Sounds plausible, I'd love to know the context. Got a link?
As for the victim-blaming... Teaching safety isn't something that should be controversial. If it's victim-blaming to teach our children to look both ways before crossing the street, then I'm ready to throw American culture into the garbage.
That "American culture" is actually a by-product of the automotive industry. In the early 1900s the automobile manufacturers managed to turn around the image of cars being child killing machines, which they were, into it being the fault of the kids.
Drive down that cul-de-sac at the speed limit and if you run over a kid, the kid wasn't looking properly, you're not at fault! How could you be when the child wasn't looking?
The driver should almost always be responsible for hitting something. In North America the sad truth is killing someone with a car by "accident" is actually less of an inconvenience than getting a root canal. You pay a small fine, you go on with life as if it never happened.
This comes off as incredibly flippant. Is this something you've personally experienced? Would you elaborate on what you mean by a small fine? Going on with life as if it never happened? I fortunately have not been through anything like this, but I've never come across anyone who considers vehicular manslaughter insignificant.
Driver ran down a mother of three children on the sidewalk, killing her. The punishment for the driver? "Ms. Taylor was fined $1,000 and given six months of probation and six months of varying driving restrictions."
A good thing the driver wasn't downloading an illegal song while driving or they'd face ten years in jail!
There was a day last year here where eighteen(!) pedestrians were hit by bad drivers: https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2016/10/21/10-pedestrians-w...
Eighteen people. One twenty-four hour period.
It was absoultely astounding, yet sadly all too typical. Drivers don't care, and why should they? What's the worst that could happen? A six month partial suspension?
IDK, this seems like it's more an issue with Canada's justice system. Canada is more humane than the US is, and that means forgiveness. The article mentioned that the driver broke down crying in court. Does it seem to you like the driver DGAF about her actions?
There is a good points in the article you posted:
> Long-term data from the city show that drivers are responsible in the majority of pedestrian deaths. In spite of this, public-safety campaigns have tended to focus more on pedestrian behaviour. On Monday – coincidentally, at the same time as Ms. Taylor’s case was being heard – the police released a video urging those who walk to be more careful.
Yeah. With the stats from the USA that I posted, it seemed like it was drunk people that were putting themselves in danger. They share some responsibility. But if pedestrians don't have any behavior changes they can do to get better outcomes then of course, we should target drivers and re-engineer roads.
Not really. It's just that the judges don't need to look "tough" to get re-elected. They're all appointed and can just go about doing their job.
I'm just exposed to local news more than other cities, but across North America the punishment for bad driving is astonishingly weak.
Most of the American stories I hear relayed to me are from cyclists who cannot believe the complete indifference police have to their plight. You got run down on the road and the driver fled the scene? Yeah, well, you had it coming and be thankful you're not dead. It doesn't even get reported because the police won't bother.
http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/inga_saffron/If-you-...
>How many of this year’s 63 fatalities will result in criminal charges? The four November deaths, some of the most horrific of 2016, are all still under investigation, according to police. But if history proves any guide, only in those cases in which the motorists committed other crimes, such as driving drunk or fleeing the scene, will police hold drivers accountable.
>although statistics are hard to come by, every transportation official I spoke with cited anecdotal evidence suggesting that the odds of drivers' avoiding repercussions in fatal car crashes far outweighed the likelihood of criminal charges.
>“If the driver isn’t drunk, it just gets declared a terrible accident,” says Andrew Stober, who helped oversee Mayor Michael Nutter’s transportation office. Even when the driver is found to have been speeding, there are often no charges, adds Kate Fillin-Yeh, who runs the National Association of City Transportation Officials.
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/you-can-kill-anyone-you-w...
>According to a recent report by the League of American Bicyclists, barely one in five drivers who end bicyclists’ lives are charged with a crime. The low prosecution rate isn’t a secret and has inspired many to wonder whether plowing into a cyclist with a car is a low-risk way to commit homicide.
>Nationwide, incidents like Cann’s often result in misdemeanor charges, tickets, or nothing. Leah Shahum from the San Francisco Bike Coalition told the New York Times last year that her organization does “not know of a single case of a cyclist fatality in which the driver was prosecuted, except for DUI or hit-and-run.” Kristin Smith, also of the SF Coalition, says that “Last year, four people were hit and killed in San Francisco and no charges were ever brought,” including for a collision captured on video that showed the driver was at fault. Last year in New York City, the bike-advocacy organization Time’s Up pushed for changes in police investigations of bicyclist deaths by painting chalk-body outlines on streets, marked with words familiar from NYPD reports: “No Criminality Suspected.”
https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/invention-jay...
>This time, the driver of a Jaguar traveling down 42nd Street in Manhattan struck another car and lost control, flipping onto the sidewalk and striking several pedestrians. Amazingly, given that this is one of the most crowded parts of town, no one was killed. Less amazingly, given the New York Police Department’s general approach toward car-pedestrian or car-bicycle crashes, the driver will apparently not face any criminal charges.
