Can you believe it? When drivers run out of lies to tell the police, they actually allege that the “cyclist was going too fast.” Sometimes the traffic collision report even comes to that same ridiculous conclusion. The tactic here is for the driver, who knows damn good and well that he was at fault, is to simply throw everything on the wall and see what sticks. Equally lame are law enforcement who are wholly sympathetic to the driver and willing to pick and choose among the bad excuses to select the one that seems most likely to justify their prejudice that cyclists don’t belong on the street anywhere, ever.
These situations happen when a cyclist is traveling in the bicycle lane, for example, and the traffic to the left, i.e. automobile traffic, is essentially back-to-back. The cyclist is going at a reasonable speed and comes to an intersection or comes upon an opening/gap in the bumper-to-bumper car line, only to get T-boned by a car that is trying to make a left turn through a gap in the stopped traffic. The driver’s response is almost always “I didn’t see the cyclist because he was going so fast…” We have overcome these situations by showing that the driver making the left turn actually would have had noticed had he bothered to look, or that the driver was going at a speed that was unreasonable for the traffic conditions. Also, GPS and Strava data sometimes come in handy because it will actually show that the cyclist was not “going too fast” at all.*
*Our past case result is not a guarantee that your case will also have a successful result.