On some roads, pedestrians are not permitted to be in the carriageway, that has been successfully used as mitigation when a case has come to court, it has also been judged not in the public interest to prosecute in circumstances as above. Now In this current case it is perfectly reasonable to expect pedestrians to be in the carriageway.
If it is expected that pedestrians or indeed any other traffic could be in the carriageway then you should moderate your driving by way of speed and attention to ensure you don’t hit one of them. You should also position yourself and drive in a manner that reduces the possibility of someone else hitting you.
In my non-expert view his trying to mitigate by claiming this is an accident will fail.
I’ve had occasion to swerve or brake to avoid someone who did something that I didn’t expect, I’d guess that despite my efforts to avoid it, over the years other drivers have felt the need to question my parentage or call me a **** ( insert your own expletive here ) so I’d just be mindful that we all make mistakes.
So I suppose that leaves his character and his care for others, Why did he build or modify a bike to make it illegal and why was he riding so fast? He doesn’t appear to have offered any of the usual excuses along the lines of urgently needing to be somewhere, never usually ride that fast, made a mistake et cetera. None of which would be an acceptable excuse, he would be better trying to claim road conditions were good, visibility was good and traffic was light, apart from the fact that he can’t cos they weren’t!
He simply claims it’s an accident , of course I don’t know the man so I can only speculate and I might be wrong but I would guess riding fast made him feel smug and self-satisfied when whizzing about the roads faster than anyone else. Quite probably it boosted his ego and he probably thought he could get away with it forever . Whilst I have no evidence to prove this, judging by eBay adverts et cetera, there are probably hundreds of bikes running round the capital today with similar illegal motors and derestricted. Pretty much everyone of them could get caught up in a similar occurrence right now.
It is my guess that he will be found guilty, at which point his previous actions building or modifying his bike, his speed on the road, his behaviour and conduct at the scene and remorse will affect the sentence. He has to live with the consequences of those actions..... and assuming a custodial sentence I guess he will have time to reflect on them.
With incidents like this you just have to read what you can and try and make your own judgement on what has happened, we all might be wrong we all might be partly right, we don’t know what was on the pedestrians mind at the time and we don’t know what was on the cyclist mind at the time, we can only try our best to figure it out. Whatever now happens to him is substantially better than what happened to the pedestrian and her family.
