// Are California’s Bike-Car Accident Laws Too Lax?
Posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010
My title today is a blatant rip-off of the title over at the GJEL Accident Attorneys Blog, but I wanted to keep it, because it’s a pretty important question, and giving this post another title would take away from that, in my opinion.
I’ve thought a lot about safety, as a cyclist. In fact, one of the first things I did when I started this blog was to build up some basic safety information pages so that even if I wasn’t posting frequently, or if the information I posted was just for fun, at least the site could always have something of a resource on the issue of safety. Of course, I mostly wrote those pages from the perspective of a cyclist trying to abide by the rules of the road that are set out in statutes. My thought has always been along the lines of “if you stay within the law, you will likely be safe–and if something does happen, at least you won’t be at fault.”
The logic of my theory is sound, in a system where the only way to handle a car-on-bike accident is in civil court. But what happens if a driver doesn’t obey the law? Sure, they’re at fault, so you can probably sue them in a civil court. Great, you might get some money to take care of your medical bills, maybe also to cover some pain and suffering. The driver might have a received a ticket for a couple hundred dollars. But you also may have permanent brain damage. Or several broken bones. Or stitches. Or all those things put together. Your life may be totally altered, or it might be ended entirely. And though the driver is out some cash, he or she will be able to get back in that huge hunk of fast-moving steel and hit the roads again the very next day.
Drivers are scary. Not all of them–there are certainly some very careful and aware drivers on the roads. But, as Ben over at GJEL shares in a quote from Oregon lawyer Ray Thomas, “the time has come to recognize that driving is a dangerous privilege and serious consequences should follow anytime a needless death occurs because a driver failed to drive carefully.” I couldn’t agree more.
But I wondered what could be done? If it was an “accident,” we surely couldn’t press criminal charges, could we? We let the civil court system take care of negligence issues, right? Well, I didn’t know, until I read it in Ben’s post, but it used to be that a driver could be hit with criminal charges in a car-on-bike accident. And even today, in many car-on-car accidents, criminal charges are brought. So what happened?
Apparently, the car-on-bike accidents “clogged the courts” so in the name of judicial economy, we gave up on prosecuting drivers who injured cyclists–unless it was a case like the one in LA, where the driver intentionally hit two cyclists. Now, I was always for a good policy argument in law school, and I generally support the idea of judicial economy–let’s make the court system run smoothly and efficiently, and get rid of cases that are frivolous or meritless. But this is not a case for that. I think the policy argument here is that we need more people to ride bikes. We need to conserve fossil fuels and limit carbon emissions. We need to fight the obesity epidemic. These things can be done by getting people to commute by bike. But they won’t do it if they’re scared. And they’ll be scared, as long as drivers continue to drive recklessly, knowing that there are few serious consequences to their behavior.
I encourage California to bring back the practice of prosecuting reckless drivers who injure cyclists. At least make it an option. Police and prosecutors will always use their discretion and can certainly choose not to press charges if the situation doesn’t call for them. But drivers should be aware of the potential for serious consequences, and it should at least be an available option for police and prosecutors.
This issue is somewhat contentious…I’d love to hear arguments either way from people–drivers and cyclists alike.