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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

#561

Post by bargl »

MollyR wrote: post #555
bargl wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the childless females can ever really understand the process either... I am a dad, and I saw a change in my wife the DAY my first son was born. It's easy to forget but we were all on the other side of having children at some point (regardless of gender). It's something that changes you, your relationships, your priorities. If someone accidentally killed my child I don't know that I'd forgive them either…

Sure people who aren't pregnant can never understand what it's like to carry their child inside them for 9 months. You feel their movements inside you. You just know when they aren't feeling well.They respond differently when you eat certain foods. It's an almost spiritual connection. Then to finally meet them after 9 months, I just can't describe it.

It's interesting seeing the affect that feeding my kids had on my wife and their relationship. I was kind of jealous for a while. I didn't get to have that.

Don't get me wrong I still remember the first time I held them both, but I had to grow to know them from that day forward.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#562

Post by dragonwriter »

chris_7 wrote: post #75

If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". The default needs to move to charging every driver involved in a fatal crash with manslaughter. Currently the police won't even perform basic investigative work that would make any charge pos…

> The default needs to move to charging every driver involved in a fatal crash with manslaughter.

In civilized society, there is some evidentiary threshold for arrest and initiating charges. Manslaughter is a crime with specific elements; the absence of sufficient evidence of those elements makes it inappropriate ton arrest or charge.

The absence, as the police expressly found upon initial investigation, of evidence of even negligence in the operation of the vehicle rightly would foreclose such arrest. (And presumably the only reason the police stated that it because it was a threshold issue that, had it gone otherwise, there would have been an arrest.)

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#563

Post by YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #310
luckroy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like CA and IA work differently. 45 is the speed limit for that highway because it's windy. On the straighter roads, the limit is usually 50-55. However, there are still no speed zones (as you call them) for small clusters of houses.

The whole west works different I think. I mean, who in their right mind would build their house right next to the highway (without a fairly long highway) if they didn't have to? As long as you have the land, you would build it 50-100 meters back! The only time I see otherwise is if mountains or rivers are involved, or there is density (in which case it is sure to be zoned!).

There are many types of highways. You might even call these rural roads just roads, even if they share the default speed limit for the area (80 km/h here).

With very low traffic density, you might build the house closer to the road (maybe 10m off, separated with trees) for just that reason – to save land. (Not all rural houses are farms.)

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#564

Post by sliverstorm »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #484
jablan wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The likelihood of death is proportional to speed [1], and the speed is lower in the urban cores. The math is super simple, and let's stop trying to justify bad urbanistic (essentially, political) decisions blaming it on the bad fate instead. [1] http://www.copenhagenize.com/2012/11/the-85th-percentile-fol...

Speed is the most quantifiable factor in a collision. It is also very controllable. That is why it gets the focus that it does. The trouble is, it's easy to get distracted by speed as a coefficient in collision intensity, and not pay attention to what causes that collision in the first place. People often think that because speed is such an important factor that they shouldn't drive faster to help traffic flow, or ev…

Reducing speeds is a form of collision prevention, is it not? A typical car can just about stop on a dime at 15mph, and a pedestrian has more time to react.

There's a whole slew of other pedestrian-friendly street design that we could & should adopt as well, but that doesn't make speed any less of a valid approach.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#565

Post by dragonwriter »

swampangel wrote: post #124
maxhallinan wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If someone fires a gun randomly down the street, not aiming at anyone, but happens to hit someone, they'd certainly be arrested. Drive a multi-thousand-pound projectile down the street, kill someone, and it's just an "accident". That is not the correct analogy for this accident. The correct analogy is "Someone runs across a live firing range." The shooters would not be charged.

If this analogy is accurate, isn't it absurd that many/most of us live right next to a "live firing range" with no safety barriers? We know that kids are unpredictable, adults get distracted, and reducing vehicle speed reduces the chance of a collision being fatal: http://www.who.int/violence_injury_prevention/publications/r... We don't need to accept that roads are deadly places for non-drivers. We should strive to…

> If this analogy is accurate, isn't it absurd that many/most of us live right next to a "live firing range" with no safety barriers?

