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OPINION
Involved in a crash? Here's a modest proposal
Tue, Aug 29, 2017 16:53
145
Crash (CC 2.0 BY-NC Edmund white|Flickr).jpgIn the aftermath of the Alliston case, what should you do if you are a cyclist involved in a crash with a pedestrian?
I have one word of advice for you: Leave.
That’s right. Leave the scene. Get out of Dodge. Get away from the situation as fast as you can. Say nothing to anyone. Give nobody your details. Don’t hang around long enough for anyone to get their phone out. Split. Bugger off. Go home the long way — down as many alleys and across as many parks as possible to avoid CCTV.
Say nothing about the crash to anyone. Don’t discuss it in forums. Don’t tweet or post on Facebook about it. Don’t search on Google for news of the crash or its aftermath. Don’t get your bike repaired. Carry on with your life as if nothing happened.
“But, John,” I can hear you say, “that’s awful advice. Ethically you should stop and help, and isn’t leaving the scene an offence?”
Road Traffic Act: leaving the scene
Last point first: no, it isn’t. Section 170 of the Road Traffic Act makes it an offence for the driver of a motor vehicle to leave the scene of a crash, but it specifically only applies to drivers of “mechanically propelled vehicles” as it quaintly calls them. (That means an engine or motor; your bike’s chain and gears don’t count as the propulsion comes from your legs.)
Section 168 makes it an offence to refuse to give your name and address to “any person having reasonable ground” to require it. But they have to ask for it first. Leave before anyone can ask your name, and you’re in the clear. Martin Porter QC, who drew my attention to this part of the Road Traffic Act, added: “I have never yet been supplied with name and address by [a] motorist I have reasonably suspected of careless driving. Asked a few times.”
Ethically, yes, all of this is dreadful. But the Alliston case has put cyclists in the position where we cannot be sure of being dealt with justly. In fact, we can be sure that we will not be treated justly.
There is no way that Charlie Alliston was guilty of manslaughter, and he was rightly acquitted.
But there is also no way he was riding furiously and wantonly. He was riding at 18mph. Traffic and parked vehicles around him left him with nowhere to go and when he yelled to warn Kim Briggs she stepped back into his path. If that’s furious and wanton riding, I’m a banana.
The brakeless fixie issue
You could argue that Alliston would not have ended up in court in the first place if he hadn’t been riding a bike that wasn’t street legal. Would the Met and the CPS have gone after him if he’d been riding a fixie with a front brake? I believe they would.
The tide is turning against cycling in London. The nonsensical claims that a few short stretches of protected cycleway have caused huge increases in congestion and pollution have stuck. Mayor Sadiq Khan has cancelled or postponed shovel-ready cycling schemes and TfL has mysteriously forgotten how to design new ones if its hopeless, inept Nine Elms and Fiveways schemes are anything to go by. I expect that before the end of Khan’s first term, TfL will announce that Cycle Superhighway 3, the world-class protected cycle lane along the Embankment is to be ripped up.
Meanwhile cycling and walking commissioner Will Norman doesn’t realise that his job is to enable active travel, not to run spin for Sadiq Khan’s preference for roads and buses. Khan is running a PR mayoralty, all talk and no delivery, and calling on others to fix problems like air pollution that are well within his power. But to do so would put him into conflict with the influential bus, taxi and haulage lobbies.
With public opinion increasingly hostile to cycling, the Met and the CPS would have gone after Alliston anyway. After all, a mother of two was, tragically, dead. Something Had To Be Done, and prosecuting Alliston was Something. Alliston had dug a huge hole for himself by his forum and Evening Standard postings. He really was a dream defendant — if you’re a prosecutor.
Given the general ignorance about cycling, a fixie with a front brake could still be easily represented as the equivalent to a Formula One car, and equally inappropriate for the streets. Alliston’s lawyer failed to challenge the Met’s nonsensical braking distance tests in either premise or execution; it’s vanishingly unlikely he’d have been able to mount a defence against the charge of furious and wanton cycling even if Alliston had been riding a bike with brakes.
