Car accidents and contributory negligence
There have been a couple of court decisions recently in cases brought by injured cyclists against car drivers.
The cases suggest that the courts perhaps aren’t being as generous to cyclists as they are to injured pedestrians – especially when it comes to contributory negligence.
In Malasi v Attmed a cyclist jumped a red light, rode into the junction without looking, and was seriously injured when he was hit by a taxi. The taxi driver saw the cyclist and braked, but couldn’t avoid the collision. The driver had been travelling at between 41 and 50 miles per hour, on a street where the speed limit was 30mph.
The cyclist sued the taxi driver for compensation for his injuries. Judge Seymour QC found the taxi driver liable, but reduced the cyclist’s damages by 80% for contributory negligence.
The judgment was delivered on 5 December 2011, but only reported in summary form (at present you can read the summary here). I’ve been waiting for the full judgment to become available, but there’s still no sign of that happening. So we still don’t have a complete record of what the judge said.
It has been debated elsewhere whether the outcome was fair. But the case also highlights one way in which the law might be giving cyclists a rough ride. Read more…
Challenging a fixed penalty notice
Lots of people post online about fixed penalty notices (FPNs) they’ve been given. Often they’re upset, or feel they’ve been mistreated in some way.
I thought I’d look at the legal position when an FPN is issued and is open to criticism – for example because it mentions the wrong offence, or imposes the wrong penalty, or just seemed like an unfair thing for the police officer to do in the circumstances.
Are you allowed to cycle in bus lanes?
A few listeners to the Law in Action piece about cycling law have picked up on something I missed: one of the complaints about cyclists, with which Joshua Rozenberg opened the discussion, was that cyclists behave as though bus lanes don’t apply to them.
I’ve been asked whether there’s any basis for the criticism. Personally I’ve always assumed that cyclists are allowed to ride in bus lanes. But it turns out that’s not always the case.
Cycle law on radio 4
Law in Action is a regular legal affairs program on the BBC’s Radio 4. This week the program discussed cycling law for a few minutes towards the end. You can listen here – the section on cycling law starts at about 21 minutes.
For the program, I rode around Edgware road and Marble Arch, pointing out some of the legal issues affecting cycling on busy streets. I then talked for about half an hour with the presenter, Joshua Rozenberg, about traffic laws, how well they’re enforced and why cyclists sometimes break them. We also talked about reform of the law, including the possibility of a ‘strict liability’ rule and the proposals which have been put forward by Andrea Leadsom in Parliament to introduce new offences of causing death or serious injury by dangerous or reckless cycling.
Because of the time constraint, much of the discussion didn’t make it into the program. For example, you hear me say that sometimes red-light jumping by cyclists is perhaps defensible – but you don’t hear me explain why. Read more…
Potholes and the law
We’re in the last few months of the year. It’s a special time of unique cycling experiences - like when you’re caught in the dark without lights, and are sure that it wasn’t night-time this early last week. Or the unexpected early-morning downpour, before you’ve started bringing extra clothes to work just in case, which means a whole day of soggy trousers.
As we get closer to winter, there are also likely to be more potholes in the roads. Potholes were a big issue in the cold winter last year, and the government ended up making an additional £100m available to local councils for the extra repairs they had to do. It was also the year when pothole-reporting apps for smartphones got a lot of attention – for example this article on the Guardian’s bike blog.
It made me wonder how bad things can get before councils start getting in trouble. And also why some potholes seem to hang around on the roads for so long, but councils were prepared to fill in other holes reported by the apps, often very quickly.
I thought I’d do some research to find out. Once again, it’s a complicated area. Below are the basics. Read more…