Who is liable?

General cycling advice ( NOT technical ! )
mattsccm
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by mattsccm »

Always be able to stop if you want no scope for being blamed. If you get tail ended it isn't your fault.
Pebble
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Pebble »

Clearly riding a bike into a wheelie bin would be the cyclists fault, cyclists deserve all they get. However, If a car driver was to smash into some wheelie bins (that were not suitably adorned with high viz) then that would be with out any shadow of a doubt the fault of the wheelie bins

apparently they have now started spraying poneys and cows that frequent dartmoor with high viz paint to try and reduce the damage suffered by cars when there owners don't see them, how could any driver be reasonably expected to see something the size of a cow in the middle of the road. This tactic should be adopted by wheelie bins owners, these people need to think ahead, how would they feel if someones car got damaged!
axel_knutt
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by axel_knutt »

WillCycle wrote: 7 Feb 2023, 1:16pm The most important principle for using the roads (regardless in what vehicle) is simply this: Travel at a speed that allows you to stop in the distance you can see to be clear.

If I go barrelling along and collide with a stationary object in front of me, then I either was going too fast, or not paying attention. I don't see how this could be interpreted any other way.
No grounds for complaint against a council that waits until a cyclist breaks his neck before repairing a pothole then.
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nirakaro
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by nirakaro »

I'm not sure a pothole counts as an 'object'.
NickWi
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by NickWi »

Airsporter1st wrote: 7 Feb 2023, 2:42pm This is so obviously a no-brainer, that I wonder at the OP’s motive for asking the question in his first ever post.
The answer to that is very simple. We live in world where it's always someone else's fault. Can I blame someone else? It's a nice easy route for not taking responsibility for one's own actions. I blame schools, no wrong answers, no winners or loosers on sports days and all that cr*p.
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Cowsham
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Cowsham »

One post the day the OP joined :?
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WillCycle
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by WillCycle »

axel_knutt wrote: 7 Feb 2023, 7:14pm
No grounds for complaint against a council that waits until a cyclist breaks his neck before repairing a pothole then.
Really? You're equating a pothole with a large object? What if it wasn't a wheelie bin, but a car that was parked? Or an ambulance stopped to see to a sick person?
At what point will you start accepting at least some degree of personal responsibility? Or is everything to you always someone else's fault?
The hill is not IN the way, the hill IS the way.
Bonefishblues
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Bonefishblues »

Cowsham wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 12:39am One post the day the OP joined :?
That'll be the most relevant post on the thread there (yours, that is)
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Cugel
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Cugel »

WillCycle wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 6:49am
axel_knutt wrote: 7 Feb 2023, 7:14pm
No grounds for complaint against a council that waits until a cyclist breaks his neck before repairing a pothole then.
Really? You're equating a pothole with a large object? What if it wasn't a wheelie bin, but a car that was parked? Or an ambulance stopped to see to a sick person?
At what point will you start accepting at least some degree of personal responsibility? Or is everything to you always someone else's fault?
It's something I've often thought about ...........

When living and riding a bike in NW England, pothole avoidance was a constant need. Many of the roads are scattered for mile after mile with not just potholes but wide subsidence cracks, swathes of loose gravel, bad cambers on corners, large drains that are sunken, raised or polished to a shine and other very bad road surface likely to off a cyclist paying little or no attention.

In fact, offs from such road damage amongst those cyclists I knew or rode with were not infrequent. Often the same ones who fell foul of pothole et al also rode into sticking-up obstacles, from stones in the road, outcroppings of stuff from the verges and even the backs of parked cars!

One might argue that potholes and other bad road surfaces are there because of the failure of an agency to meet their duties (councils failing to maintain road surface qualities) so the agency is liable for a cyclist hitting one. But these potholes and other road hazards are there when we ride. Do we have no duty ourselves to notice and avoid them?

Personally I do notice and avoid them, so have rarely hit one and never had an off from one in 63 years on a bike. I have hit one sort of road hazard - the dip & lump sometimes found in black tarmac where something has depressed the road surface, squeezing the tarmac up around it. These are very hard to see until you're right on them; but give a bad jolt to the cyclist rather than casting them into the road.