And I don’t believe the bike made any substantial difference. The instinctive reaction when a pedestrian steps into your path is to try and avoid hitting them. Yes, you’ll slow down too and Alliston did, but Kim Briggs stepped back into his path, they butted heads and she fell to the ground. Had he been going slower (as he would not have had time to stop, despite the Met’s staged video), she might still have fallen, she might still have hit her head on the ground. We just don’t know, and we cannot therefore know that Alliston’s inability to stop faster was the primary cause of Kim Briggs’s death.
The not guilty verdict shows that the jury did not think it was. If Alliston was guilty of an illegal act in not having a front brake, and that illegal act led to Kim Briggs’s death, then he was guilty of manslaughter. If he was not guilty, then his illegal act did not cause Kim Briggs’s death.
That also makes the conviction for wanton and furious driving unsafe too, unless the jury took the view that the injuries that Kim Briggs sustained as a result of Alliston riding into her did not cause her death. That would be a somewhat bizarre conclusion, but that’s juries for you. However, I’m not a lawyer and there may be some twist to the legal reasoning here that I’ve missed. Happy to be corrected in the comments or via Twitter.
The justice system is stacked against cyclists
More broadly, the Alliston case is only the latest example of the justice system failing a cyclist, but it’s unusual in that the rider was accused of perpetrating a fatal crash, instead of being its victim.
London’s police have largely been on the back foot when it comes to cycling since the debacle of Operation Safeway, in which the police targeted minor cycling infringements after several cyclists were killed in London in November, rather than going after the motor vehicle behaviour that kills cyclists. They were pilloried for it by cycling groups, and rightly so.
Presented with an unsympathetic defendant in a cocky, pierced teenager riding a hipster bike, the Met and the Crown Prosecution Service must have thought all their Christmases had come at once.
They therefore charged Alliston with offences that had to be heard in Crown Court, rather than any of the more appropriate lesser offences that would have been heard by magistrates, as Martin Porter QC has pointed out.
There’s a legal maxim that if you want to get off a charge, you go for a jury trial if you can. Juries are composed of people who can’t convince the court they’re too important to be excused jury duty. They tend to be sympathetic to mundane criminality, which is why there are so many breathtaking not guilty verdicts in cases of causing death by careless or dangerous driving.
Charlie Alliston, Daily Mail stereotype
Unfortunately for him, with his tattoos and piercings, Charlie Alliston was as close as it gets to the Daily Mail stereotype of an arrogant, reckless, young tearaway, scofflaw cyclist. There was no way he was going to get a sympathetic hearing from a jury of Londoners who are encouraged to hate cyclists by every story about cycling on the local news, in the London papers, in the national papers, on the BBC and on LBC.
And so it went. Anyone who rides bike knows Alliston’s account of the crash was entirely plausible. Between a parked lorry and moving cars he had nowhere to go. Kim Briggs stepped back into his path (presumably seeing the cars, but not registering Alliston) and he was unable to avoid her.
But by bringing the absurd charge of manslaughter, the CPS could be confident they’d get Alliston for something. I can imagine the jury room discussions. “All right, it’s not manslaughter, but the arrogant git’s guilty of something. What’s this wanton and furious thing? Up to two years bird? Yeah, that’ll do.”
Lynch mob
The resulting atmosphere is that of a lynch mob. I’ve seen posts hoping that Alliston gets anally raped if he goes to prison, and wanting to know his usual riding route so they can string wire in his path. Have you ever seen that for a killer driver?
I fear for the safety of the cyclist next time one of us is involved in a crash with a pedestrian who doesn’t immediately get up and walk away. By bringing this spurious prosecution, the CPS has failed in its duty to act in the public interest. It has made the roads more dangerous, not less.
Cyclists have long known that we will not get justice if we are victims of road violence. Now we can be sure we will not get justice if we are accused of being its perpetrators.
And that means our only recourse is to get away from a crash immediately.
Footnote: If you do choose to stay at the scene of a crash, and there’s even the slightest possibility you might be blamed (in other words, any crash at all in the current climate) say nothing to the police without a lawyer present. Don’t try and be helpful, don’t give a statement. Ask for a lawyer and shut up till he or she arrives.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.
