UncleEbenezer wrote:An accident involving more than one party happens when both parties fail to prevent it. The one who caused the near miss, plus the one who failed to avoid it. The latter is legally deemed not at fault, but the case in which there's absolutely nothing they could've done is extremely rare.
First, I doubt the essence of any insinuation that the "non-fault" party is almost always to blame, at least partially. And I'd be interested to hear of any corroborating evidence that went beyond mere anecdote. (My anecdotal contribution is that, on all three occasions when I was hit, I was either stationary or doing perhaps 2 mph in queuing traffic. )
When we drive, most of us drive within what you might call an envelope of reasonable expectations. We don't expect everyone to be doing exactly 30 or less when we join a 30 mph road - indeed, the highway code tells us not to - but we do have a reasonable expectation that the other guy won't be coming at us at sixty on our side of the road. And if he is, and the accident happens? Well, I suppose some jobsworth might accuse us of not doing everything we could have to avoid a potential accident. Such as staying at home.
Trying to be more constructive, though: I could see how the actuaries at the insurance companies might want to say that the aggrieved parties were to blame for driving within what most would call "reasonable tolerances" of the exact and correct line and speed. And indeed, when looking at the whole volume of accident cases as a generality, it might be valid for an actuary to throw that thought into the mix.
But it's a different matter to tell an individual to his face that he's probably partially to blame because he's had "non-fault" accidents before. It might be a justifiable inference, but heck, the speaker had better have some pretty good evidence to back up his explicitly negative intimation. Otherwise, the tone of civil discourse is going to fall apart rather rapidly.
BJ