Cop says today that no matter what, if the car is going to turn, its at fault with a motorcycle.
thing is i am in car lane, almost stopped waiting for scooters to go by so i can make a right turn into a parking lot. a scooter breaks his lane to pass the scooters, sees me in teh car lane, swerves and spills. im not in the scooter lane, but he car lane where he spills. it was all slow and not bad, he scraped his knee and didnt touch our truck.
Cops were pretty uninterested in dealing with it and said solve it in 2 days or the fine for both of us goes up (they blamed both of us). Now this dude once he spilled tried to get money from us, which annoyed the shit out of me cause i was watching him the entire time in the mirror and saw how shitty he was driving and saw him spill.
After bugging the cops relentlessly to check cameras to show the whole thing, we were finally told they are broken, go figure.
So i am wondering, because this sounds exactly like the kind of logic i expect, but is that shit for real? even if you are not in the lane, so long as your turn signal is on you are at fault…?
thats what i was thinking, but is it in fact true? they said it was “new rules”, and actually i have heard on ICRT radio something to the effect that scooters have the right of way no matter what. dont remember the exact wording, so i am wondering if this is true? i can see scooters having the right of way, but there seems to little or no importance to what actually happened, unless the vehicles or of similar size (ie. car and car or scooter and scooter).
i was going slow, dead slow as we were turning right after the red light, we got up to 10kmh maybe and the scooter maybe 20. we hung out slow rolling in the car lane for the long line of scooters to go by and he does his swerve thing into our lane and spills to avoid us…wtf? the guy tried black mailing us, which is a massive pet peeve of mine, though i should know better living in Taiwan its probably just best. anyway, he’s looking for money and going to the doc. he was walking fine, crouching down etc all in front of those traffic accident vans that investigate, i hope they have cameras. anyway, even if that somehow got ignored (as i expect it would) could there be further problems even though the cops told us both we are both at fault?
Now i know for a fact we are in the right and we literally begged the cops to go find some video footage somewhere, but nadda. I just dont know how a person could possibly do a right turn more safe;y, waiting in your own lane…im dumbfounded and now very worried as there seems to be very little thinking involved and he is kind of a douche bag.
Former boss of mine (foreigner) had a similar incident some years ago. Driving on a straight road coming towards company entrance, in traffic, no high speeds, puts his indicator on in advance and watches in the mirror as a girl on a scooter hits the brakes and slides out the front taking a tumble, never made contact with his car. He does the gentlemanly (stupid as it turns out) thing and stops to see if she is ok, she broke her arm and insists on the cops being called, he obliges and the cops duly arrive and call a FAP officer for good measure. Ended up in court and he was found guilty of something and his insurance paid a rather large sum of money to the girl, never found out what he was guilty of as he wasn’t in the mood to discuss when it was over!
The police have absolutely no legal power to decide who is at fault in an accident. Also, their knowledge of the law is roughly on a par with the toad that lives in my compost pile.
Their job is to record the details of the incident, and a tribunal will decide. However, since this is an almighty amount of work* they will usually bullshit you into thinking their word is law, and pressure you into making a settlement, with themselves as arbitrators, there and then. Make a statement, but DO NOT sign anything that says you are going to settle (ie., the “guilty” party coughs up some cash, and everyone pretends nothing happened). Then leave it to the arbitration panel, who will miraculously make a fair and enlightened judgement on the basis of some illegible scrawl and a sketch that looks like it was drawn by a drowning spider. Your insurance may cover some of whatever payout is necessary (if any).
reminds me of a joke from when I was a kid. Policeman is called to the scene of an accident, and on arriving pulls out his notebook to make notes. He observes a leg on the road, and writes in big, round letters: “leg on road”. He walks along a little way and finds an arm on the road, and duly notes “arm on road”. Finally he reaches the actual scene of the crash and finds a head on the pavement, thinks hard, and starts to write: “Hed on [strike]pay[/strike] [strike]pafe[/strike] [strike]payeve[/strike]”. He kicks the head into the road. “Hed on [strike]pay[/strike] [strike]pafe[/strike] [strike]payeve[/strike] road”.