I did do that accidently, but as the way to ensure that entering an intersection with traffic flowing against one is to stop, look and listen, there is no safe condition to roll through the stop signal.

” I am always amazed there are cyclists so rash as to try to pass on the right of a car that is signaling a right turn at a stop sign, whether it has slowed to a complete stop or not”

In all honesty, I have never seen this. It makes no sense to me – why would I (or another motorcyclist) put my unprotected body intentionally in the path of a car? Of course, if the car is actually stopped, the driver has the opportunity to observe the cyclist (who is apparently making a “rolling right turn” which I am arguing is not a safe manouveur) and avoid a collision.

I have of course seen/had cars pass me on my right – not only stopped and signalling to make a turn (in a right turn only lane), but simply riding down the highway and suburban or bucolic byway.

Any action which requires less care on the road is a dangerous action to others oin the road.

That would be correct if the “money grubbers” were paid only on the basis of people the cameras “caught” breaking the law. They are not. In Orlando, for example, the company that owns the cameras is paid a over $4200 per camera, per month before the camera has even taken a picture.

As WO can verify I was a fan of red light cameras when they first came out. Now I realize that do not have anything to do with safety, they are all about the money. Period. It is all about the money.

The two main companies that sell red light cameras go to great lengths, sometimes of questionable honesty, to prevent citizens voting on whether they should be allowed in a community. In all of the elections held in the US over red light cameras, the only one where the cameras won was in a town outside of St Louis where they had the policemen going door to door telling people that they would have to be laid off if the red light cameras lost.

Ask yourself why do so many states/counties/cities go to such great lengths to make it so hard/expensive/impossible to contest a red light cameras.

Because it is all about the money.

To the extent that you are saying that, as a matter of law, the driver of the trailing vehicle always is at fault in a rear-end collision, that is not so, at least not in any jurisdiction that I am familiar with. See, e.g., Lovell v. Stanford, 386 S.W.2d 755 (Tex. 1965) (reversing on ground that negligence and proximate cause were issues for the jury in accident case involving two rear-end collisions about which the driver testimony was in dispute). My sense is that this is a common, but mistaken, belief about the law.

In many (perhaps most) cases, jurors are likely to find the driver of the trailing vehicle at fault (due to failure to keep a proper lookout, failure to maintain an appropriate interval, etc.) to some degree, but there could be any number of circumstances where it is not necessarily so. And, in today’s world of comparative fault, even if jurors find the driver of the trailing vehicle primarily to blame for an accident, they still may apportion some portion of the responsibility for the accident to the other driver.

My take (I didn’t come here to give you a hard time).

If you rear ended her you are at fault. The fact that she set you up may give you the moral high ground but if she stopped and you hit her -you were at fault.

Regrets,

Somehow you snipped off the final three words, “under safe conditions.” If you believe that there are no conditions in which slowing to 2 mph rather than 0 is in fact safe, no matter how deserted the intersection and flawless the visibility, I suppose we will have to disagree.

I am always amazed there are cyclists so rash as to try to pass on the right of a car that is signaling a right turn at a stop sign, whether it has slowed to a complete stop or not. But then I also wonder why so many cyclists engaged in sharing the road with cars interpret stop signs and red lights as not applying to them.

In our community when the local council discovered the kickback’s in the contract they just shut them off and said sue us. So far they haven’t, probably with good reason, they don’t want the additional adverse publicity. Whatever little good might come from the events in lead article are quickly overshadowed by the evil quest for the almighty dollar.