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Legal Riddle: Should Bikes ALWAYS Trump Cars?
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2972 Reads
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 If a bike and a car collide in Los Angeles, who makes the most noise - legally speaking?
Councilman Bill Rosendahl Ed Reyes is pushing for city support of a bill that would amend the California Motor Vehicle code to "assign responsibility of any collision between vehicles and bicycles to the motorist."
Here, (thanks to Joseph for the doc) is the resolution that heaps the blame for any bike-versus-car wreck squarely on the motorist's head. The California Bike Coalition is tracking the bill itself, AB 60, which you can read here ...
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The bill - which sprang from an incident in which a truck killed triathlete Kendra Payne on a training run in Santa Barbara County in January, 2006 - sounds like a good idea poorly expressed:
It's no secret that I'm a vigorous, fire-breathing, chainlube-in-my-blood advocate for VC 21200, which gives bicyclists every right and responsibility to share the road with motor vehicles.
But I wonder about the legal stability of such a law as the one Rosendahl Reyes urges us to support.
At first blush, it seems like a recipe for heavy litigation and, ultimately, a solid overturning at the hands of an aggrieved driver, a sharp lawyer and a sympathetic high court.
The chief problem, to me, is the way bikes can move through stopped traffic and cars cannot:
If I bike out through stop-and-go traffic and cut through gridlock across the path of a car that crushes me when the car behind it is rear-ended, is that entirely the rear-ender's fault?
If I split two stalled lanes of traffic at high speed, big-ringing it toward the intersection at 20 mph to make a light, and someone inadvertently doors me while pouring out his coffee, who's at fault?
If I'm pacing traffic and swerve left to avoid a pothole (or being doored) and bounce off the nearest moving car and onto the pavement, should the motorist automatically get a ticket and - if I'm feeling litigious - a trip to civil court?
Granted - I'm totally playing devil's advocate here: Good friends and good strangers are doored, broadsided, rear-ended, high-sided and otherwise abused every single day - sometimes with brutal or fatal results - by Los Angeles drivers who either don't see bicyclists as "a threat" or just don't give a damn about us.
But if you're riding imprudently - albeit legally - should you be able to prevail in any court at any time simply because you were on two wheels and the guy who nailed you was on four?
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Friday, January 19, 2007 - 12:07 PM
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