Does British Cycling insurance cover this sort of stuff?
That is ridiculous. So he was going along the road perfectly legally and went through lights on green for traffic. Some daft bint who was not looking where she was going whilst crossing the road steps in front of him so they collide.
And he gets stitched up for all the legal expenses?
If those are genuinely the facts, then things are not right.
I hope my BC membership covers for this type of liability case (I’m not on the basic one - I’m on the middle one I think).
Good question, because the £100k is legal costs, not liability, so it needs to be legal cover rather than liability cover (which is easily covered by club insurance policies and home insurance policies, but in this case the liability is small).
that's bizzare - how does a person not paying attention get compensation crossing on a gree light.
If those are genuinely the facts, then things are not right.
They're not. HTH.
@poah
Seems like he had bad advice. He should have countersued, but he didn't as he doesn't agree with that sort of thing. If he'd countersued she would owe him an equal amount of money, so it would cancel out.
... or something like that.
I really don't get this - as I understood it, they were found more or less equally liable (she didn't look, he wasn't riding at a speed that he could react in time to the unexpected), so why would he pay out and her not?
Is this replicated in person v car? Bet that happens more often.
EDIT: Tahnks Easily, that makes sense.
what a stupid decision by the lady judge. Probably bias against cyclists.
I've no idea why her gender is worth mentioning, but it's worth reading the judgement instead of jerking your knee.
how does a person not paying attention get compensation crossing on a gree light
Because it's not illegal or inherently irresponsible to do so. In this case there was at least one vehicle approaching which the claimant had failed to see due to voluntary distraction, so she was deemed to have been partly responsible, but surely as a general principle it makes sense for people with vehicles to have some responsibility for not ploughing into people on foot.
Extrapolating the scenario, if I was waiting at a crossing with a child and they stepped into the road, and someone was driving towards them and could have avoided them but didn't, I'd expect to have a valid claim for compensation on their behalf.
Don't forget that there will be many details of this case which aren't reported in the media.
The one aspect of this that bothers me (other than the legal costs business) is that the quote refers to "cyclists" rather than "drivers or riders of vehicles" or some similarly generic phrase. I'm not overly convinced that had this involved a car rather than a bicycle then the same outcome would have occurred—but that may well be just my cynicism.