Cugel, allergic to pain and damaged bikes, so paying attention.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
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nirakaro
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by nirakaro »

Cugel wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 8:51am One might argue that potholes and other bad road surfaces are there because of the failure of an agency to meet their duties (councils failing to maintain road surface qualities) so the agency is liable for a cyclist hitting one.
You could certainly argue that they're morally, if not legally, liable. But we're still responsible for protecting ourselves from the mistakes/failures of others.
Nearholmer
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Nearholmer »

This is another of these incendiary posts that is either:

- written by a person with a very unusual outlook on the world;

- written by a person deliberately stoking trouble; or,

- is being dropped into multiple places by trained agent-provocateur-bots (usual sign of that is precisely the same post on multiple outlets).

In short:
B7C796B1-7A8A-43B9-86D4-A386D83F6620.jpeg
(Possibly a Russian one)
mattheus
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by mattheus »

Posters should be aware:

In civil liabilty cases, courts/judges very often find BOTH parties liable for SOME of the damages.

It's rare that either party in these sort of situations are entirely to blame for something; if we all remembered that, these discussions would be about 4 posts long, and would avoid the endless circular debate we always get!

If the following is true, we have ourselves to blame for always stoking these fires:
Nearholmer wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 10:20am This is another of these incendiary posts that is either:
...
- written by a person deliberately stoking trouble; or,
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Cugel
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Cugel »

Nearholmer wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 10:20am This is another of these incendiary posts that is either:

- written by a person with a very unusual outlook on the world;

- written by a person deliberately stoking trouble; or,

- is being dropped into multiple places by trained agent-provocateur-bots (usual sign of that is precisely the same post on multiple outlets).

In short:

B7C796B1-7A8A-43B9-86D4-A386D83F6620.jpeg

(Possibly a Russian one)
Paranoia strikes deep! Into your life it will creep!! :-)

Bot-pots are certainly out there but the content seems to vary from the obvious attempts at creating division and disaffection to the merely playful. If the OP of this thread is a bot, I would class it as the playful kind, since the question asked is quite a good one to play with in one's head and also in subsequent posts.

Many motorists, for example, have the attitude that anything impeding their progress down a road is somehow "unfair" or otherwise indicative of something that should removed, prosecuted or perhaps just driven over. One can argue that potholes are in this class of "unfair impediments" but also, by analogy, so are other obstructions or hazards within the roadway.

The differentiation between potholes and other road-hazards seems to have these differentiators:

* An authority is responsible for maintaining the roadway itself, which covers pothole filling but not removal of other accidental impediments like dustbins or parked cars.

* Potholes are an absence of something whereas dustbins, parked cars, wandering beasts and other objects are a presence of something.

But from the point of view of any road user, including cyclists, they're all hazards that we would wish to avoid. Avoidance can't be practically arranged by, for instance, having council road-minders every 50 yards to notice and fill potholes or shoo off a swan 5 minutes after they appear. Therefore the road user must have some degree of duty to avoid these hazards themselves.

If such a duty of the road user exists, for swans, frozen-to-the-spot deer or potholes, then coming a cropper from any one of them must be, to some degree, the responsibility or fault of the road user hitting one, whatever the outcome.

Or are we getting so daft that we think "someone" should always provide us with completely safe spaces or be prosecuted if "they" don't and we act injudiciously to become a cropper here and there?

***********
Personally I like smooth roads free of hazards. Luckily, most roads out here in West Wales are much, much better than the roads I rode over in NW England for 50 years. Still, i keep an eye out on the 50 or so metres ahead as it seems preferable to avoid a possible pothole than to have the satisfaction of suing the council from the hospital bed where I lie with a broken pelvis and vast swathes of gravel rash.

Cugel the careful.
“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence are usually the slaves of some defunct economist”.
John Maynard Keynes
Nearholmer
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Nearholmer »

Bot-pots are certainly out there but the content seems to vary from the obvious attempts at creating division and disaffection to the merely playful.
You’re probably right, in which case what I’m observing is no more than the normal division into “us”(people on bikes) and “them” (people in cars) that happens without deliberate provocation.
Bonefishblues
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Re: Who is liable?

Post by Bonefishblues »

mattheus wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 11:28am Posters should be aware:

In civil liabilty cases, courts/judges very often find BOTH parties liable for SOME of the damages.

It's rare that either party in these sort of situations are entirely to blame for something; if we all remembered that, these discussions would be about 4 posts long, and would avoid the endless circular debate we always get!

If the following is true, we have ourselves to blame for always stoking these fires:
Nearholmer wrote: 8 Feb 2023, 10:20am This is another of these incendiary posts that is either:
...
- written by a person deliberately stoking trouble; or,
Liability is established. It rests with one party, however the compensatory sum may be reduced due to the contributory negligence of the successful party.
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