Trump is likely to have a meltdown when the US Fed cuts interest rates at their September meeting.
Today’s non-farm payrolls show a softening of the job market but not so bad that there’s talk of a recession . So for Harris an interest rate cut and inflation pressures easing are a help going into November .
Isn't Trump and meltdown a daily occurrence anyway
True but he’s going to go into major meltdown mode . The last thing he wants is the Fed cutting interest rates . In other US news Gavin Newsom has done Harris a huge favour by vetoing legislation in California that would have provided an open goal to the GOP .
I am very relaxed now Harris has replaced Biden, and just find Trumps meltdowns pathetic and he will lose by quite a margin in November
Please do not worry about Trump, it will be over for him soon
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Ran out of my own time. A couple of further notes.
Some PBers will disagree on aspects, but that's my take.
I think the role of deterrence in these sentences is particularly important, because we have a road culture where causing serious injury to pedestrian, cyclists, motor cyclists by careless, reckless, dangerous or negligent driving is deemed acceptable or trivial, and driving is deemed to be a human right, which it is not.
A classic case of whataboutism. As it happens I agree that Cyclists should be jailed for killing or seriously injuring someone due to their own negligence. But I am consistent in also believing this should apply to drivers who do the same thing. Your nasty little vendetta against cyclists is no excuse to let car drivers off when they break the law. Thakfully both the police and the courts apparently agree with me in this instance.
TBH for me this isn't something I worry about especially.
The previous Government, their failure to hold a promised comprehensive review of road safety for an entire decade, and their lunatic Transport Ministers with their transport policies based on beliefs determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories, and the hundreds of people who have unfortunately been killed unnecessarily on our roads in the interim are all in the past and are now sunk costs.
We now have a Government that *is* carrying out a review of road safety, and by the look of it addressing a lot of basic, long-neglected and that needs to be our focus.
I can take or leave IDS's proposal; it's about bar number 29 or 86 or something on the pareto chart of things needing to be addressed in road safety, anyway, and will have vritually zero practical effect. At root it's an irrelevance, but Knick Knack Paddywack, why not throw IDS a bone.
What I won't forgive him for are 1 - Standing Up and Parliament and lying his head off about a series of innocent people in pursuit of a political hit, and 2 - Turning this into a self-serving project where he has given cover for people who want to abuse vulnerable users of our roads.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
You don't think jail has a deterrent effect?
You don't think - when the driving instructor teaches the student they have to stop at a T junction, look carefully, and consider fast cyclists that might be hidden from view - and warned if you decide to disregard the road rules and cause an accident with a catastrophic result, leaving an entirely innocent lady with a likely brain injury, that not just their licence will be taken away, but their liberty, too - might make them more likely to stick to the road rules, and in future, reduce the prison population?
And leave fewer people with entirely avoidable brain injuries? And worse.
Given most jailed offenders reoffend no, not really. It should primarily be used to protect the public from those who intentionally committed harm and to rehabilitate them more effectively before release.
No. I don't think it would make the slightest difference to these incidents happening either as accidents like this happen all the time and people miss cyclists or motorbikes when pulling out or turning in the road even if they did an initial check just being careless as Darkage states, often when in a hurry for an appointment, to pick up the kids etc
BTW: can you remind me of your opinions on the cyclist who accidentally killed a pedestrian in Regent's Park.
They should certainly at least have got a community order or suspended sentence not walked free with no charges
Trump is likely to have a meltdown when the US Fed cuts interest rates at their September meeting.
Today’s non-farm payrolls show a softening of the job market but not so bad that there’s talk of a recession . So for Harris an interest rate cut and inflation pressures easing are a help going into November .
Isn't Trump and meltdown a daily occurrence anyway
True but he’s going to go into major meltdown mode . The last thing he wants is the Fed cutting interest rates . In other US news Gavin Newsom has done Harris a huge favour by vetoing legislation in California that would have provided an open goal to the GOP .
I am very relaxed now Harris has replaced Biden, and just find Trumps meltdowns pathetic and he will lose by quite a margin in November
Please do not worry about Trump, it will be over for him soon
It over @HYUFD - Harris will win by quite some margin
(Jeeves voice: Stephen Fry, obviously)
One certainly hopes so, Sir. But we should perhaps recollect that our friends across the Atlantic sometimes show surprisingly eccentric judgement in such matters.
