I was about twelve years old, riding my bicycle. I was on the sidewalk, and I had stopped at a “T” intersection. I had been traveling on the left side of the main road (again, on the sidewalk), and was about to cross the “vertical” part of the “T”. A car was stopped there, waiting to turn right on red onto the main road. I had the green light, but I still pushed the button for the crosswalk signal, and was pleasantly surprised when it quickly gave me the “WALK” signal. I started to pedal forward. The driver of the stopped car had been looking to her left for cross traffic on the main road. Not seeing any, she began her right-turn-on-red (without first looking to her right, or in front of her), and knocked me off of my bike. She hadn’t built up more than a few MPH, so I wasn’t seriously injured, but it messed up my bike pretty good.
Funny followup: This was in the early '80s, so cell phones didn’t exist, and there wasn’t any payphone nearby to call the police. So she put my mangled bike in her trunk and drove me home, and gave me a fake name and phone number to contact her to pay for bike repair (hey, I was 12, I didn’t know better). She must have thought of the deception at the last second, because she used her real first name and a slightly fake last name (like “Laura Zawadtobe” instead of “Laura Zawadski”). When my parents came home at the end of the day, they called the police to report the deception - and by sheer coincidence the police dispatcher deduced from the fake name that the perp was a friend of hers, and put us in contact with her. After a severe tongue-lashing from my parents, she paid up.
Anyway, as regards who is at “fault”:
Roadway users are absolutely at fault when they violate the rules of right-of-way, defying the reasonable expectations that others form based on those rules. They should be made to pay fines, compensate victims, and serve prison sentences if necessary, based on the consequences to others from their violation.
That said, I get what you’re saying, and I cringe and shake my head at the amazing lack of self-preservation instinct exhibited by many pedestrians and bicyclists. If I could go back in time I would tell my 12YO self, “goddamit, LOOK at her face and make sure she sees you and stays STOPPED before you move out into the crosswalk.” As an adult some 30 years later, my head is on a swivel any time I’m walking in the street; I will not let them get me.
I would say the same to Sharita Williams, who was killed in Ann Arbor five years ago. She did almost everything right. She was crossing in a crosswalk, and she had activated the impossible-to-miss flashing yellow lights that tell approaching drivers “there may be a pedestrian in this crosswalk, and you are required by law to stop if there is one.” There were four driving lanes; she had crossed three lanes of stopped traffic, but as she entered the fourth lane, a speeding car failed to yield, and knocked the life out of her. The driver rightly served a multi-year prison sentence for that. I will never say Williams was at fault, but she had the most to lose that day, and the easiest action - simply looking upstream before entering that last lane - would have prevented her from losing it all.
Pedestrian/car collisions aren’t the only situation where this sort of thinking should apply. Example: when driving, you are legally allowed to hang out in another motorist’s blind spot, and they are legally at fault if they merge into you because they were too dumb to look over their shoulder before changing lanes. But you’re an idiot if you let them do that to you. Want to make it harder to get hit? move forward so you’re clearly in their field of view, or fall back so you’re out of their danger zone.
Graveyards, after all, being stuffed with people who had the right of way.