Darren_S's blog

As soon as the term 'no fault' comes up in discussing accidents, collisions and insurance there is a lot of confusion as to what 'no fault' means.

The Insurance Bureau of Canada does an excellent job of explaining how 'no fault' insurance works. It even attempts to clear up some of the confusion but misses out on a little history that would really help clear things up. I am going to try to sort things out for you by example. I have simplified things a great deal as there can be many exceptions and thresholds that apply.

Let us go back to the time when 'no fault' insurance did not exist. If I were to hit Herb in his Hummer with my Smart Car, Herb's insurance would pay for his damages. Then his insurer would sue my insurer to be compensated for the funds they paid out. This is pretty much how most civil suits outside of car insurance work to this day. The person suing must prove that the other person is the one at fault. This process would be the same if I had hit Herb while he was on his bicycle.

At the end of the year Insurance companies saw that their losses under this scheme were comparable to one another. In addition they had big legal bills to deal with. It was clear that the easiest way to save money was to stop suing one another and to just pay their insured directly.

I am going to start off by expanding a bit on Herb’s intro to Vehicular Cycling and John Forester. These posts are not an attempt at an wholesale assassination on ‘Vehicular Cycling’. There are many good things about Vehicular Cycling that one would be wise to consider putting into practice. I agree with Herb that some parts of Vehicular Cycling should be considered as part of a balanced approach to riding on our streets. That said, there are some suggested practices and pieces of information in Vehicular Cycling that range from questionable to dishonest to dangerous. This is troubling because quite frequently these problem areas are in the forefront, being used to obstruct the progression of all things cycling, whether it is a bike lane or legislative relief. While Vehicular Cycling converts like to describe their entire approach as a proven theory, the problems being explored in these posts will suggest that Vehicular Cycling contains a mix of various theories and hypotheses.