Safe Speed Forums

Why is it our government fine us for speeding in a notion to prevent accidents.

Yet when accidents happen, does not prosecute the driver for causing an accident.

You have to pretty much kill someone in an accident , to be faced with prosecution. Yet we are fined for driving safely just above the limit.

You cannot even report an accident now, unless someone has been injured.

I would like to see every accident result in a prosecution of a driver. The Insurance company should not be able to process a claim without a police number. This is the only sure way to reducing accidents, drivers would not be as prone to making an error if they were aware that they face prosecution.

It is now the case that although we have safe driving records we are fined as a means to reduce the accidents other drivers are causing.

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Steve

But the punishment should be for the action, not necessarily the consequences.
There have been many miscarriages of justice recently, where a normally careful driver who makes a small error - the kind anybody could make - and causes a horrific accident in which several people are killed, gets sent down for years, and some other disqualified, uninsured driver who drives wilfully recklessly and causes an accident in which nobody is seriously hurt gets, comparatively speaking, a slap on the wrist.

Regards
Peter

Disagree Peter, just because someone is road legal, does not make it acceptable to kill anyone.
Driver error is what kills, this is what needs to be tackled. No matter how small the error.

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Steve

Check out my story under the Amazing Satitisics thread.


http://www.safespeed.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=349


When prosecuting extreme cases where deaths or injury have occured, I believe it all boils down to ascertaining the intent of the driver concerned. Did the individual concerned just make an error, or did they attempt a deliberate maneouvre which they knew was illegal/risky? That was the key question in the incident I witnessed, and the court decided to err in favour of the driver who claimed the former (he would wouldn't he?) when I know I witnessed the latter. The problem is, you can't get inside someones head to know exactly what they were thinking at the time.

I suppose we would all like to think that if we made a genuine error, albeit one with serious consequences, we would be treated leniently. And if the case goes before a jury, you can bet your bottom dollar there would be a few jurors sat thinking "there but for the grace of god go I".

The net result is that killing someone using a car seems to have become, if not socially acceptable, then an 'understandable' crime, one where the culprit tends to attract sympathy rather than outright condemnation.

Unless you are a friend/relative of those killed or injured that is.

OK, let's try a hypothetical situation.
You're driving along the motorway when a wasp flies through the window and stings you on the eye. Disoriented with shock and pain, you swerve all over the road, and an HGV, in an attempt to avoid hitting you, loses it, crosses the central reservation and hits a coach, killing 20 people.
You get sent to prison for 10 years and lose your house, your family, everything.
You had absolutely not the remotest intention of harming anybody, but you did - and you are punished very severely. It could happen, similar things have happened. Is this justice?

Regards
Peter

Your actions resulted in death of innocent people.

A fanciful situaction.

99.9 % of accidents are avoidable, and i am talking about the driver that causes the accident, not the innocent third party.

We currently have no system in place to penalise drivers for causing accidents. We have laws, which are ignored by the police in favour of penalising motorists who are driving perfectly safely a few miles above the limit.

The cameras are in place, they would have us believe to reduce accidents.

If we want to reduce accidents we must tackle the root cause, that is drivers that cause accidents.

Why is it acceptable to cause an accident, and just say sorry my mind was on other things, or i was just tuning in my radio, or i did not see you.

Excuses, we need to deal with these drivers. We will then see some accident reduction. Then maybe they will lay off safe drivers.

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Steve

<<ll boils down to ascertaining the intent of the driver concerned. >>

Nothing to do with intent, driving without due and attention kills. Just because we did not mean to do it, does not make us innocent.

<<Did the individual concerned just make an error, or did they attempt a deliberate maneouvre which they knew was illegal/risky?>>

Error or deliberate maneovre both equal to poor driving standard, that kills and injures.

We are responsible for other road users.

"I did not mean it" is not good enough, we should be fully aware of our driving standards at all times.

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Steve

But it's intent which should decide the punishment.
If you intend killing someone and you do, then society rightly demands that you be removed from society, for the protection of society.
But if you accidentally kill someone, then society does not need protection from you, as you're extremely unlikely to do it again, so you don't have to be removed from society.
For most people, just having to live with the knowledge that they've killed someone is a far worse punishment than any court could dish out.

