This is actually a thread about me on my mountain bike, but I think it would be broadly the same on a PTW, so I've posted it here. I'm interested in exploring this to work out how to adapt my riding (and driving) style.
I crashed my bike yesterday when a car to my left pulled out on me at a roundabout (here - imagine the van pulled out). Not misinterpreted or anything, just a classic SMIDSY.
I don't know how fast I was going, except that from experience you can't go round it quicker than about 25mph. Anyway thanks to disc brakes, I did a super cool but inadvertent endo and went into their bonnet at a thankfully reduced speed. No obvious injury bar a few aches and pains, and no obvious damage to the bike.
All this left me wondering a few things about this and traffic accidents in general.
- Can I be held at all responsible for taking a legal route around a roundabout at a legal speed, with no traffic to my right? e.g. could anyone say "you were going too fast for the conditions and poor visibility here''? [I suspect I can]
- If it's said that I should have slowed for increased visibility, or been able to emergency stop in time, where do you draw the line? At some point it becomes physically impossible to still make progress.
- If I hadn't hit the offending car but swerved and hit either another vehicle or someone's property, how would liability be affected?
- If I hadn't hit the offending car but swerved and crashed doing no damage to anyone but myself, how would liability be affected?
I ask the last two because it applies everywhere - e.g. the moral and pragmatic question of do you avoid a worse head on collision by hitting someone blameless? It certainly seems more straightforward to hit the car to me, if perhaps not the most comfortable option.
I have a picture of the junction from their perspective somewhere, and I can understand how it happened - from behind the give way markings, there's no view. From a little further forward before getting into the path of traffic, there's a view of the last bit of that approach.
One thing I found interesting was this: under normal circumstances, my line means that the van driver has to get quite a lot further forward to get in the way. However if they move far enough forward, I 'decide' I'm going to crash. This means that half way through my turn before the roundabout centre, I instinctively brake in a straight line - it's not really consciously avoidable. This may be part of something called target fixation but either way any chance of that line goes out the window and we are definitely going to collide - whereas it's possible I could still have got around.
Thoughts?