He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.
Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.
John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.
He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.
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145 comments
"I’ve seen posts hoping that Alliston gets anally raped if he goes to prison, and wanting to know his usual riding route so they can string wire in his path. Have you ever seen that for a killer driver?"
Ummm, well, yes I have actually. Regularly, right here on road.cc, in the comments after every report of a driver getting a 2-year ban & £100 fine for killing a cyclist with an appalling & egregious example of not giving a damn about anyone else on the road. But hey-ho, you can never have too much hate in the world, eh?
Remind me again, what is it two wrongs don't make?
There **is** a deep & terrible injustice here, but it's not that Alliston has been convicted under a stupid 19th century law. Instead the real horror of this case is that had Alliston been driving a car rather than riding a bicycle the police would have written it off as another sad accident & no-one's fault, a la Michael Mason. **Everyone** who's responsible for a serious traffic incident should be prosecuted & convicted, not just cyclists.
Yeah, but that's the point being made, I think. You pretty much _only_ see it here (and only from over-excitable regulars, and always disagreed with by others). Whereas the comments in this case are much more common in what one would have to call 'the mainstream media'.
Bedevere, innit?
Tbh the Charlie Alliston case was a joke. However i think that Charlie Allistons attitude and complete lack of remorse played a big part in the CPS decision to try him for manslaughter.
By all accounts he shouted at the woman as she lay seriously injured on the floor and then placed comments about the accident on social media blaming her for the accident, as well as never once being apologetic for what happened that day.He really created his own downfall. If i was the person who crashed into this woman i would have done all i could to help her and certainly would never have used social media to blame her for the accident. I,m sure i would have been gutted to hear that she had died and was the mother of two children. I would most definitely have asked to speak to her family and answer any questions they may have , if this would be allowed or not i don,t know.
In my opinion Charlie Alliston did all the things you should not do.unfortunately for him he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. One thing certainly springs to mind. Charlie Alliston said that even if he had brakes he would not have had time to use them . Thats nonsense, if you have time to shout twice at somebody then you certainly have time to pull your brakes.He is obviously a very inexperienced cyclist. The charge of wanton or furious cycling i find also a joke. Again it comes down to Charlie Alliston. On one side you have a very arrogant, unremorseful young man riding a bicycle thats not street legal. he collided with a woman who later died. At the scene he was seen shouting at her then he placed comments blaming her for the accident on social media and apparently shown no remorse for the accident.
On the other side you have a woman in the prime of her life married with two children.
I feel that police and the CPS want to charge this young man with something purely to give some sort of justice to the family of the deceased woman. It reminds me of a case years ago when a man killed four cyclists and seriously injured eight others after skidding on black ice. He only got fined for having three bald tyres.
Alliston was a pillock for riding an unroadworthy bike and for not even knowing the rules about brakes.
He should be treated as harshly as the man who, driving at speed on an icy road with three defective tyres, lost control of his vehicle and collided with a group of cyclists, killing 4 of them.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/1525561/Driver-fined-180-for-defective-t...
Tragic outcome, but fair sentencing...
Here you are again, defending the status quo. Thank you Dr Pangloss.
What's your opinion on that case? Should the punishment fit the crime, or should it fit the outcome?
statusquo.jpg
First off, the band are crap as well and not to be defended.
Secondly, you really don't see any inconsistency in that case being blamed on 'the weather' (quick, lock up the weather, put it in the cell next to that 'sun' that keeps getting in drivers' eyes), and are happy to accept the bad tyres played no role, while being so convinced that the lack of a front brake was crucial in this case?
If that driver had not been there, had chosen a different mode of transport, or had not been going at the speed they were, four people would not have died.
I don't see a radical difference between the two cases, certainly not so great as to justify radically different outcomes (granted we have not yet seen the final outcome of this case, so it's possible it won't be out of proportion, despite the disproportionate media comment).
In that case you have a serious inability to reason logically. Let me help you with that one...
Skidding on 'black ice' cannot be prevented by having tread on your tyres ... that accident was not within the driver's control. Hence he was prosecuted only for having bad tyres.