Regards
Peter

Pete317,

I agree with the general gist of your argument, there isn't IMHO enough accountability with respect to bad driving.
If an airline pilot made an 'error' on final approach to land, lost control and killed even one person the bru-ha-ha would be tremendous. TV cameras would descend upon the airport, studio panels of experts would be convened and, ultimately, there would be calls for the pilot to lose his licence and therefore job.
A motorists commits an error and it gets shrugged off. Why? Because people can relate to drivers' errors, they can't relate to pilot errors (most people aren't pilots). So whilst we are quite prepared to see someone else's rules enforced against them (even demand that this is so), we aren't quite so happy to see rules that WE must obey enforced quite so rigidly.
Having said that, I would like to think that if I made a genuine human error on the road and killed someone, an element of mercy would be demonstrated by the powers that be.

Rather think the wasp sting in the eye would be regarded by courts as unforeseen accident and dealt with accordingly and with some understanding of the mitigating circumstance.

The chap who rear-ended my wife had heart attack behind the wheel of his car - and he died. At the inquest and enquiry - he was absolved from blame as this was unforeseen circumstance. This impacted on our insurance claim from his insurers. My wife's insurance company was unable to reclaim their pay-out for my wife's medical care as result of this. We then faced a stiff legal battle with the insurance company regarding the damages' claims. My wife was very, very seriously injured at the time, and it took us years of legal wrangling to resolve the claim!

Much depends upon whether or not error was reasonably foreseeable in the legal arguments - and circumstances and seriousness of the outcome.

This applies to me every day in my normal work - I make a mistake, do not identify a virus properly, supply wrong blood to a patient - great hullaballo in the papers and I become the murdering careless doc in the dock! (Wildy is in similar situation - she gets her work wrong, and everybody gets high as kites! )

If an airline pilot (or, indeed, any pilot) made an error on final approach (or, indeed, anywhere while in charge of the aircraft) there would be an inquiry. Near-misses, crashes (even hard landings), infringement of controlled airspace, all are investigated. However, unlike with motoring, they're not looking to automatically blame the driver and this has resulted in aviation becoming a far safer mode of transport than the road network. If operating procedures or airfield layout are responsible, those are changed to improve safety. Constrast that with problems in road layout, where they villify the drivers and then (maybe) slap on some paint and slap up another speed camera!

That said, there are far fewer pilots than drivers and if the DfT had to investigate every near miss on the roads, they'd never cope.

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Will

Obviously that's true - but we could get much of the benefit with none of the pain if we just told drivers to investigate and understand their own near misses.

I'd love to see a helpline staffed by expert drivers where near-miss involved drivers could ring up and talk it over for example.

And I'd love to see remedial training available to near miss (and accident involved for that matter) drivers sold on the basis of: "We'll help you not to repeat your mistakes".

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

There is a definate consensus that causing an accident is completly acceptable. I find this bizzare, If a driver pulls out in the path of another they should be prosecuted. At present this is acceptable behavior should no one be injured, the next time the driver does it, the result could be very differant and end in death. However we make both situactions acceptable.

These same people wish to prosecute a driver for drifting just above the limit in a completly safe manner.

Peoples priororities are completly wrong.

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Steve

But humans are not infallible, and they make mistakes. Should we punish everyone who makes an innocent mistake? What sort of punishment would you advocate - removal of their driving licence? We'd soon have no one left on the roads. At some point in your driving life, you will make a mistake. It might not cause an accident, it might not cause a near miss, but you'll be aware that you made a mistake.

If this mistake causes an accident, does that make it more worthy of punishment? Why, because fate decided that there'd be someone coming round the corner at just that moment?

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-mike[F]
Caught in the rush of the crowd, lost in a wall of sound..

How far would it go? You'd have to report even a little scratch?

Non-injury accidents are considered to be no more than a civil claim by one party against another. And if both parties agree, it can be resolved without an insurance claim at all, with the supposedly "guilty" party paying for the damage. Many minor accidents are resolved this way.

It would probably extend to situations whereby you were entering or exiting a parking space and touched another car's bumper in so-doing.

Sorry - waste of time for the courts. They have better things to deal with.