Trump is likely to have a meltdown when the US Fed cuts interest rates at their September meeting.
Today’s non-farm payrolls show a softening of the job market but not so bad that there’s talk of a recession . So for Harris an interest rate cut and inflation pressures easing are a help going into November .
Isn't Trump and meltdown a daily occurrence anyway
True but he’s going to go into major meltdown mode . The last thing he wants is the Fed cutting interest rates . In other US news Gavin Newsom has done Harris a huge favour by vetoing legislation in California that would have provided an open goal to the GOP .
I am very relaxed now Harris has replaced Biden, and just find Trumps meltdowns pathetic and he will lose by quite a margin in November
Please do not worry about Trump, it will be over for him soon
I read the discussion about carbonara sauce the other day with interest
I believe that one of my first posts on here was the proper recipe
I don't care that the recipe is only eighty years old; cream is still not an acceptable ingredient
Nobody’s forcing you to use cream (which is exactly the same stuff as unsalted butter, with a bit more moisture).
The world changes and so do recipes. Anti-miscegenation rules tend to fail after a while, in food as in life.
Not true: there are very significant differences in fat concentration.
Sorry but… what sort of animal puts cream in carbonara? Why would you? It’s an egg based dish. What role would it play? Is this what we have come to?! I give up….
I read the discussion about carbonara sauce the other day with interest
I believe that one of my first posts on here was the proper recipe
I don't care that the recipe is only eighty years old; cream is still not an acceptable ingredient
Nobody’s forcing you to use cream (which is exactly the same stuff as unsalted butter, with a bit more moisture).
The world changes and so do recipes. Anti-miscegenation rules tend to fail after a while, in food as in life.
Not true: there are very significant differences in fat concentration.
Yeah and it all melts into a sauce at the end of the day. The preciosity about carbonara is so fake.
(I prefer it dry with butter but I’m not judging anyone who likes a slick of cream. After all Heinz were making it - with cream - before “it” was invented).
Trump is likely to have a meltdown when the US Fed cuts interest rates at their September meeting.
Today’s non-farm payrolls show a softening of the job market but not so bad that there’s talk of a recession . So for Harris an interest rate cut and inflation pressures easing are a help going into November .
Isn't Trump and meltdown a daily occurrence anyway
True but he’s going to go into major meltdown mode . The last thing he wants is the Fed cutting interest rates . In other US news Gavin Newsom has done Harris a huge favour by vetoing legislation in California that would have provided an open goal to the GOP .
I am very relaxed now Harris has replaced Biden, and just find Trumps meltdowns pathetic and he will lose by quite a margin in November
Please do not worry about Trump, it will be over for him soon
It over @HYUFD - Harris will win by quite some margin
(Jeeves voice: Stephen Fry, obviously)
One certainly hopes so, Sir. But we should perhaps recollect that our friends across the Atlantic sometimes show surprisingly eccentric judgement in such matters.
I think and hope Harris will win. I am also sure I thought that at this stage in the 2016 cycle, with the same amount of evidence to confirm my belief.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
Are you actually a driver because you sound like an armchair one
I do not know anything of the case being discussed, but at 80 I have been actively driving since I was 17, have not had any traffic offence convictions, fines or even parking tickets but then I do take driving seriously and certainly do not accept any driver can have a lapse of concentration whilst driving, and still expect to keep their licence
Since the new regulations, I always give cyclists a wide berth and are courteous to them as I am with pedestrians
It is true that cyclists exceeding the speed limit seems unfair, and I do think they should have insurance but all road users are entitled to use the road and respect each other
I should say I have an annual eye test and have notified the DVLA of my pacemaker, and I would urge all drivers to be conscious of their legal duty to inform the DVLA if they have sight or notifiable health issues
Good for you but I would suspect more than half of drivers have had at least one traffic offence conviction, fine or parking ticket
Our former Police and Crime Commissioner had FIVE speeding offences within a very few months when she was campaigning for the position, and immediately after she won it!
