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> Police in those cases are not trying to root-cause the accident. They are assigning legal blame. Here in the US, if you are driving a car and a child suddenly runs out into the road in front of you, you are at fault regardless the circumstances. The child's behaviour was the root cause, but the car was at fault. That might be true in the US, not so much in the UK. The police reports try to determine root-cause, including any mitigating circumstances for any party involved. Insurance might consider that as “legal-fault”, but the courts don’t. They’ll use it as part of their evaluation, but judges and magistrates also include other information that might be pertinent when trying to divvy up fault. > Where I live now there aren't many road cyclists, but like the child, if a cyclist does something unpredictable and a driver doesn't notice, I assume the driver would still legally be at fault. Has it occurred to you that if a cyclist making a minor error results in a car hitting them, it might be that the driver was far too close to the cyclist? It not like a bike can accelerate or change direction extremely quickly, giving a bike a couple of meters of space is usually all you need to ensure that a collision doesn’t happen if either parties do something unexpectedly. Finally the most common cause of bike-car incidents is driver doing stupid things like pulling out in front of bikes, or more likely, turning across them unexpectedly. Cars can behave just as erratically and unpredictably as bikes, difference is, car occupants rarely suffer serious consequences. |