question for the forum - liability when a pedestrian causes an accident to a cyclist

Happened to me last week, filtering past traffic at lights and ped walking with his back to me stepped out with about 2 meters notice. Ruined new paid for Nanoflex leg warmers, badly bruised elbow and knee and two or three weeks off the bike. Ped got up, apologised and off he went leaving me to patch myself up and continue the journey to work.

I've given up commuting to work now, in Oct I crashed broke my humerus, smashed the humerus ball and pulled all the mussels off my shoulder due to poor driving and then the above on my fourth commute back to work.

You could take out accidental damage insurance which would cover the costs with the exception of excess.

Commiserations. Similar thing happened to me heading down Duke Street Hill outside London Bridge station a few years ago.: Tourists ran into the road, knocked me off, broke both my hands and did permanent damage to my knees. Not only don't we have any comeback at all but when people at work heard about it the typical response was "it was just pedestrians getting revenge."

Short of riding everywhere at 2mph there's not much to be done about it. No one cares.

been there done that and got no where. I was lucky the pedestrian not so. It cost me £200 in parts for the bike, that the road was wet worked in my favour i just slid , they were knocked unconcious and lost a couple of teeth. Maybe next time they will actually look before randomly stepping off the pavement whilst listening to an ipod?

Park of the reason i am against shared use is because pedestrians all too often don't "share" they wander ramdomly all over and generally mean that shared use above 2-3mph is a disaster.

Anyway. House insurance??? Does it have accident cover? granted you get stung for the no claims.

Sorry to hear this. For the future I would take a photo of the incident, a photo of the pedestrian and take a photo of their ID to track them down in case you need to take action against them in the future (lots of injuries only reveal themselves a few hours later). Might get myself a camera for this kind of situation after reading this! What does the law have to say about deliberately not avoiding such a collision? If by trying to avoid a collision you potentially put yourself in a very dangerous position i.e. by swerving into moving traffic then could it ever be justified that you try to slow as much as possible but deliberately stay on course and crash into the pedestrian?

British Cycling membership gives decent insurance coverage for stuff like this. It is a pity you weren't able to get details from the pedestrian, but in the heat of the moment this isn't always possible which I do appreciate. That area is very well covered by CCTV.

You might want to try reporting it to the cops. The person did leave the scene of an accident, which is an offence. Whether the cops will pursue it is another matter and they might just say the pedestrian is unidentifiable, which you are aware of as you commented on It yourself.

Some years ago now I had an incident with two Danish tourists who looked the wrong way before stepping straight out in front of me. Like you, I ride with my hands covering the brakes and I was able to brake sharply, slowing down considerably before impact. We all hit the deck but there were only cuts, bruises and a couple of dented egos. They were most apologetic.

My wife had a similar incident on her commute when a Polish woman looked the wrong way and stepped out. In that instance, the wire basket on the front of my wife's bike took the primary impact and was squished out of shape. My wife had cuts and bruises and so did the pedestrian but neither was badly hurt. Without that wire basket to act like a crumple zone I'm pretty certain there would have been some injuries to either, or both of them. As a safety device, I reckon having a basket on the front of your bike makes sense, I can't quite bring myself to fit one to my commuting bike though.

Sorry to hear about that. Sounds nasty.

Nightmare really as at the end of day getting any money out of another party who is uninsured will be almost impossible (unless they happen to be very rich and very apologetic). Ambulance chasing solicitors may have their faults but the whole process of claiming from a car driver is relatively easy these days. I can't imagine it would be fun chasing an individual through the courts at your own expense.

I guess, having your own insurance is the best option but I thought (maybe wrongly) that it's pretty extortionate?

I think (though you're best enquiring) that my ETA insurance would cover this: https://www.eta.co.uk/insurance/cycle/what-we-cover/

Fully comp bike insurance that includes breakdown cover...

Well it will make you shout out in future and ride covering the brakes more often.

Report to police, get witness details. Hopefully there is cctv to help identify pedestrian. If you're lucky and get his details then sue if he doesn't pay up after asking him to compensate you for repairs and trauma.