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The day I accidentally killed a little boy

bbc.co.uk

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Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#171

Post by bryanlarsen »

erik_landerholm wrote: post #123
bryanlarsen wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, the only person to blame in this incident is the person that thought a 50mph speed limit was appropriate for a road that kids live on.

Uh...have you ever driven anywhere rural...anywhere? If you have to drive 100 miles in rural area, going 30 mph would never fly. But, people ( including children) often live along these roads. I grew up in a place like that. People live directly off of highways. So highways should be 25 mph? 30mph?

99% of Sweden is rural, most of it with a significantly lower population density than the areas you're referring to, and they too had a lot of people that lived directly on their main roads.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#172

Post by ceejayoz »

DarronWyke wrote: post #39
weavie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expound on how the culture and mindset is different? I can imagine what it would be, but don't want to just jump to stereotypes..

Not the OP, but my take on it would be that every State is different from each other, and even within the State there's differences. Take a look at where I live, Texas. Dallas will be different than Austin which will be different than Houston. Any metropolitan area, even within the same borders, will have different culture and mindset than another. Compare that to another State and the divide only widens. Most countr…

> Most countries are fairly homogenous, which lends itself to a singular-ish mindset and culture.

I see this stated a lot by folks in Europe vs. the US discussions, but having visited both I'm pretty baffled by it. Switzerland has four national languages - hop on a train for an hour or two and you may go from French to German areas. The folks in Paris would laugh at the idea that they've got the same culture as Provence. Same with northern vs. southern Italy, Moscow vs. Siberia, etc.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#173

Post by jfoucher »

Pigo wrote: post #7

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

Haven't read the story yet, don't know if I will. I just wanted to reply to your comment with a personal anecdote. My eldest son died in an accident when he was about 2 ½ years old. The dread wasn't there before. I didn't think anything like that would happen to me. You do learn to live with the pain, even I sometimes cry for what would have been futile reasons. But I still couldn't bring myself to enter the church at an acquaintance's funeral. The pain was too much to handle. It's the guilt that's harder to get rid of. Everything you could have done to prevent it. Eventually (therapy does help) it softens a bit. So I don't think it's ever possible to get over something like that. It's been almost ten years. Maybe in another ten it'll have passed.

Edit: just wanted to add, spend the most quality time you can with your kids. I resigned from my job when my eldest was 1 year old to be able to spend more time with him. Best decision of my life in retrospect.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#174

Post by kelchm »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #6
oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #3

You have to feel terribly sad for everyone involved here. The only place the blame can rest is humanity's desire to mix very fast, solid vehicles with very slow, squishy pedestrians in the same spaces. We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it, but hopefully self-driving cars (and less polluting cars, too) will start to reverse the damage done by the automobile, in the not-too distant future.

"We're way too far down that rabbit-hole to address it" That's BS. Sweden has essentially zero pedestrian fatalities annually, and its overall traffic fatality rate is well under a quarter that of the US. There are two main components: reducing speed limits and spending money on infrastructure. Both of these are anathema in the US, but the refusal to do so is borderline criminal, IMO. http://www.visionzeroinitiative.…

Except reducing speed limits really don't change the speed at which people drive.

https://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#175

Post by JauntTrooper »

BearGoesChirp wrote: post #155

All the people talking about being unable to handle/comprehend the death of their child, and especially the one line of conversations about the impact of losing one child when you have many more, made me think about something. For most of human history, losing some children was expected. Child mortality rates for most of our history have been abysmal. As species, what impact did that have on us? Child abuse has a lon…

I think the pain of loss was just as severe, and the past was just more miserable than we think.

Someday our children and descendants will look back at our time period in horror at the atrocities we continue to allow happen globally.

300,000 children under 5 die every year of malaria. The extensiveness of the agony that causes is difficult to comprehend.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#176

Post by kmm »

adventured wrote: post #152
mattlondon wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1 This seems to be a common excuse from people in the US "Oh yeah - well - of course you could do in such a small place - the US is just too big for to happen!" I looked up some stats for the inevitable "But the US is bigger than that! We simply cannot solve this problem!" replies. The EU is pretty big too, but the fatality rate is half of that in the US despite being of comparable land-area. US road fatalities per…

The distance driven per year per person in the US is twice that of the figure in the EU. As an example for the prime driving age bracket, the average driver in the US, 20 to 55 years of age, drives nearly 30,000 KM per year. In the EU it's half that. You would expect fatalities to increase meaningfully when you double the distance driven per person.

