Originally Posted by John C. Ratliff
Maybe it is so hard to understand because, as a trained accident investigator, we never specucate about anything. We also do not assume anything, for the reason (the breakout of that word) stated above. Once you do that, you start going down a road that may be leading in the wrong direction.
You say "wrong direction". In order for a direction to be wrong, you must have a destination in mind, and the direction in question must not take you there. If your destination is "determine what actually happened", then certainly speculation and assumptions may take you in the "wrong direction". As I said earlier, "determine what actually happened" is not an appropriate or relevant topic for this forum. What
is appropriate is to talk about what is more or less likely to have happened, and discuss how a cyclist might avoid such a crash IF those things are what happened.
It is apparent that you are interested in only the things that a cyclist can do, and not what effect the cyclist might have on the system to change behaviors of drivers.
Oh, really? I'm not interested in what effect the cyclist might have on the system to change behaviors of drivers? Where have you been? Of course I'm interested in that. It's just that you don't accept that cycling vehicularly, and advocating vehicular cycling,
is the most effective means cyclists have to change behaviors of drivers. I also don't think that efforts to pass laws such as 3' minimum passing distance, or the current proposed law in Oregon, will have much if any positive effects with respect to how motorists treat cyclists, and are likely to do the opposite. Same with onstreet segregated bicycle facilities.
Your working theory says that all accidents are preventable by the cyclist, and mine says that is not true. This is the major disagreement that we have.
Are you capable of not exaggerating my position when restating it? If you could, it would go a long way towards us being able to have a rational discourse.
Your statement is akin to accusing MADD of have a working theory "that
all accidents are preventable if all drivers are sober", or Planned Parenthood of having a working theory "that
all pregnancies are preventable with rubbers". It's disingenuous strawman creation. Never have I claimed that
all accidents are preventable by the cyclist. So that most certainly is not the major disagreement that we have. In fact, we don't disagree about that at all, since we both recognize that some crashes like (
Name deleted, HH, no names mentioned in this thread please, due to the previously mentioned concern for family members finding the analysis thread via Google-T.S) death, or the woman pulling the kid trailer) are certainly not preventable by the cyclist.