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
I read the discussion about carbonara sauce the other day with interest
I believe that one of my first posts on here was the proper recipe
I don't care that the recipe is only eighty years old; cream is still not an acceptable ingredient
Nobody’s forcing you to use cream (which is exactly the same stuff as unsalted butter, with a bit more moisture).
The world changes and so do recipes. Anti-miscegenation rules tend to fail after a while, in food as in life.
Not true: there are very significant differences in fat concentration.
Sorry but… what sort of animal puts cream in carbonara? Why would you? It’s an egg based dish. What role would it play? Is this what we have come to?! I give up….
You obviously missed the discussion a few days ago.
I read the discussion about carbonara sauce the other day with interest
I believe that one of my first posts on here was the proper recipe
I don't care that the recipe is only eighty years old; cream is still not an acceptable ingredient
Nobody’s forcing you to use cream (which is exactly the same stuff as unsalted butter, with a bit more moisture).
The world changes and so do recipes. Anti-miscegenation rules tend to fail after a while, in food as in life.
Not true: there are very significant differences in fat concentration.
Sorry but… what sort of animal puts cream in carbonara? Why would you? It’s an egg based dish. What role would it play? Is this what we have come to?! I give up….
You obviously missed the discussion a few days ago.
Trump is likely to have a meltdown when the US Fed cuts interest rates at their September meeting.
Today’s non-farm payrolls show a softening of the job market but not so bad that there’s talk of a recession . So for Harris an interest rate cut and inflation pressures easing are a help going into November .
Isn't Trump and meltdown a daily occurrence anyway
True but he’s going to go into major meltdown mode . The last thing he wants is the Fed cutting interest rates . In other US news Gavin Newsom has done Harris a huge favour by vetoing legislation in California that would have provided an open goal to the GOP .
I am very relaxed now Harris has replaced Biden, and just find Trumps meltdowns pathetic and he will lose by quite a margin in November
Please do not worry about Trump, it will be over for him soon
It over @HYUFD - Harris will win by quite some margin
I think she will win but it will be very close if she does
I don't feel I can call that one closely.
I am interested in the likely impact on the National Conservative movement here of a Trump loss. Will some people suddenly stop being sympathetic to him - but I don't even have a current list of those who still are.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
Are you actually a driver because you sound like an armchair one
I do not know anything of the case being discussed, but at 80 I have been actively driving since I was 17, have not had any traffic offence convictions, fines or even parking tickets but then I do take driving seriously and certainly do not accept any driver can have a lapse of concentration whilst driving, and still expect to keep their licence
Since the new regulations, I always give cyclists a wide berth and are courteous to them as I am with pedestrians
It is true that cyclists exceeding the speed limit seems unfair, and I do think they should have insurance but all road users are entitled to use the road and respect each other
I should say I have an annual eye test and have notified the DVLA of my pacemaker, and I would urge all drivers to be conscious of their legal duty to inform the DVLA if they have sight or notifiable health issues
Good for you but I would suspect more than half of drivers have had at least one traffic offence conviction, fine or parking ticket
Our former Police and Crime Commissioner had FIVE speeding offences within a very few months when she was campaigning for the position, and immediately after she won it!
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
I can understand anyone driving if they ‘think’ they can if, like me, they’re wailing for DVLA. to get their finger out.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
Are you actually a driver because you sound like an armchair one
I do not know anything of the case being discussed, but at 80 I have been actively driving since I was 17, have not had any traffic offence convictions, fines or even parking tickets but then I do take driving seriously and certainly do not accept any driver can have a lapse of concentration whilst driving, and still expect to keep their licence
Since the new regulations, I always give cyclists a wide berth and are courteous to them as I am with pedestrians
It is true that cyclists exceeding the speed limit seems unfair, and I do think they should have insurance but all road users are entitled to use the road and respect each other
I should say I have an annual eye test and have notified the DVLA of my pacemaker, and I would urge all drivers to be conscious of their legal duty to inform the DVLA if they have sight or notifiable health issues
Good for you but I would suspect more than half of drivers have had at least one traffic offence conviction, fine or parking ticket
Our former Police and Crime Commissioner had FIVE speeding offences within a very few months when she was campaigning for the position, and immediately after she won it!
