I've had another good look at the video.
What's everyone's take on what the lead cyclist does in the seconds just before the second cyclist falls off?
To me it looks like they slow down/stop?
What is the audio saying? Not the bleeped out bits, what is said just before the falling off?
If the lead cyclist does slow down/stop then the could second cyclist be calling for them to move on and that would explain what happens as the second cyclist has nowhere to go and, as they can't put a foot down, fall off.
As with many things, I think there's much more to this than a simple...... vehicle comes the other way, maybe a bit close, maybe a bit fast and a cyclist falls off.
But the Judicial system has clearly laid the blame at the driver's door.
And for those that think I don't get it, I use to cycle to get the train to work down a path alongside the dual carriageway A38. There's no barrier, no fence, nothing but a strip of grass then the kerbstones. A wobble would have prevented me from writing this as I'd have been under 30 tonnes of truck travelling at 60mph. And yes, there is a great deal of wind blast and draw coming from those trucks so it would be very easy to come off the path into the live lane. So I rode accordingly. If I had ended up on the trunk road would that have been the fault of the truck driver? Or will it be now?
Perhaps I should have ridden in the carriageway itself? There was an elderly gent on a trike who used to do this. The number of near misses was rather high - trucks doing 60mph in Lane 1 and cars doing 70mph in Lane 2 coming across trike doing maybe 15mph at the time when folks are going to work or coming home
.
Yes, the gent is perfectly entitled to use the dual carriageway but the reality is it doesn't matter who is in the "right" when you've just been crushed and/or caused a multiple pile up.
IMHO it isn't always someone else's fault there must be a degree of, dare I say it, common sense.