The Hierarchy of Responsibility

The first sub-topic said everyone carries obligations. This one answers the obvious next question: how much? The answer is a principle the rest of this platform returns to constantly:

Two dials, both intuitive once named:

Dial one — the harm you bring. A lorry carries more destructive energy than a car; a car more than a boda; a boda more than a bicycle. As the harm you're capable of rises, so does your share of the duty to prevent it. This is why heavy and public-service vehicles sit at the strict end of nearly every rule they touch — the harm dial is turned all the way up.

Dial two — the gap between you. A car meeting a lorry is a small gap: both drivers sit in steel. A car meeting a pedestrian is the maximum gap: one party brings a tonne of metal and crumple zones, the other brings a body. The bigger the gap, the more the vigilance falls on the protected side — not because the pedestrian has no duties, but because the consequences of failure are so unevenly distributed.

What the principle does for you: it replaces a memorised list of "special cases" with one piece of reasoning you can apply to anyone. Around a child, an elderly person, a loaded handcart, a herd of goats — you don't need to recall a rule for each; you read the protection gap and scale your margin to it. Later modules put this to work in detail; this is where the principle lives.

One everyday corollary — the horn. The horn exists to warn other road users when necessary, never to scold, hurry, or assert. Blasting it at a pedestrian or a startled animal inverts the hierarchy: it spends your protected position frightening the unprotected. If a warning helps, use it early and briefly; if it can only startle, your speed and space were the real problem.