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
Ted Kennedy killed a woman in 1969 driving while probably drunk and walked away from the scene of the incident and was re elected as Senator for Massachusetts in 1970 with 62% of the vote, so beat even your PCC!
I read the discussion about carbonara sauce the other day with interest
I believe that one of my first posts on here was the proper recipe
I don't care that the recipe is only eighty years old; cream is still not an acceptable ingredient
Nobody’s forcing you to use cream (which is exactly the same stuff as unsalted butter, with a bit more moisture).
The world changes and so do recipes. Anti-miscegenation rules tend to fail after a while, in food as in life.
Not true: there are very significant differences in fat concentration.
Sorry but… what sort of animal puts cream in carbonara? Why would you? It’s an egg based dish. What role would it play? Is this what we have come to?! I give up….
Theory, you take the pasta off the stove and add the egg which is cooked by the residual heat. Practice, it's not hot enough and you end up with a snot based dish. Reality, who cares? It's just bacon and egg for people too refined to eat fried bread.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
Are you actually a driver because you sound like an armchair one
I do not know anything of the case being discussed, but at 80 I have been actively driving since I was 17, have not had any traffic offence convictions, fines or even parking tickets but then I do take driving seriously and certainly do not accept any driver can have a lapse of concentration whilst driving, and still expect to keep their licence
Since the new regulations, I always give cyclists a wide berth and are courteous to them as I am with pedestrians
It is true that cyclists exceeding the speed limit seems unfair, and I do think they should have insurance but all road users are entitled to use the road and respect each other
I should say I have an annual eye test and have notified the DVLA of my pacemaker, and I would urge all drivers to be conscious of their legal duty to inform the DVLA if they have sight or notifiable health issues
Good for you but I would suspect more than half of drivers have had at least one traffic offence conviction, fine or parking ticket
Our former Police and Crime Commissioner had FIVE speeding offences within a very few months when she was campaigning for the position, and immediately after she won it!
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
I can understand anyone driving if they ‘think’ they can if, like me, they’re wailing for DVLA. to get their finger out.
I did a small media survey a couple of years ago, and it was surprising how many reports in local media there are of drivers only able to read a number plate at 5-10m not 20m there are.
Ashley Neil also had a harrowing video clip that strengthened my views somewhat.
A key part of this agenda is to make sure that cost-effective and safe alternatives are available so there is as little pressure as possible which could cause people to deceive the DVLA. I'm on a 3 year medical license, so I understand the pressures.
This is an interesting story on the effect of increased Council Tax on second homes in Wales.
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
Are you actually a driver because you sound like an armchair one
I do not know anything of the case being discussed, but at 80 I have been actively driving since I was 17, have not had any traffic offence convictions, fines or even parking tickets but then I do take driving seriously and certainly do not accept any driver can have a lapse of concentration whilst driving, and still expect to keep their licence
Since the new regulations, I always give cyclists a wide berth and are courteous to them as I am with pedestrians
It is true that cyclists exceeding the speed limit seems unfair, and I do think they should have insurance but all road users are entitled to use the road and respect each other
I should say I have an annual eye test and have notified the DVLA of my pacemaker, and I would urge all drivers to be conscious of their legal duty to inform the DVLA if they have sight or notifiable health issues
Good for you but I would suspect more than half of drivers have had at least one traffic offence conviction, fine or parking ticket
Our former Police and Crime Commissioner had FIVE speeding offences within a very few months when she was campaigning for the position, and immediately after she won it!
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
I can understand anyone driving if they ‘think’ they can if, like me, they’re wailing for DVLA. to get their finger out.
I did a small media survey a couple of years ago, and it was surprising how many reports in local media there are of drivers only able to read a number plate at 5-10m not 20m there are.
Ashley Neil also had a harrowing video clip that strengthened my views somewhat.
A key part of this agenda is to make sure that cost-effective and safe alternatives are available so there is as little pressure as possible which could cause people to deceive the DVLA. I'm on a 3 year medical license, so I understand the pressures.
