The reason is that you should be responsible if you are indeed responsible: Insurance fraud is very real. See https://gizmodo.com/people-throw-themselves-at-cars-for-mone...

If your society considers a particular transportation mode so antisocial that people who choose it are automatically guilty regardless of the specifics of the incident, no one should ever make that mode choice. It's tantamount to a ban. You aren't perfect, and other people sometimes behave far outside the bounds of what any reasonable person expects (and sometimes do so deliberately to commit insurance fraud). If there's no standard like "reasonable caution" or "due care" to save you, then it doesn't matter how cautious you are, making that mode choice is playing with fire.

Parent said that cyclists who hit pedestrians are automatically liable, then turned around and called bicycling "safe." That's a bizarre interpretation - with that law, Japan is messaging that Japanese people ought to stay far, far away from bicycling unless they have particularly extreme appetite for risk.

To answer your question, modern cities need some method of transportation faster than walking. At speed, injuring the pedestrians who get in your way is an inevitability. Either you have a tax on the unlucky (and unable to afford real estate in the pedestrian core), or you give at least one such method immunity. In Japan, that method is trains. Japan takes the pedestrian victim-blaming even further than necessary in this case, and bills their families for the cleanup costs.

> At speed, injuring the pedestrians who get in your way is an inevitability

Well, that's the point. You are supposed to be riding or driving at a speed that you can safely stop if you need to. This is the same in every country, right?

> Japan is messaging that Japanese people ought to stay far, far away from bicycling unless they have particularly extreme appetite for risk.

Bicycling to work or school is very common here

> Japan takes the pedestrian victim-blaming even further than necessary in this case, and bills their families for the cleanup costs.

They sue for damages because they have to arrange buses for tens of thousands of people. It's not cheap

>stop if you need to

If you're on a 45mph road and someone puts themselves in your path 10 feet ahead, no, we don't say that you should have actually been going 5mph just in case something like this was going to happen. You're required to yield at crosswalks, but there's an expectation that mutual acknowledgement between you and the pedestrian happens at a reasonable distance before the pedestrian enters the roadway. Similarly, if someone enters an intersection on red, you have a duty to try and avoid the crash, but if it's too late, that's on them.

> If you're on a 45mph road and someone puts themselves in your path 10 feet ahead

This is why roads should be designed not to cause such a situation. If you have a pedestrian path really close to a 45mph road the design is bad. I'm not aware of anywhere having such a high speed road where a pedestrian could walk along side it (in Netherlands). Usually it's more closed off with pedestrians being banned.

you can tell beforehand that its possible for somebody to suddenly jump out, so yes, you probably should be going 5mph

It's always possible for someone to enter the road, even a restricted-access freeway.

> At speed, injuring the pedestrians who get in your way is an inevitability.

Solution: _don't cycle on the bloody footpath_; that's not what it's for. Cycle in bike lanes, or, if unavailable, the road.

Yeah cars are totally unused in Amsterdam.

30 seconds of Googling suggests (and a comment upthread) suggest that a defense based on reasonable expectations and circumstances beyond one's control is available to drivers in The Netherlands. The stakes are also much lower when the thing you're assigning is an insurance company payout. Cyclists presumably aren't insured when they hit pedestrians. If there were no defense available, cycling would be a bad idea.

Found this: https://www.cycling-embassy.org.uk/wiki/dutch-cycle-because-...

> Cyclists presumably aren't insured when they hit pedestrians.

It is compulsory in some places in Japan. ¥4,000 ($40) per year pays out up to 3 billion yen ($3,000,000) in case you hit someone.

We'll never see this requirement in USA because it would be proof salient to everyone of how much more dangerous driving is than cycling.

We're under no illusions that cycling presents a danger to others in the same way that driving does. When we say cycling is unsafe, we mean it's unsafe for the cyclist.

The point is that your experience in a society that privileges automobile driving has left you with misleading impressions of how other societies function. In other places poor drivers are held responsible for their poor driving, and the sky has not fallen.

> In other places poor drivers are held responsible for their poor driving

As they should be everywhere. What seems crazy, though, is the belief that every collision is necessarily an instance of a poor driver committing poor driving, with no reference to how a reasonable person would have handled the situation differently.

Because responsibility should be based on what you do, and whether you did anything wrong, and not based solely on what mode of transportation you were using.

Choosing a mode of transportation is something you do.

One vehicle is dangerous to the driver. The other vehicle is dangerous to other drivers.

Which one are you saying should be responsible here?