in the country.

https://www.judiciary.uk/about-the-judi ... s-ct-list/

To lay people, information like that contained in Schedule 2 of the Road Traffic (Offenders) Act 1988 may seem arcane but the single line entry for each offence notes the maximum punishment and things like whether trial is summary (magistrates' court) or on indictment (Crown Court) ie it's the starting point for the administration of a case,
Jdsk
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Re: Cyclist who caused death of motorcyclist found guilty of riding without due consideration

Post by Jdsk »

New case in Oxford:

"Edward Breeson, aged 55, of Newton Road, Oxford, has been charged by postal requisition on suspicion of careless cycling on May 20 and causing bodily harm by wanton or furious driving on July 12."
https://www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/23674 ... ath-woman/

Jonathan
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