Originally Posted by
Abe_Froman
...Responsibility always lies with the one who is creating a dangerous situation. People walking at 3mph are not a danger to anyone, no matter what they do.
... Same as a cyclist on the road....they can close their eyes and sprint through red lights, and they're not going to endanger one person in a vehicle. The drivers are the ones that pose a lethal threat to others.
Not quite. It's about something more important than "creating a dangerous situation," it's about what reasonable people do to avoid harm. The cyclist who sprints blindly through a red light and inattentive pedestrians on busy MUPS do, in fact, create hazards. It doesn't matter who could cause the most harm to whom. What matters is who is most negligent. I don't know about you, but I don't want to run into ANY 100-200 lb object with my bike or my car. If such an object were a log or a deer or something, we couldn't blame them, but people? Not only can we blame them for their own injuries, we can blame them for any damage or inconvenience to us when they are negligent and we are exercising caution.
That said, I'll go out on a limb and say that, unless it's divided and well-marked, and there is a steady stream of high-speed riders on the MUP in question, riders who don't keep their speed below 15 mph in the presence of pedestrians are negligent.