snibgo wrote:thirdcrank wrote:My own interpretation is that if you are pushing a bike you are driving a vehicle but if you carry it you aren't.
With great respect to TC, I disagree. Driving a carriage on footways isn't allowed but pushing a bike on footways is allowed. Therefore pushing a bike isn't "driving a carriage". Perhaps TC is distinguishing between "carriage" and "vehicle".
It seems to me that walking across a stop line at a red light while pushing or wheeling a bike isn't prohibited. (It may be unwise, of course. And it's worth mentioning that skooting is cycling.)
It seems to me that the words I've underlined here are meaningless in this context unless you mean "nobody is ever going to do anything about it." On that basis, almost anything goes, especially on footways. It's fair to say that the Highway Code was amended on the subject some years ago and somebody on here has even quoted correspondence where the authors were asked about this and they replied that they had taken Brooks v thingy as the authority. As kwackers has already implied, this is academic because the likelihood of this ever going anywhere is somewhat less than zero but I remain confident of my view that that case was about the definition of a pedestrian / foot passenger and you don't need to be the Lord Chief Justice to see that somebody on foot is a pedestrian. I'm saying that being a pedestrian and being a driver are not mutually exclusive.
Is a pedal cycle a vehicle? Yes. (Ellis V Nott Bower 1895)
Is pushing a vehicle when you have control of the steering etc driving? Yes (Any number of decided cases, decided on the extent to which the alleged driver had control of the vehicle. I'd suggest that anybody pushing a pedal cycle in the normal sense of the expression has total control over it.)
Although we began here with traffic lights and vehicles I did quote footways in anticipation of the Cranks v thingy stuff and I wish I hadn't. In the context of the Highways Act 1835, a pedal cycle was declared to be a carriage in later legislation. It's possibly significant that they didn't try to declare it an honorary horse, which would have focused on the riding leg of the section. They didn't; they declared it to be a carriage and it would have been meaningless to do so if they hadn't considered using a bike to be driving it. This dates from the days before the invention of the motor vehicle.
The obituary of an eminent lawyer was published recently and he was quoted as saying the greater an advocate's expressions of respect, the more the opposite applied (my reinterpretation.)