IMO, the psychological barrier may be too high to overcome. No-one (even those who analyse their near misses) wants to take the blame and the natural reaction is to lay blame on anyone or anything other than yourself. For such a service to work, you'd need to get across a clear "no blame apportioned message" and I suspect that "We'll help you not to repeat your mistakes" implies admission of fault. Something like, "We'll help you defend yourself from others' mistakes" may be more successful.

FWIW, I'd fully support a mandatory annual or biennial check ride. The instructor would not be able to take your license away but would merely serve to help and advise. This is pure first-thoughts and no doubt the suggestion if full of holes, but it seems reasonable.

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Will

It amazes me that we allow rude, aggresive behaviour to go unchecked, yet a simple lapse of concentration or even driving at a speed suitable for the road conditions (though not necessarily within the limit) can result in draconian penalties.

Bottom line cameras make money, are good for clear up figures eg 200 camera offences = 200 clear ups (assuming the camera is working) and it is easy to prosecute. Having to get the courts to judge the implications and severity of an 'offence' eg cutting in front and forcing a gap when they have little, if any specialist knowledge of driving or road safety is nigh on impossible

To continue the point re: aviation, coming from a RAF background, I saw several inquests where the basis is always 'what happened', 'what can be done about it' the issue of who was responsible was a secondary factor the process not being out to 'get' someone. This is in a system where there is no innocent until proven guilty. So why are we doing our best to criminalise drivers ???

Also from my time in the forces try the comparison between someone being taught how to handle weapons to someone being taught to drive - both equally horrific in it's consequences (death, disability) yet driving is the more likely to be realised. Of the two weapons training can take several months yet I know people who have been 'messing about' in friends cars (illegally) take the test and pass with no formal training or supervision. The car is a far deadlier weapon than any gun, grenade or mortar. Just look at how many are being killed on our roads. Personnally I used to feel safer on a live firing exercise than I do driving.

Scrap the test system and bring in something that makes people actually learn how to drive !! That way tinkering with the already flawed courts and legal system would be unnecessary.

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Gordon Brown saying I got the country into it's current economic mess so I'll get us out of it is the same as Bomber Harris nipping over to Dresden and offering to repair a few windows.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my work here is done.

http://www.wildcrafts.co.uk

Hi Will,

You're right to highlight these issues, but I believe we can, and indeed must, overcome this sort of resistance quite easily.

We need to adjust the culture so it's harder for individual drivers to assume that they are the best. One worthy route would be the introduction of a graded official optional advanced driving licence. Then the boy racers cold try to get higher scores on their licences, and those with lower scores or without advanced licences would know that they had some making up to do. Anyone who was talented enough to score 100% would not be a problem, and all the rest of us would have something to aspire to.

I wouldn't make a big deal of blame, and actual sales slogans would very likely be far more sophisticated than my earlier note. I was trying to explain the motivation rather than the sales pitch!

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Paul Smith
Our scrap speed cameras petition got over 28,000 sigs
The Safe Speed campaign demands a return to intelligent road safety

I think we're agreed that something must be done to change public perception WRT road safety. At present, we have an unbalanced approach in that the authorities almost exclusively use enforcement rather than encouragement and I believe they must take a holistic approach before we'll get anywhere.

WRT driver standards, not only do we need to encourage drivers to attain initial high standards, we need to encourage them to maintain or improve those standards. There are schemes (e.g. pass plus and IAM) but there aren't enough takers. I advocate "check rides" yet have only taken one in over three decades of driving. (and what a revelation that was!)

There's an old adage that nobody does something for nothing. We have to motivate drivers to improve; give them positive reasons for doing so. For example, cheaper insurance or increased speed limits (I'd be perfectly happy for someone who proved their skill in an annual advanced test to travel at 100 mph on motorways where their expert assessment judged that speed to be safe).

Just a thought...

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Will

Sadly it is a fact that a person can pull out of a side road without looking, hit a motorcyclist and kill them and effectively walk away with a careless driving charge or less.

However, if we jailed people for the consequences of their mistakes then we would be locking up the wrong people.

What would be nice to see is these drivers offered retraining (and thats proper retraining not speed awareness b*****). I know of a number of cases where riders have been seriously injured and the police took no action against the driver.

Yet there have been many riders jailed for doing 130+ who didn't harm anyone.

If we had appropriate speed limits then the offence of speeding could vanish overnight.

It is worth noting however that insurance companies will give you a larger premium for a fault accident than 3 pts.