Re: Woman driver texting on mobile kills cyclist jumping red light

solomonsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On 6 Feb, 13:21, Adrian <toomany2...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
solomonsky (solomon...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) gurgled happily, sounding
much like
they were saying:

The woman was an habitual speeder, and the family of the dead man
claim he had stopped and checked first.

"First"... So that'd be before he then set off through the red light?
Can't have checked very thoroughly. Let's guess that it takes a
cyclist -
especially a fit young one - about three seconds to clear a lane of a
junction on a bike from a standing start.

A car travelling at 30mph will travel about 40 metres in three
seconds.
A car travelling at 45mph will travel about 60 metres in three
seconds.

Are you really claiming that he couldn't see an oncoming car from 60
metres away? And he didn't continue to check that direction whilst
crossing? Remember the last step of the Green Cross Code?
"Keep looking and listening for traffic while you
cross."http://www.thinkroadsafety.gov.uk/arrivealive/greencross.htm

Oh, and how do the dead man's family _know_ he stopped and checked?
Were
they there?

Unless anyone wants to make suicide illegal it's clear the serial
criminal speeding driver was most at fault here.

Nobody's claiming she wasn't largely culpable. Merely that the idiot
on
the bike was a long way from being an innocent victim. Yes, he did
pay a
far higher price given the vulnerability of cyclists, but since that
could hardly be said to be unexpected it just shows him to be even
more
of a fucking idiot.

Anyway, the speed itself really isn't the issue here - even at
50mph, the
highway code stopping distance is 54m, not the 60m that roughly three
seconds visible warning would give. IF she'd actually been looking
where
the *** she was going, she'd have seen him start to cross and been
able
to stop - in plenty of time, given that the HC braking distances are
massively outdated, being based around a fairly mediocre early '60s
car
with very poor brakes by even vaguely modern standards. Given that
there
was a junction, a competent driver should be able to cut the thinking
distance, by being prepared for another vehicle to enter the
junction. So
let's say that's 45m total stopping distance. But that's from a
higher
speed than alleged. So let's say 40m is a viable stopping distance
for an
alert driver in a good modern car from 45mph.

So - for the difference between 30mph and 45mph to have made the
difference between impact and no impact, she would have had to have
been
around 40m away when he entered the junction. About two seconds at
45mph.
And that, of course, would only be the very gentlest of nudges as she
came to a halt. Much nearer for a harder impact.

Given that she wasn't paying the _least_ bit of attention, it would
have
made no difference if she was obeying the 30 limit - unless you're
claiming that the cyclist's vision was so poor that he wouldn't have
been
expected to see a car 40m away. Given that the eyesight test for a
driving licence requires a place consisting of seven 79mm high, 50mm
wide
characters to be read from 20m, I'd have said that an inability to
see a 6ft wide 4ft high object from twice that distance was extremely
restricted vision, wouldn't you? It probably even counts as
technically
blind.

Should blind people be encouraged to cycle on major roads?

There's a heap of assumptions there- it was dark, vehicles may have
blocked the killer driver's view, the road curves. You are doing all
you can to excuse the driver based on pure guess work and assumptions.

This woman had been caught speeding beofre.

She is a serial offender.

She ignored the warnings.

Yes, we have a duty of care to each other.

However, this woman had a complete disregard for anyone else on the
road. If she was a safe and competent driver she wouldn't have been
speeding or paying attention to her phone instead of the road. She is
not a victim in this. Her choices led to this.

Unfortunately there are many people out there like this woman who make
bad decisions and then don't have the decency/guts to accept the
responsibility for their actions.

If people like this are in prison then at least other road users are
marginally safer.

If my understanding is correct, she was proceeding on a green light whilst
the cyclist went through a red light which is the root cause of the
collision. The fact that she wasn't paying attention to driving and thus
added to the severity of the cyclists injuries is a factor in the
consequences not the root cause.


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