The relevant statistic is fatalities per billion vehicle-kilometers, which attempts to even out that discrepancy, and leads to the same conclusion. Using this metric, the US still has twice the fatality rate than the UK.

> In the EU it's half that.

I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#177

Post by joosters »

dragonwriter wrote: post #167
joosters wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous cars could actually lead to increases in road deaths (or at least, less pressure to improve road safety, and hence less potential reduction in deaths), because people would be far less invested in the accident. There would always be someone else to potentially blame: the manufacturer of the vehicle, the programmer of the software, the creators of the sensors, or even the owner of the vehicle not cleaning t…

The legal system has already solved this problem because liability isn't exclusive. For a product that the operator and owner are required to maintain in safe condition, where there is contribution of a defect in some component, it's possible for the operator, owner, the whole sales chain, the manufacturer and the supplier of the defective component to all be fully liable, and for none of them to be able to avoid tha…

I'm not suggesting that the legal system would throw their hands up and exclaim "There's too many possible parties at fault! Let's not blame any of them!" Instead, as you say, many parties could be held liable. Notably absent will be any one individual, i.e. the human driver of a car. No-one will be left feeling remorse. The writer of the original article could not get the death out of their mind. That won't happen to the developer of faulty collision avoidance AI code.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#178

Post by christophilus »

Pigo wrote: post #7

I can barely bring myself to read stories like this now. I never really thought about it before my son was born, but there's always this dread you live with in the back of your mind. This little helpless person has your life in it's hands. The world and fate is trying to take them out, and if they succeed you'd never recover. You can learn to live with pain, but I don't believe you ever get over something like that.

I had a similar experience yesterday when my wife related a near-kidnapping that happened in a grocery store. It seems that a pair of child-traffickers attempted to take a baby out of a shopping cart. It was a male/female duo. (Side note: NEVER leave your children unattended even for a moment. In this case, the parent was right beside the cart, moving groceries from the cart to the conveyor belt. It was a brazen act on the part of the kidnappers.)

In the past, stories like that would make me angry, but that's about it. Now that I have a kid, my brain plays through the scene with him as the baby being taken. My response is violence. I'm not a violent person at all, but I think I'd probably kill those kidnappers in the heat of the moment if I realized what was happening. I mean I would find anything to use as a weapon, and I'd just beat the everliving crap out of them. It's probably the worst reaction I could have, as it would mean me spending my life in jail, my son growing up without a dad, etc. Just a terrible, terrible decision, really. But I think that's what I'd do in the moment unless I could manage to overcome emotions with reason.

It's hard to express how having a kid changes your perspective on things like this.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#179

Post by peatmoss »

cobbzilla wrote: post #118
peatmoss wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reducing speed limits and designing roadways to discourage high speeds. But yeah, I like to measure annual traffic fatalities in 9/11s. Here in the US, we typically do >10 of them per year. We toppled the governments of two countries, created a whole new department of our federal government, and continue to advance prosthetics at a breakneck pace to fix the men and women we send to be disfigured overseas as a respons…

Maybe if all the traffic fatalities occurred on the same day each year it would be a more apt comparison. I bet you'd see some political will power then.

Well, if we’re doing > 10 9/11s per year, and we’ve had 16 years of comparison since 9/11, my back-of-a-napkin reasoning suggests we’re almost half way to a year’s worth of 9/11s.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#180

Post by notacoward »

Mailboxes on the opposite side of a street with a 45-50mph speed limit? STUPID. I feel terrible for both the victim and the author, in part because tragedies like this are avoidable. This particular scenario seems pretty egregious, but even the typical line of cars parked along the side of the road - obscuring view of the sidewalk and giving pedestrians a false sense of security - is provably bad for safety. If you want safety you need to maximize all-direction visibility. You can also add traffic-calming elements like bumps or chokepoints, but those are strictly secondary.

FWIW, I live on a pretty busy street - feeder for the neighborhood, popular short cut between two state roads, 35mph speed limit. Technically parking is allowed, but nobody does so visibility is pretty good. In nearly 20 years living here, I've only seen or heard of one accident, and it was a neighbor's dog (who came out of it fine). On runs I've seen evidence of maybe two or three other collisions. We're lucky. I can't imagine the carnage if we did something as stupid as putting mailboxes on only one side of the street.

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