Originally Posted by Helmet Head

It's a moot question.

A basic tenet of defensive driving is that in almost all collisions (with very few extreme exceptions), the collision would have been avoided if either of the drivers involved had been operating defensively. Therefore, in any collision, both of those involved are at fault at least for not operating defensively. So, in virtually any bike-car collision, both the cyclist and the driver are at fault to some significant degree.

For me, in a cyclist forum, in terms of collisions, it only makes sense to focus on changing the behavior of the cyclist. After all, while changing either will avoid the collisions, we have no direct control over the behavior of the motorist, so we must take his behavior as a given. Therefore, it only makes sense to focus on the area where we do have direct control: the behavior of the cyclist.

Motorists are going to speed. They're going to be distracted. They're going to turn right without checking their blind spots. They're going to not see us from time and time and turn left in front of us. We should treat motorist bad driving like potholes: learn to expect it, and learn to avoid it.

From our point of view, blaming a motorist for a collision is like blaming a pothole for a crash: it's pointless.