Originally Posted by
Paul Barnard
Two examples here. If Hurst cautioned riders to avoid door zones and a cyclist was doored into traffic and killed, wouldn't that be a reasonable test. If Hurst advised riders not to ride into the blind spot of slow moving large trucks, dump trucks, and cement trucks, and a rider was killed when he entered the blind spot of a truck that subsequently turned into the rider, wouldn't that be a reasonable test?
No, actually. We wouldn't be able to tell why the cyclist ended up in the door zone or blind spot, or if those areas were avoidable at all. We wouldn't know whether avoiding those things wouldn't have also resulted in a fatality by other means.
I know you and a number of people on A&S think there's some value in second-guessing the dead, but it really proves nothing other than hindsight is 20/20.
And that's not even considering the obvious fact that disinterested accounts of what actually happened are hard to come by, and the facts of these crashes are highly likely to be contested.
Also, it seems pretty obvious to me that I could get into a situation where I have to choose between the door zone or somebody's blind spot.
Finally, does he have a patent on those rather obvious rules? I'm sure I didn't learn them from him directly or otherwise.