Daily Mail in cycling shocker!

To quote:

***"That’s right: no collision, whether it be with a car, bus, motorbike or pedestrian, would ever be the bike rider’s responsibility. This, he calculates, will encourage more people to take up cycling.

Let’s consider a few scenarios. Cyclist jumps a red light and crashes into your car. Whose fault? Yours. Cyclist shoots out of a blind alley without looking left or right and ends up under the wheels of a passing bus. Whose fault? The bus driver’s.

Drunk cyclist wobbles wrong way up one-way street and even though you stop your car in time, he still thuds into you. Whose fault? See above."***

All relevant. I HATE cars in cities, but taking it as a given for moment I think motorists are right to be sceptical of this legisation.

"Many cyclists, particularly in cities, already see themselves as either above the law or victims or both."

Whilst cyclists are undeniably under catered for, this is actually true. Forgiving the articles obvious and revealing vitriol towards cycling and its representative organisations, it's on the money as far as I can see.

I think I've posted about this elsewhere, but just to re-iterate: This gets misreported all the time (often probably intentionally). It is not proposed to make motorists at fault in all collisions. Rather, it is proposed to create a legal presumption that a motorist will bear the burden of proof to show that they were not at fault. Hence, the cycling bogeyman suddenly jumping a red light would still be at fault (and in most cases, it would be easy to demonstrate that they were at fault).

A full briefing is here:

http://www.roadpeace.org/documents/Strict%20liability%20discussion%20paper.pdf

Until this sort of quality information becomes available more widely, rather than being blocked by politically-motivated gutter journalism, this will continue to be misunderstood and misreported.