2009-03-20 - Rider Down, Uxbridge Road + Askew Road

No road user is 'solely responsible for their own safety'. That's not the right way of understanding traffic, which is a social environment with plenty of interaction that follows pretty much universally understood norms of human behaviour. It's not a free for all in which everybody is on their own. It is only by increasing the degree of collaboration between different road users that actual safety and perceived safety can be improved.

That may be true, but each road user at the end of the day, must take sole responsibility for their actions. This means they are the only ones in a position to ensure their safe passage without doing anything that will unnecessarily endanger themselves.For example, undertaking lorries is just plain wrong. Surely that should be common sense to everyone?

We should hope that everyone is responisible for their own actions. In practice people try to avoid full responsiblity if they can get away with it. On the road the importance of this responsibility should be related to the capability to harm other people. We should expect a much higher degree of care from lorry drivers because the capability to harm is much higher than car drivers or cyclists. We could construct a scale of care, with lorry and bus drivers at the top and pedestrians at the bottom.
I can't see the point on trying to work out who is to blame after a crash, that involves simplifying what are quite complex processes often with incomplete evidence, particularly if one of the witnesses is missing. The real question is how could the crash have been avoided, because of the huge capacity for harm we should expect lorry drivers to put more effort into avoiding crashes and as professionals they should have better training and be expected to perform better than amateurs. Similarly we should expect cyclists to take more care about hitting pedestrians than pedestrians should take care to avoid being hit. Under British law pedestrians have the right to wander wherever they want on the streets. I think it is great that some choose to do it while plugged into an ipod and texting.