10 year ban for killing cyclist

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TonyR
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by TonyR »

Bicycler wrote:There can be no proof that a prolific speeder is going to kill a cyclist - most won't.


But there is a established strong relationship between speed and the risk of an accident. Every kph increase in speed increases the risk of an accident by a few percent. In addition between 20 and 40mph there is a very strong relationship between survival of a vulnerable road user and speed of the motor vehicle. So the faster a driver goes, the higher the risk that they will hit you and that they will kill you when they hit you.
Bicycler
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by Bicycler »

Yeah, agreed. I was just trying demonstrate the folly of waiting for somebody to kill or maim before doing anything about their driving. Rather than just penalise those few after the event it is much better to do something about the greater number of drivers who show signs of poor driving before finding out which ones are going to maim and kill
thirdcrank
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by thirdcrank »

Meanwhile, there's a clue to why the case in the OP ended in the way it did.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-28979459

:shock:
binsted
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by binsted »

IMHO every driver should start with say an arbitrary number of points, say 30, use the same totting up and banning procedure but when the total has been reached revoke the licence for good.

There are some people who should never be allowed behind the wheel.
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[XAP]Bob
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by [XAP]Bob »

kwackers wrote:It's all explained by the pyramid of risk.

At the top you have deaths.
On the next tier down you have injuries which are some multiple of the number of deaths.
Under that you have minor collisions which are some multiple of injuries.
Under that you have near misses.
Under that you have risky behaviour.

So basically to reduce the risk further up you have to address the issues at the base of the pyramid - in this case risky behaviour.
The problem is of course the multipliers; you need (say) 100 instances of risky behaviour for every near miss, 100 near misses for every minor collision, 100 minor collisions for every serious injury and 100 serious injuries for every death.

So your average motorist can persist in risky behaviour and never experience causing anything further up and thus consider themselves 'safe' (since the odds rapidly work out in his/her favour).
Against this you have to convince them that their behaviour needs changing but that's difficult when having been caught speeding several times society fines you pocket change and refuses to do anything that might actually change that behaviour.

This,

Clearly not all risky behaviour ends up killing people, but without that risky behaviour being taken (and effectively condoned) society wide the deaths will occur. Reduce the instances of risky behaviour and the consequences will also be reduced.
A shortcut has to be a challenge, otherwise it would just be the way. No situation is so dire that panic cannot make it worse.
There are two kinds of people in this world: those can extrapolate from incomplete data.
thirdcrank
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by thirdcrank »

One limitation of that explanation is that it deals with the behaviour of drivers but not the reaction of others affected by it. Vulnerable road users modify their behaviour to avoid putting themselves - or their children at risk. That's relevant to cyclists.

Having mentioned children, it seems a bit rich to advance as "exceptional hardship" that if a driver is disqualified, his children's privacy will suffer.
Flinders
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by Flinders »

thirdcrank wrote:One limitation of that explanation is that it deals with the behaviour of drivers but not the reaction of others affected by it. Vulnerable road users modify their behaviour to avoid putting themselves - or their children at risk. That's relevant to cyclists.

Having mentioned children, it seems a bit rich to advance as "exceptional hardship" that if a driver is disqualified, his children's privacy will suffer.


More than a bit rich, given that the higher the speed, the more likely he would have been to kill someone else's kid in any collision, whoever's fault that collision may have been.
Would he speed with his own kids in the car, I wonder?

If a charity suffers because he's banned, and I see no reason why it should in any case, that isn't the responsibility of the court, it is 100% his responsibility. This sort of misplaced leniency just encourages other drivers to think they'll gt away with it.
Postboxer
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Joined: 24 Jul 2013, 5:19pm

Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by Postboxer »

I doubt we'll see an increase in drivers on 9 points doing charity work, but it would be one of the only possible positives, pre-emptive community service.
TonyR
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by TonyR »

It looks like a big part of the big sentence in the Welsh case is the judge took offence to the dress of the solicitor representing the driver. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-28979459
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GrumpyGit
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by GrumpyGit »

IMHO the authorities should begin by taking a much harder stance with road ragers.

A motor vehicle is a lethal weapon in the wrong hands. Any person applying for a firearms certificate who displayed an aggressive attitude, anger management issues etc. would rightfully be told to "jog on", so why should someone of a similar personality be allowed on the road with an object weighing over 2 tons?

Drivers seen tailgating, intimidating other road users, driving aggressively etc. should loose their licence.

Clamping down on bad drivers early would reduce the death toll by removing these drivers from the road long before they kill anyone. A driving licence is a privilege, not a right!
Derek - The enlightened petrolhead ;)
drossall
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Re: 10 year ban for killing cyclist

Post by drossall »

kwackers wrote:So your average motorist can persist in risky behaviour and never experience causing anything further up and thus consider themselves 'safe' (since the odds rapidly work out in his/her favour).

I read somewhere (not sure whether I can find it, may have been in Death on the Streets) an estimate of the mean time between accidents for drivers. Can't remember how serious those accidents would be. However, it was a very large number*.

The implication of this would be that an absence of accidents is normal even for below-average drivers, and no indicator of whether we're actually any good on the roads. If we've had one accident, we may have been unlucky. If we're ten times more likely than average to crash, we've still only got a rather better than evens chance of ever having an accident in an entire driving career.

This does not mean that anyone who has had multiple accidents is a terrible driver - can still just be bad luck, that's how statistics works.

However, it should give any of us pause for thought while driving.

======

* I suppose you could look at it this way. According to this link, there are 30 million licence holders in the UK(!)

Let's make some really simplistic assumptions. Let's say that every crash requires two drivers, that every driver is going to crash once in a 40-year driving career, and that the number of licence holders never changes. Let's ignore anything about severity of crash (or that some drivers do hundreds of times more distance than others, giving hundreds of times more opportunity to crash).

Then one in 40 drivers crashes each year, so 750,000 drivers crash. However, each crash takes two drivers, so there are something like 400,000 crashes a year (keeping the numbers simple because this is a very simplistic approach).

In reality, this link says that there were about 140,000 reported crashes in 2013. Many of those must have been minor.

There will have been many more unreported ones. There again, if an accident is not serious enough to report, we may not count it in our minds as a "real" accident (like the time that, as a relatively new driver, I bumped someone in a traffic queue with no damage on either side, or the slight dent that someone put in our new car :evil: ) I'm going to ignore unreported crashes.

So, in this very simplistic world, the average driver is going to crash once in every two or three driving careers. Which makes it difficult ever to say that my driving record is evidence that I am any good at all. Maybe if I've done very high mileages for many years...
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