What?

Do you recognize that very useful things can be learned from totally hypothetical situations? Of course, the more realistic the assumptions in the hypothetical situation, the more likely it will be useful, but the point is that nothing has to be based on actual facts in order to learn something.

We can for example talk about a situation in which a cyclist is riding in a door zone, when suddenly a child in the back seat of the car, totally out of the view of the cyclist, unexpectedly opens the rear driver's side door. Would whether this actually ever happened even matter relative to the learning value of it? More to the point, am I talking about an incident that I was actually involved with, or did I just make it up? Does it matter with respect to the lesson it brings? Of course not.

So then why in this case does knowing the cyclists' actual lane position necessary in order "for any lessons to be gained from this incident". What's so special about this incident that it cannot be leveraged to create a realistic hypothetical situation and analyzed and learned from?

Why must we know all the facts for anything we say based on what is 'likely' to be anything other than worthless?

After all, on this forum we're not the police or insurance investigators. We have no interest in determining what really truly actually happened. This is a safety and advocacy forum. If we can learn about safety from this, even if it's from a hypothetical loosely constructed based on what is likely to have happened here, where's the harm in that? How is that any less useful than using pure hypotheticals?

I'm genuinely baffled by the resistance to speculation and hypothesizing on this forum. It's quite common, too.