Digital_Cowboy
New Member
- Location
- Tampa/St. Petersburg, Fl, USA
Option "d" for Jane - which you've forgotten about, for some reason - is that "she can stop, because she's riding at a speed which allows her to do so without endangering anyone or anything". Johnny's incident I grant you is one the cyclist could have done very little about, but the only real way to avoid such an incident is for children to be kept on leads at all times, and I think most people - even most parents - would see the risk of an occasional collision with a cyclist as preferable to that.
Even if one is riding at a slow speed, it is still possible not to avoid a crash.
Many, many years ago in high school social studies my teacher gave a similar example to the one I used with Jane Cyclist. Only it was a car driving down the road, with parked cars on one side, oncoming traffic on the other side of the road, and a child runs out into the path of the car. According to her the legal option was to hit the child, and than stop and wait for the authorities to show up.
Regardless of the speed one is traveling, it is possible for a child (or a dog, or wild animal) to appear in the path of a bicycle, car or horse and the operator having no way of stopping in time to avoid the crash.