anothereye wrote: ... Except that drivers lose their no claims bonus; that, apparently, makes a difference.
As I said when I first queried what you were saying above, I wasn't querying the value of the principle. My concern was that once something has been posted on the internet, it can soon be being quoted as a confirmed fact. If a cycle campaigner were to make that assertion in front of an audience of people who were dubious but open-minded (no point in trying to convince anybody else) then unless the assertion could be immediately demonstrated to be watertight if queried, the campaigner would be wasting their time. eg we are now into the effects of losing the NCB, not the principle of "strict liability."
I'm not trying to dodge a discussion about that principle, but I can't see any need to recycle what I said on that earlier thread.
The essence of this is that we want to change driver behaviour. It's not at all certain that being indemnified by insurance makes drivers (or anybody else) more careful. To the extent that some of the countries listed as having "strict liability" actually have "no fault compensation," that illustrates what I am saying. Like it or not, some people on both sides of the debate see this as a means of achieving "guilty unless proven innocent." (Look back at your own use of the word "guilty" in the post I queried.)
While I was posting you have quoted Martin Porter (the same bit reohn2 quoted a bit further up in response to a post of mine) so I'll add this. I've hammered on till I'm regarded as some sort of crank (
) about the retreat from traffic policing. I cannot now see there being a return. What happens in other countries is often quoted, as it has been in our current exchange. I'll suggest it needs a bit more analysis and I don't believe there is necessarily one common factor. I suspect that in The Netherlands, for example, society is not divided along class lines in the same way that it is here. I also suspect that in France the difference is employing a lot more "police," quite a lot of whom are more military than police, who robustly enforce traffic law when they have no riots to quell. Their long-standing fixed penalty system means, for example, that loopholes are thin on the ground.I suspect that the main uniting feature of the legal system in many EU countries (at least those with the "inquisitorial" system) is that they just don't deal with summary motoring matters in the same way that we do. Eg, when the issue of the police being able to require the keeper of a motor vehicle to identify the driver went on appeal to Europe, on the basis that it infringed the human right to avoid self incrimination, the gist of the judgment was that identifying offending drivers took precedence over such legal niceties. (It must be one of the few appeals to European courts where the UK government was on the winning side.)
,I wear a helmet an hiviz.I've never been knocked off,some near misses,occasionally luck has saved me from injury,mostly 45years of road craft has seen me through.