Do I understand correctly that the motion before the SNP is basically presumed liability, plus strict liability for the under 14s and over 70s?
For me presumed liability wouldn't make it into the top ten reasons why cycling in Holland is more pleasant than here, but it would be a bonus if we had it. If I were to campaign for presumed liability in as non EEN-antagonising a way as possible, the argument would go something like as follows.
1. Presumed liability does not transfer liability for accidents, it transfers the burden of proof to the party likely to have been responsible.
2. We already have presumed liability in this country. If one car hits another car from behind, the car behind is presumed to be at fault unless they can prove that the car in front did something to cause the accident. So presumed liability isn't a radical untested concept.
3. Presumed liability has been effective in the case of cars hitting from behind because it deals with a type of situation where one party was almost always to blame, and if that party wasn't to blame then there must have been a clear action from the other 'presumed innocent' party which can be shown to have caused the accident.
4. This situation is similar to that of collisions between cars and more vulnerable road users, in which statistics show that cars are almost always liable according to the current law, but that this can be difficult to demonstrate in court.
The only difficult point is that I don't have any statistics to back up the fourth point. There's a table towards the bottom of this article which shows how a large number of accidents are caused solely by the car, but I don't have the full table, or know where it came from, and it concerns only cyclists rather than all vulnerable road users.
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