trashbat wrote:A nice little line in victim blaming going on here.
trashbat wrote:Well, that or they cause the retrospective audience to lose sight of the things that matter.
Oh she could have done X.
Oh she should have done Y.
Oh this would never have happened to me because I would never have done Z because I'm an expert.
Err great. None of that matters because, hello, reality check: he deliberately* ran her over with his car.
What next? Sorry you've been stabbed madam but you do carry some responsibility for not doing that evening class in knife fighting. Wonderful stuff. And people wonder why AD has a bad rep.
*you can argue the toss about precise intent but at the bare minimum he moved his car specifically to intimidate and got the measure of passive/aggressive wrong. It's a very tenuous grip on the concept of accident. Personally I'd like to see people like this severely punished.
Edit: there was a post about cameras that this was in reply to, I've not gone completely mad
I am not sure that is entirely fair - this is an AD forum, and a part of that is analysing what happens & seeing how it might have been prevented etc. There is also a part of AD which is driving / riding to change the behaviours of others - acknowledging that we don't live in a perfect world and that many other road users will do silly things / react badly / have toddler meltdowns / etc. - none of that is victim blaming or accepting such behaviors as valid or acceptable - but it is a reality check on the world we live in and an acknowledgement that to be the best driver / rider out there we need to deal with such situations - prevent them happening / avoid the consequences etc. - a big part of AD is using the road in such a way as to control or influence how others use it.
The discussion above is not blaming the rider, but outlining and learning from the video such as to suggest alternatives which could have prevented the issue - she may well have been in the right - but that doesn't mean she chose the optimum set of actions, she knew perhaps from his moving forwards that he wasn't happy with her filtering - did she do anything about it? She could have been more assertive and moved her bike in front of the car, she could have accelerated faster once the lights were green to outpace him, she could have moved in several other ways - instead she chose a passive route which was perhaps not the best choice in hindsight... As to it being deliberate, I don't think we have any right to make such a judgement - from the driver's perspective it is not easy to see where a biker's foot might be, and visually he will have seen her and the bike and maybe not realised that her foot was out to the left of the shape he could see... he didn't swerve at her, he wasn't being agressive when he got out of the car, he didn't drive off, etc.
I have no issue with bikers who filter properly - however many don't, there are those esp. in London who are lunatics on bikes and try and take out your car, and as for the ones who 'filter' in my lane undertaking me on the motorway at speed - sorry that is just dangerous... While it might be legal to filter at low speeds, it does stretch the safety boundaries a little having two vehicles beside each other in the same lane, and however legal it might be, the biker is the one initiating the action, they need to control the situation and choose when and where it is wise to filter, rather than sitting back on the law and not recognising their own lack of foresight - both are needed, we need more education of motorists, but also every road user needs to take responsibility for their own actions, however legal; it might be legal for me to drive up a dual carriageway at 70mph, but it is not always sensible...
Alasdair