>Despite remarkable recent gains in pedestrian safety – thanks in part to design changes aimed at slowing down drivers – cars still jump the curb nearly every day. Drivers who kill or maim pedestrians with their vehicles are still only rarely treated as criminals in New York, as long as they are not drunk and do not flee the scene. Even that is sometimes not enough to merit serious charges.
>Twenty years ago, an out-of-control driver plowed through New York’s Washington Square Park, killing 5 people and injuring 27 others. That horrific incident caused a public outcry and galvanized advocates in what has become known as the livable streets movement. But the driver, a 74-year-old woman, was not charged with any crime.
http://startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians-the-...
>Carol Wiggins crossed Territorial Road every day at the crosswalk on her way home from work in Watertown. But the driver of the car that hit her one evening said he didn’t see her until it was too late.
>Wiggins never recovered from the traumatic brain injury from the 2011 crash, dying weeks later in a Minneapolis hospital. The driver never faced any charges — not even a traffic citation.
>The decision not to cite the driver who struck Wiggins isn’t unusual. The majority of drivers who killed pedestrians between 2010 and 2014 were not charged, according to Star Tribune analysis of metro area crash data. Those who were charged often faced misdemeanors — from speeding to careless driving — with minimal penalties, unless the driver knowingly fled or was intoxicated at the time of the crash.
>Charles Roger Lord died after being struck by a van while checking out a Nice Ride bike on a north Minneapolis sidewalk in 2014. The van “reportedly driving at a high rate of speed” jumped the curb, hit him and dragged his body across a vacant lot before crashing into a building, according to a police report.
>The driver fled, but was later arrested. He said he did not know he had hit someone before fleeing and blamed the crash on problems with the van’s steering. He was never charged.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/recreational-cycling/why-do-d...
>Despite the cyclist having clear, unambiguous footage of the incident, the CPS decided there was not enough evidence to prosecute. The reason, apparently, is that it was a hire car and so they couldn’t say for sure who was driving. Nottinghamshire police say the man and woman who were eligible to drive the car both ignored a legal request to provide driver details despite being summonsed to court. The man got six penalty points and a £150 fine for failing to provide details and no action was taken over the hit and run.
I found it really hard to find cases of people actually being convicted because most articles mentioning a fatality and an aggressor never yielded much in terms of court records. It's like they just shrug and move on. It's the worst.
Yes, sometimes, some other vehicle will swerve and force you off the road. That seems to be the exception, not the common case.
Very rarely, a mechanical fault will cause an accident. But, even those are generally do to lack of maintenance. Personal example - I was almost hit by a detached car wheel/tire a few months ago while riding my bicycle on a bike trail. The car was an old beater. No muffler, rusty, etc.
Current laws don't do much, but an incident like that should be a minimum automatic five year suspension with mandatory re-testing.
Click on the last link and watch the video. It's a video that can only be described as a brutal and unprovoked attack with a deadly weapon, caught on camera. The author described it as "attempted murder." If someone was caught on camera beating someone else with any other weapon (nightstick, bat, hammer) police would be a lot more interested in following up and making sure the attacker doesn't attack again.
I think the big problem is there is rarely any sort of investigation unless it's really, really egregious. You just say "whoops" and maybe get a ticket for speeding or failure to keep right or running a stop sign and that's the end of it.
The fact this comment actually exists shows the problem.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2...
Rather than actually changing anything, suggest education.
(A phrase, I might add, is the single most useless one in the english language? It's a thought-terminating cliche.)
If you're dead or severely injured, what does it matter if it was not legally your fault? I pay attention to other cars regardless of whether I have the right-of-way or not. This has saved me from accidents. I don't care to be "dead" right.
I don't understand pedestrians and bikers who wander carelessly into traffic, presuming that having the right-of-way is some magic shield against getting run over.
I step into the road when I have a right - while being careful, but still taking a risk that isn't strictly necessary - because it is my right and I care about that.
I don't leave valuables in plain sight in my car when I leave it, and I lock the door on my dwelling. I don't go around flashing wads of cash.
This is not victim blaming, as flashing cash does not reduce the culpability of the robber in the slightest. I just don't care to be a target. And that's my choice.
It depends on a lot of factors. The presence of a separated sidewalk might imply a hard separation between vehicular and pedestrian traffic which can increase speeds. Deliberately blurring those boundaries, as is often done in small European cities, makes the road more ambiguous and this leads to slower, more cautious drivers.
Confidence equals speed. Long, straight, wide roads with ample room for stopping encourage people to drive faster. Narrow, winding, difficult to navigate roads are naturally approached with more caution. The trend has been to straighten out and widen narrow roads, to eliminate any impediments to "traffic flow", which often makes for roads over-engineered for their intended speeds.
The presence of a sidewalk doesn't make people drive faster, but the philosophy of separation of traffic flows that leads to sidewalks being used does.
I've seen it argued that shoulders/sidewalks actually make roads more dangerous, because drivers drive faster when they're present.
> This gives us a pretty targeted demographic! Start a "dangers of the road" campaign targeted at pedestrians who are men, aged 25-44, drink at night and who live in rural areas.
Isn't that classic victim-blaming? Getting pedestrians off the road would reduce pedestrian deaths, but it's the wrong way to solve it as a matter of principle.