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Comment by School-Cotton | Hacker News Reader

What the law says is one thing. What actually gets enforced is another. There is almost 0 probability of any consequences for a driver in NY who kills a cyclist, regardless of whose fault the incident was, as long as the driver doesn’t flee from the scene.

The US is not really a developed country with stable rule of law in the same way most countries in Western Europe are.

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It’s similar in Germany, where truck drivers regularly kill cyclists on right turns and get away with a four figure fine and (if the judge has a bad day) a few months of license suspension.

Even if the cyclist has the right of way?

All the damn time. Here's a recent one: https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Radfahrer-erfasst-Lkw...

2700 Euro and 1 month license suspension.

In Germany, you have to cycle extremely carefully if you want to survive.

It's often said that if you want to get away with killing an American, first give them a bicycle. Drivers just say "they came out of nowhere" or "the sun was in my eyes" and that's that.

That is not similar at all. In the US they would not get the four-figure fine nor the license suspension.

Here in Norway, the one crossing lanes has the blame almost regardless. So with a bicycling lane on your inside, you have to be very, very careful.

However the exact limits to that are being tested. There's just been a case in front of the supreme courts here[1], where a e-cyclist in a bike lane got run over by a truck doing a right-hand turn in a busy intersection.

A similar case back in 2019 ended with 60 days of jail for the driver of the truck[2], though that one seems more cut and dry.

[1]: https://rett24.no/articles/dodsulykken-pa-st.hanshaugen-opp-...

[2]: https://www.aftenposten.no/oslo/i/XgJWg7/syklist-paakjoert-l...

I don't live in ny. Is this really true, even if the cyclist is in a bike lane?

I mean, yeah kind of. You can weasel your way out of manslaughter trivially. Generally people aren't punished for true accidents.

Yes. Due to how space is used in the US (with all but a tiny minority of people living in car-centric areas), most Americans view cars as tools and bikes as toys, think the main purpose of roads is driving, and feel that cyclists on public roads are an annoying nuisance.

This mentality is a bit less common in major city centers, but by no means nonexistent.

So a pro-car and anti-cyclist bias pervades every part of the justice system: police, prosecutors, judges, and juries, and it's extremely unlikely for a driver to be found guilty of anything in an incident involving a cyclist, unless the driver did something overtly malicious like fleeing the scene.

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