Boost cycling tomorrow by changing to assumed liability.
Two weeks into my first semester as an undergrad student in The Netherlands, i was run over by a car. My right leg was broken in two places and i spent almost a week in hospital. During my first year at uni i was known as the “wheelchair guy”. Nevertheless, the experience taught me a lot about Dutch cycling laws, and how UK cycling legislation lags behind.
The UK is one of the most dangerous countries in Europe to be a cyclist. On the UK’s roads, cyclists are 15 times more likely to be killed than car drivers[1]. Cyclists are also much less likely to receive justice for their injuries. In 2013, 20-year-old Tom Ridgway was run over and killed by a taxi driver, who was later fined £35 for driving without due care and attention. That’s not a typo. £35. The driver was fined a mere £35 for killing a cyclist. This isn’t a rare story, over 100 cyclists were killed last year.
So how do we start making cycling safer? The most common response is to look at the cycling infrastructure in the Netherlands and say we need to replicate it here. While properly segregated cycling lanes do help to protect cyclists, this isn’t the quickest, cheapest or the most effective solution as the infrastructure takes time to be built and won’t cover everywhere. There are some locations where cars and cyclists have to share roads; think of the cobbled inner city streets of Amsterdam.
There is a free, most effective step the government could take tomorrow to protect cyclists that wouldn’t cost a penny: legislate for assumed liability. In the Netherlands, this law means that in the case of a collision between a car and a cyclist, the driver will be presumed liable, unless there is clear evidence that the cyclist was to blame. This is fairer because the cyclist will inevitably come off worse than the car, a statement with which my snapped leg would certainly concur. Assumed legislation levels the road for cyclists; drivers are more wary of them when they know they can be blamed for running them over.
The U.K is one of only five countries in Europe to have liability laws that prioritise cars. Here, the law requires the cyclist to prove that the driver was to blame following a collision. This is often impossible. If for example, a cyclist is run over on a country lane with no witnesses, then under British law the cyclist will find it almost impossible to seek protection. The imbalance in liability is unfair because drivers don’t pay for collisions with their lives but cyclists often do. Over the years, numerous organisations (by which i mean every pro-cycling charity in existence) have led campaigns for this change to the law. Ultimately their efforts have led nowhere, presumably due to apathy and lobbying by insurance companies
The increased number of cyclists on the roads is one of the few positive developments from this pandemic. Cycling is better for your health, better for the economy and better for the environment. People have felt safer with fewer cars on the roads. With traffic levels returning to normal, the government needs to stop treating the car as king and put cyclist firsts. Moving to a system of presumed liability can be done overnight and would represent a sensible change to the culture of how we treat cyclists. Just as stricter rules on drink driving created made it unacceptable to drink and drive, presumed liability would make it morally wrong to knock off a cyclist.
Further reading
[1] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/cycle-safety-laws-new-kim-briggs-death-warning-against-witch-hunt-a7960291.html
