Going helmet-free not contributory negligence, German appeal court rules

Its a technique to be taught in driving school:

In Holland I was told and shown that you open a door on the road side by crossing over your "wrong" arm. This makes you look before you open.

Try it, in UK and you are driving open the door with your LEFT hand it forces you to look down the street.

“This was not the case at the time of the plaintiff’s accident. According to traffic observations by the Federal Highway Research Institute in 2011, only eleven percent of urban cyclists wore a safety helmet.”

Is it only me who sees a dispiriting implication in this statement?

It seems to suggest there is no way of staying neutral in the all-consuming helmet-argument. Personally wear a helmet and, at least in a German context, you are making it more likely that others will be blamed for not doing so!

It shouldn't matter how many wear a helmet, what should matter is who creates the risk in the first place!

Hold the front page!

Insurance Company in "Trying To Weasel Out Of Paying Up By Any Means Necessary" Shocker

Presumably insurance companies wishing to reduce payouts in the case of less serious injuries such as broken bones plead contributory negligence where the injured cyclist (or pedestrian) fails to wear knee/elbow/hip armour. The principle is surely the same

I live in a city with more bike riders than cars (Münster, Germany). It's a massively cycling friendly town with priority going to bikes and pedestrians at nearly every junction and 1000s of kms of cycle paths.

There aren't many car/bike related accidents here for the simple reason car drivers actually LOOK for bike riders while there driving. I ride my bike everywhere and feel perfectly safe, I even take my daughter along in her bike trailer as a primary form of transport around the city. This is something I would have never dreamed of doing back home in a city in England. It's a culture thing, here car drivers are also nearly always bike riders so have common sense, give way, leave plenty of space when passing and don't tailgate riders.

Granted you get the odd bad driver but there's also a lot of bad/crazy/suicidal cyclists out on the roads.

For England to be a safer place to ride a bike, car drivers need to be educated to expect cyclists and look for them.

Couldn't riding in the door zone be seen as contributory negligence....
"if he ignores the standard of care that a prudent and sensible man would undertake to avoid"

Also couldn't NOT WEARING A CAR HELMET, be seen as contributory negligence.

It's worth noting that this case only related to cycling as a means of urban transport, not to sports cycling. 11 per cent of cyclists within urban areas ("innerorts") wear helmets, so the statement made by the judge in the original case that any prudent and sensible person would wear one seemed quite open to challenge with its implication that 89% of the population were neither prudent nor sensible.

Other cases involving people on road bikes have gone differently - most people who zoom around on road bikes do consider it prudent and sensible to wear a helmet and that's been reflected in legal logic.

I'm hoping not to be knocked off my bike on Friday (and it's fairly unlikely, I never have been knocked off my bike by a motor vehicle, in Germany or anywhere else) but it would be an interesting test case if it did happen and I wasn't wearing my helmet at the time. I will be engaged in transport cycling (I have a seminar in another town on Saturday, and I'm going to cycle 100 miles on Friday to get there) and my bike is not a road bike, but it does have skinny tyres, and I will be wearing lycra. Would the laptop in my panniers legally cancel out the effects of the lycra and turn me from a sports cyclist who should be wearing a helmet into a business woman travelling for work who doesn't need one? Or is the urban-rural divide the main factor that matters?

If you could argue that not wearing a helmet contributed to an injury, you could also argue that not covering the door in 10 cm of impact absorbing foam was a factor.

Quote:

"There could be no doubt that the failure to wear a helmet might expose the cyclist to the risk of greater injury; such a failure, like the failure of a car-user to wear a seatbelt, would not be sensible and so, subject to causation, any injury sustained might be the cyclist's own fault.”

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it implies to almost any situation, e.g. walking on the pavement.

To be considered contributory negligence, wouldn't they have to show that
a. head injuries were reasonably frequent whilst carrying out the activity in question (cycling)?
b. helmets provide a significant improvement in protection.