In Alliston's case, he not only had illegal brakes, but he was going at a speed that was unsafe given the lack of front brake and inability to react safely to anticipated events. Yes, pedestrians do step out, and yes he also anticipated that might happen (his first warning shout), but he was going at a speed that he knew he would be unable to stop safely due to his lack of proper brakes (for which he is responsible). His lack of proper brakes played a key role in the death of Mrs Briggs, whereas bad tyres did not play a role in the previous case, hence there was no one to blame for that accident.
Fact remains the deaths in the black ice case would not have happened if the driver had been going at a speed suitable for the conditions - including not being there at all, if the road wasn't safe to drive on.
Whether Aliston's lack of front brakes were crucial doesn't appear to have been established beyond doubt, especially given the very weak nature of the police testing.
There is not a _vast_ gap between the two cases.
The bottom line, is that substantial numbers of people die every year due to drivers' decision to drive, when they could have done otherwise. Having a bike with inadequate braking is a choice that imposes danger on others, agreed - but so is choosing to drive a motorised vehicle.
And when are all the drivers who drive vehicles that break emissions limits going to be prosecuted for the harm they cause?
Likewise, the cyclists would not have been killed had they not been there ... if the road wasn't safe to drive on, then it most certainly wasn't safe to cycle on.
The roads were probably fine in most places, but black ice is very difficult to spot and can take you by complete surprise.
Nope, doesn't work as an arugment - It wasn't the cycling that bought the danger. The killer momentum came with the car.
Or would you argue that Mrs Briggs wouldn't have been killed had she not been there?
Where's the smiley to denote "I'm starting to think you are actually a genuine moron." ?
Love you too...
This is the idiot that has been here under 3 different usernames now isn't it - defending drivers and claiming to ride a bike within mm of the kerb because he is a wonderful human?
The ban hammer can't be far away but he serves as a demonstration of all that is wrong with our laws, moral standpoints and the application of it. Very simple logic that he seemingly fails to understand:
Bike without correct braking backup travelling under the speed limit collides with inattentive pedestrian stepping into the road and freak fall results in death = manslaughter charge (police present misleading evidence to attempt to secure conviction)
Car with a minimum of 3 issues not making it roadworthy, travels at a speed unsuitable for the conditions, kills 3 people as tons of metal travelling at excessive speed kills = £180 fine (evidence presented to defend motorist that cannot be proved to be correct)
And he thinks there's no issue here?
Nope, wrong ... I do think there is an issue, but the issues regard a prat taking to the road in an unroadworthy vehicle was not what resulted in the accident. He was presecuted for the offences he was responsible for. Are you saying that he should have been done for manslaughter even if he'd been driving a well maintained and road legal vehicle? Should you be done for multiple manslaughter for causing a bus to swerve (and crash) to avoid hitting you? In which case maybe they should avoid swerving and simply mow you down.
You see, this has always bothered me about this particular case.
The defective tyres were not seen as contributory due to the black ice... I contest this to a degree... yes tyre tread clears water and avoids aquaplaining which was totally irrelvant in this case. However, tyre tread also causes movement of the tread, which generates heat, which leads to grip. defective tyres will not have been working to the parameters designed by the manufacturers so their performance would have been compromised.
It is/was far too simple an observation to say that tread was irrelevant in this case.
And to further work this point... if the conditions were so bad, and the accident so unreasonably avoidable why was the accident isolated to one car... one that happened to have defective tyres.
If a corner was made undrivable due to black ice, there would have been a collection of crashed cars on the exit of that corner. There was not... other vehicles had managed to pass that corner without incident.
Therefore in my opinion either the way that car was driven, or something fundamentally different about the cars handling caused that car to lose control when it did.
So... there are similarities here between the two cases. However, they are not the same.
You make some good points, though we are not in a position to make judgments about the evidence here as we don't have access to the full details of the case. What we can say is that if we accept that black ice was the cause of the accident, then the judgment was fair.
When in doubt, the law always errs on the side of not guilty so as to avoid any miscarraige of justice.
