Originally Posted by
cdp8
Nobody, not even the attorneys for Mr. Flint's family, is denying Mr. Flint's responsibility for the accident.
If it takes breaking the law to break a Strava record, and Strava encourages people to break that record, then Strava is encouraging people to break the law. So, no, Strava encouraging its users to break records is not garbage. Plus, Mr. Flint does not have to have been "forced into it" for Strava to have some culpability.
Just because Mr. Flint is primarly responsible, does not mean that no one else has some culpability.
Hypothetically, if Strava started keeping segment times and records for motorcycles, and this incident and the SF pedestrian fatality occurred with motorcycles instead of bicycles, would you feel the same way?
Of course. It is down to the individual to make decisions and take responsibility for those decisions. If some company (Strava or anyone else) were offering cash sums as prizes for challenges that could only be achieved by breaking the law and/or putting others in danger when those others were nothing to do with the activities concerned then I'd say there was potentially some responsibility. Even then I'd say it was still a huge stretch on the basis anyone could reason that the cash reward didn't make the risk go away and it wasn't worth the risk.
The trouble with cases like this is that if Strava is deemed to have some responsibility for posting a leaderboard or sending emails saying things like "you lost your record" then where does it stop? Does a bit of friendly goading suddenly turn into legal responsibility if things turn sour? Does an informal sprint between two cyclists on an open road land one of them with legal liability if the other loses control and is injured or killed? If Strava didn't send emails out telling people they lost their record but merely posted a passive leaderboard what (if any) liability should that carry, if someone updated the leaderboard and saw they weren't at the top any more? If there is any liability perhaps this forum should be shut down because the somewhat outlandish claims made in some of the subforums here may encourage people to take silly risks to manage apparently superhuman feats and generate a host of legal liabilities.
The question ultimately boils down to the eternal question of "am I my brother's keeper". While we may argue about moral obligations not to encourage others to do things that might be dangerous there's a huge difference between a moral code that we can keep or not as we see fit and a legal code enforced upon us all.