Safe Speed Forums

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to improve road safety by introducing strict liability for motorists in collisions.



Disregarding the 'perception' issue - discuss......

_________________
Views expressed are personal opinions and are not necessarily shared by the Safe Speed campaign

Poor lambs. They know not what they ask for.

We need skilled and responsible behaviour from all road users. Assumptions of blame just won't do. The ultimate effect would be that drivers would be angrier and pedestrians and cyclists would be more careless.

We also need to see road safety as a 'team game' for all, not an 'us and them' thing.

Edited to add: It's also a charter for careless cycling/pedestrianing.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

The proposers of the petition might like to consider this.

Children are over-represented in accident figures because of their own hazardous actions not those of drivers. An alternative measure to make children cycling or walking more conscious of their responsibility for safety would be to make THEM (or their parents) strictly liable if they were in an accident with a car.

This is the reverse of what the petition intends but if the proposers believe that the sanction of automatic liability will improve people's attitudes then the logic is good. The petition seeks to make drivers more careful by imposing strict liability. Why won't this logic work with pedestrians/cyclists?

_________________
Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

If they did ever introduce this system I would want to fit cameras onto my car so that I could prove liability.



And what if the car is not "at speed" and some idiot walks out in front of it? Is it still right to blame the driver?

Personally I dont think there should be ANY strict liability offences.

They ONLY exist to make prosecutions easier (IE so you can get easy convictions without having the inconveniance of having to establish guilt! )

They are little better than "Acts of Attainder".

_________________
"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Oh, and another thing!

The initial proposal may well be applied elsewhere in Europe.

But then most european countries legal systems dont have the same presumption of innocence that ours has (supposadly, Its been somewhat erroded in recent years) so that shouldnt be too surprising!

_________________
"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

I often have one running now after a two year fight getting another driver to admit liability. It has also proved useful in reviewing my own driving.

_________________
Driving fast is for a particular time and place, I can do it I just only do it occasionally because I am a gentleman.
- James May

And thus the idea is defeated in a puff of its own logic. Brilliant.

Of course it's still dangerously wrong for other reasons too.

_________________
Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

Perhaps if more parents were held responsible for their failure to educate their offspring or ensure that they were not at danger on the public highway , then the accident rate involving minors might reduce. How can some parents expect drivers /road users to be held responsible for their failure to oversee the safety of young/very young children

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Since the petition only wants assumed liability to refer to insurance claims....it is an obvious attempt to make it easier for fake insurance claims.

Call me a starry-eyed optimist, but wouldn't starting each accident investigation with an open mind be the best way?

Um - they have more cycle lanes and shared ped/cyclist facilities which are always used over on the mainland continent. We do not have that kind of inrastructure and would be difficult to engineer this.

Highway Code across EU has been revised. Wildy brought various copies back from a recent trip to her parents. Their revisions seem to focus more on developing COAST principles - and are very well illustrated throughout.


There are also rules regarding j-walking and cycling which are complied with. Thus - they can perhaps initiate a liability clause on the motorist because there are the legal means available to prove the pedestrian or cyclist was either completely or partially at fault.

_________________
Take with a chuckle or a grain of salt
Drive without COAST and it's all your own fault!

A SMILE is a curve that sets everything straight (P Diller).

A Smiley Per post
FINES USfor our COAST!

Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon - but driving with a smile and a COAST calm mind.

Surely it isn't true that at present, recklessness must be proved? To me that word implies a complete disregard for others' safety; I would have thought it was sufficient to show fault. It sounds like a false premise.

We are all missing the point here. This is one of those proposals that have been sold to an ignorant populace by a group of people who are laying a gravy-train for themselves (not unlike those magical self-funding accident reducing machines that are nothing of the kind).

This stems from one branch of the insurance industry, because the concept is not who is at fault in the traditional sense, but in fact who is in the best position to fund the consequences of the incident (in the best left-wing tradition of ability to pay being more important than culpability). The bleeding heart liberalists will fall for it in a social justice sense, not appreciating that it will in fact put (compulsory) insurance costs up for everyone as every incident will be claimed and robustly defended.

This system already exists in Italy, and it has in fact backfired on the cyclists and pedestrians who now find themselves being expected to pay to insure against the costs of any counter claims made by the insurers of 'strictly liable' motorists.

The winners of course being.....

Indeed!

_________________
"The road to a police state is paved with public safety legislation"

Like this: http://www.lcc.org.uk/index.asp?PageID=256

I see more hit-and-runs.

_________________
Fear is a weapon of mass distraction