Would that investigation have had the same rigorous scientific procedures as the stopping tests applied in the Alliston case? If so, its work less than fuck all.
Perhaps, but from a cyclist's perspective, the entire road justice system is in an existential state of damned poor taste at the moment. Aliston - albeit a first class knob - gets nailed to the wall and gets a small law library thrown at him for circumstances that would earn the average driver little more than a friendly chat over a cup of tea with the local plod, and if he's really unlucky, a few points on his licence and a few weekends of community service. And this happens not just once, but hundreds of times a year.
From the legislative arm of government, to the courts, the CPS, local government, the press and the police force, it can seem very much like the whole system is almost universally lined up against us. So sod it, if the system won't play nice, if the system won't play fair, then neither should we.
I don't agree with this point of view, more because it wouldn't do my psychological health favours at all, but I can understand it. It's symptomatic of where we are right now. I'm fifteen minutes ride away from where Vicky Myres was killed on Sunday morning, five minutes walk from where Clare Haslam and Deborah Clifton where crushed against a wall and killed in a hospital car park in March, five minutes ride from where Harry Sievey was killed in Fallowfield in February. All by car drivers, in the past six months, within spitting distance from my front door. All charged, certainly, but they'll all be driving again in a few years time. To quote Richard K Morgan, "There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic".
As long as the smaller minority of idiot cyclists keeps growing in size and people keep trying to defend the indefensible (article above included) you'll only get a larger backlash against all cyclists especially since they think they are the exception to the assorted laws that do apply to them like most who break them whether in a car, lorry, bus, etc.
The suggestion of leaving the scene came from a legal point of view and not a moral one. The majority of suggestions are purely legal and had Alliston done this it would have taken plod a little longer to have got hold of him, and I'm sure they would have got hold of him eventually.
His opinion is as valid as yours, there's nothing offensive here. Before the recent incident I would definitely have stopped but the police clearly made up evidence to fit an agenda against an out group...
I think that when cycling, and travelling with a bike at any speed, we have to expect pedestrians, especially if they are children, to do unexpected things like jump out into the road. It is the law to have a front brake for this reason. He disobeyed the law, and being slower "may" have changed the outcome. As a result, he has to accept at least some of the responsibility in my opinion.
I also disagree with your suggestion that people should leave the scene immediately. Should we not try to help the injured person and make sure they are ok? I would do so and hope that others would do for me.
Until now I have respected this website greatly but this article encouraging others to act like this has certainly changed that. I honestly believe you should think again.
whenever somebody writes 'a modest proposal' you are expected to think of Swift's original, which is satirical in the extreme.
http://art-bin.com/art/omodest.html
http://www.bl.uk/learning/timeline/item126684.html
In this particular example I don't really think the author has pulled it off. Should have gone much further.
I personally think that he was riding carelessly (whether or not that is wanton and furious is another question) as he didn't have sufficient brakes for going at 18mph.
However, I agree with the rest of the article though you should ensure that anyone injured has someone to help them before disappearing.
@davel - I'd vote for drivers being charged with manslaughter if it resulted in more convictions or harsher penalties than careless/dangerous driving.
"Whosoever, having the charge of any carriage or vehicle, shall by wanton or furious driving or racing, or other wilful misconduct, or by wilful neglect, do or cause to be done any bodily harm to any person whatsoever, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable, at the discretion of the court, to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years ..."
I can see how it could be construed that he cause harm by wilfully neglecting to install a front brake. Also what is 'wanton driving' the dictionary definition is "deliberate and unprovoked" - so is only accidental driving permitted?
Just to add some context to this... the 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act was written in the time of horse and carts, which probably have top speed of about 15 MPH. It was a long time before the first motor car - there may have been horseless carriages - I wonder what their stopping distance would have been at 18 mph (if they could even reach that speed). It was written before the even the first velocipede - but bear in mind, they would have had a fixed wheel (on the front) and no brake.
Kieren, stop like this driver:
http://road.cc/content/news/228438-manchester-hit-and-run-driver-charged...
It's clearly not satire, it's controversial but reasonable given the current climate.
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