We are talking about a situation where someone observed a situation that may have caused an accident, so we are talking about incidents, not statistics. If I failed to remedy a situation that may cause an airline crash, that is significantly higher stakes than failing to remedy a situation that may cause a bicycle crash. Honestly, if we can’t agree that airline crashes are worse than bicycle crashes then we don’t live in a sufficiently similar reality to discuss the issue.
(Objection: Because we are talking about the general application of the law, we shouldn’t be considering the incident but instead we are concerned about what would happen if we allowed this to happen every time. I’ll get to this at the end).
I brought up the reality that police officers have the ability to use judgement when they are making enforcement decisions. You are ignoring what the police officer was doing here. According to their understanding of the law, it would have been entirely legal for a one-armed person to operate a bike with two handle-bar breaks.
In your FAA analogy, the equivalent would be that I tell the person with the unique operating system, “No, you can’t fly with this, but you can fly with a standard operating system despite the fact that you can’t use half the controls and will undoubtedly crash.” A strict application of the (mistaken) law in question would say that a person with no arms could ride a bike as long as they had two handlebar breaks.
So to get to the objection I raised to myself above, it is very tempting to think that we have to apply the law equally in all cases. A large number of abuses of the law stem from unequal applications of it. Laws are written in ways that are too vague and then they applied one way when the person in question is black and another way when they are white.
But laws can’t just be applied according to their letter in every situation and police, prosecutors and judges are all empowered to make decisions that are reasonable for unusual circumstances. If the law worked the way the officer thought - you need two handlebar brakes on a bike - then it takes an astoundingly small amount of sense to realize that law didn’t considering the situation of a person who physically cannot operate both of the brakes. At that point the officer is either astoundingly foolish with negative consequences for those around them or believes the law should be applied in a Kafkaesque manner even when it works against the purposes it was passed for (road safety).
There are two ways to frame this exchange: 1. The cop would have allowed him to bike on if he had two functioning handlebar breaks; or 2. He would not have. I don’t see how the cop comes out looking okay in either situation.
According to the original (German-language) article, the issue wasn’t that the bike had just one handlebar brake (which is perfectly legal in Germany provided that there is another independent brake, e.g., operated by backpedaling), but that the police officer insisted that the single handlebar brake that the bike did have ought to be affixed to the right-hand side of the handlebar, where Mr Ionescu happens to have no hand, rather than the left-hand side. The relevant law, however, stipulates no such thing.
We don’t know where the police officer in question got the erroneous idea that the brake must be on the right-hand side of the handlebar. It would, however, make reasonable sense for a police officer to check the actual law before placing somebody like Mr Ionescu into what amounts to an unsolveable dilemma – after all, if the brake really needed to be on the right-hand side then Mr Ionescu would no longer be in a position to go about by bicycle at all. It would be the polite and citizen-friendly thing to do.
In addition, common sense suggests that whether one operates one’s handlebar brake with the right hand or the left hand makes no conceivable difference as far as slowing down a bicycle is concerned, and it would be pretty silly to have a law that says it must be the right hand. (In general, we in Germany have a lot fewer silly laws on the books than the US, where people write hilarious web sites and books about how you are allowed to shoot whales – but no other game – from a moving vehicle in Tennessee and so on.) That, if nothing else, should give a police officer pause and possibly prompt them to check chapter and verse before issuing a silly citation that people are sure to create a fuss about afterwards, and that will reflect badly on their own professional reputation as well as that of the police force in general. It’s not as if police officers weren’t in constant radio contact with their superiors so as to be able to consult them for guidance in cases like this, where there is no hurry or immediate danger to anybody involved.
I truly believe that sincere, intelligent people can examine exactly the same set of data, yet arrive at different conclusion.
I should have ceased to try to persuade you one post earlier than I did.
My last reply, before this one, reflects a failure on my part to keep in mind the principle I declared at the start of this post.
I offer my apologies for the snark/sarcasm. Sadly, I can’t promise it won’t happen again, because I am human.
This doesn’t mean I agree with your conclusion, but I couldn’t keep my emotions out of the conversation, so I should have just left without any further comment.
I did not do that, but this will serve as a data point and a reminder for me in further discussions.