It's accurate from a safety perspective, but otherwise a roadway is not like a firing range.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#566

Post by sliverstorm »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #359
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…

>Reducing speed limits and designing roadways to discourage high speeds. One of these works. One of these handicapps your infrastructure's capacity, reduces safety in certain conditions and has a handful of other negative externalities. I would wager that were it not for someone following the speed limit the woman in OP's story would not have been cruising along in a line of traffic with her situational awareness dim…

I think the big picture goal of reducing speeds is much more than putting up a different sign. There's a whole movement out there pushing for denser development, reduced car-driven-development, and streets that are truly lower speed, not simply highways rebranded with different signs.

Segregating types & speeds of traffic is still good though, especially dedicated trails for pedestrian and/or bike traffic.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#567

Post by rdiddly »

jacquesm wrote: post #513
rdiddly wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's obvious you kind of think I'm right, by your use of the term "guilt" regarding your use of a car, and the use of "good" regarding riding a bike often. Not everyone is me, that's painfully obvious... but you and I agree at least. The guilt you indicate represents that which is highest and best within you - the desire to protect & preserve human life. Stop fighting it, which includes trying to turn it outward and…

The number and degree of your assumptions about me, my life and what I am or am not exposed to is so far besides the truth that I think it is ok to stop the discussion here. Much good luck to you.

It seems like you just gave me permission to stop discussing. Subtle, yet still offensive. That's a neat trick, I'll have to try that. "Hey everyone who disagrees with me! You should all definitely feel totally free to stop the discussion here."

The number of my assumptions about you is three:

1) You feel guilty about driving and good about biking. Source: your words.

2) You care about human life. That's just extrapolation from 1) and from the fact that you were interested in (at least the comments on) this article, and is moreover, charitable towards you. Take that away and I'd be assuming you're something much worse.

3) You feel conflicted when you get behind the wheel. Probably the least fair assumption of the three. No real grounds for it, other than 1) & 2) and the fact of how strenuously you defend driving (but not in a way that proclaims it's right and just, rather in a way that says I'm wrong to remind people about it).

The rest of it is about people in general, people I've witnessed talking about this in various contexts in the past. I see I used the pronoun "you" occasionally in that portion, so if that was confusing, I apologize, it's the usage of "you" that means something more like "one" or "someone."

You've also made some assumptions about me, which I don't find "ok" at all, but I let most of those go as the cartoons they are. My flaws that you want me to enumerate (which would in no way affect your own, even if it turned out I was a mass murderer or an angel) do not include driving a car, and as I said, that's relevant because that's how I know it's possible to avoid it. And it's also the source of some other flaws you're witnessing, including being rude, pissed-off and fresh-out of patience with people saying how messed up the world and the roads are, while contributing to the problem. People hate being confronted with that shit, more than anything else. I don't care, this is not your "safe space" any more than the roads are mine. Nor am I an ambassador or an advocate trying to gently coax and sell people on something. I know most of them would sooner jump off a bridge than change voluntarily, and you implied that very thing. I just want to be a pain in the butt and remind them they're doing something that benefits themselves at the expense of others, and pissing people off like me in the process who have kids and lives also.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#568

Post by AznHisoka »

rootusrootus wrote: post #539
AznHisoka wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, a lot of people including dread driving cars and try to avoid it as much as possible. My wife thinks I'm lazy because I don't want to drive to so and so, but the real reason is because I know the more I drive, the higher the chances of a life-threatening accident

Are you a nervous wreck? There are lots of things more dangerous to you than driving a car. A little less than 40,000 deaths a year sounds like a lot, but I think perhaps we are just not good at comprehending what that number means in the context of a country with more than 300,000,000 people.

what dangers are more dangerous?

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#569

Post by PhasmaFelis »

5ilv3r wrote: post #529
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 2. Don't post pictures of your kid all the time on social media. No one really cares. Sorry. Send those pictures to your parents or friends directly. For many people, social media is how you send things to parents and friends. It's more straightforward than managing an email list, and needn't be any less real a connection. I don't deny that ubiquitous social media is deforming our interactions, but I think a lot of…

Facebook is notorious for making those connections impossible when they are truly needed most. It's a marketing tool with aggressive filtering, not a family message board.

Unfortunately, it's both. Wal-Mart is a good comparison--their policies are awful and they blight the communities around them, but they provide real value to individual users. It's how they maintain their hold.

Re: The day I accidentally killed a little boy

#570

Post by jackvalentine »

When we say things like "I wish people read more widely" this is the kind of thing I imagine people should be reading.

Hopefully I'll never accidentally kill someone, but I like to think that a lifetime of reading about other people's experiences good and bad has made me less quick to judge someone as a 'bad person' and take a charitable view to trying to understand why people do things.

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