The accepted advice in my peer group when I took the driving test 60+ years ago was walk round the cars outside the test centre before the test and get an idea of the number pl ates.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
I don't know what the term of imprisonment should be for that ^ but I think imprisonment is a morally correct outcome. You don't, Why?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
What is shown above is the type of offence that can happen to almost anyone when there is a lapse of concentration. He just didn't see the cyclist - failed to look properly, the single biggest cause of accidents as I understand it. I've had several similar near misses in my time cycling. Sending someone to prison in this situation serves no purpose,. These lapses of concentration that go on all the time, sometimes unfortunately they end up in accidents. It is basically just a hazard of having people driving cars.
Indeed and if we kept jailing people for it we would soon have to jail almost half the population if not more at one time or other
Are you actually a driver because you sound like an armchair one
I do not know anything of the case being discussed, but at 80 I have been actively driving since I was 17, have not had any traffic offence convictions, fines or even parking tickets but then I do take driving seriously and certainly do not accept any driver can have a lapse of concentration whilst driving, and still expect to keep their licence
Since the new regulations, I always give cyclists a wide berth and are courteous to them as I am with pedestrians
It is true that cyclists exceeding the speed limit seems unfair, and I do think they should have insurance but all road users are entitled to use the road and respect each other
I should say I have an annual eye test and have notified the DVLA of my pacemaker, and I would urge all drivers to be conscious of their legal duty to inform the DVLA if they have sight or notifiable health issues
Good for you but I would suspect more than half of drivers have had at least one traffic offence conviction, fine or parking ticket
Our former Police and Crime Commissioner had FIVE speeding offences within a very few months when she was campaigning for the position, and immediately after she won it!
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
I can understand anyone driving if they ‘think’ they can if, like me, they’re wailing for DVLA. to get their finger out.
I did a small media survey a couple of years ago, and it was surprising how many reports in local media there are of drivers only able to read a number plate at 5-10m not 20m there are.
Ashley Neil also had a harrowing video clip that strengthened my views somewhat.
A key part of this agenda is to make sure that cost-effective and safe alternatives are available so there is as little pressure as possible which could cause people to deceive the DVLA. I'm on a 3 year medical license, so I understand the pressures.
The accepted advice in my peer group when I took the driving test 60+ years ago was walk round the cars outside the test centre before the test and get an idea of the number pl ates.
I think mine in the 1980s brought one with him in his bag.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
The cyclist had right of way. Do you drive or cycle or e-bike or scoot or tricycle? Do you understand how the rules of the road work.
Even if a cyclist had right of way if they were going over 30mph or even over 20mph where that was the limit or driving too fast for the conditions if it was heavy rain say and hit and injured a pedestrian, they could be liable and charged with 'wanton and furious cycling'
I've just watched the video. Good grief. 100% the driver's fault. I can't see any blame attaches itself to the cyclist whatsoever. Looking at the driver's reaction, I think it a simple case of "didn't see". It happens, usually without serious consequence. But I can't see any respect in which this is in any way the cyclist's fault.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not paying attention, they were also partly to blame
As a cyclist I went in with a preconceived view that @hyufd was wrong, but on viewing the video I have sympathy for the driver. The driver was in the wrong, but at worst it was careless driving as the cyclist was hammering along and I could imagine making the same mistake as a driver. It could be argued that the cyclist was a bit reckless passing a junction at that speed.
Would you say a car driver or motorcyclist would have been in the wrong in passing a junction at that speed (thanks to MattW we know it was 19 MPH)
@Richard_Tyndall After I made my post I then saw your post about 'what if it had been a motorcyclist travelling at that speed' and I immediately had second thoughts about what I said because I thought you made a very good point and I now have my doubts.
You make a very valid point and all I can say to defend that part of my post regarding the speed of the bike is that motorcyclists and cyclists are a lot less visible and should accordingly ride a lot more defensively, and also they are a lot more vulnerable. It is a lot easier to see a car than a bike.
It doesn't take away from the point that the car driver was at fault, but a bike is much harder to see and he was travelling very fast and was very vulnerable. A car is much bigger and much safer if hit.
So I do think it makes a difference whether you are riding a bike or driving a car. That doesn't take away the responsibility of the driver to look properly, but one must have sympathy because most of us have made mistakes like this before, but have been lucky enough to get away with it.
I read the discussion about carbonara sauce the other day with interest
I believe that one of my first posts on here was the proper recipe
I don't care that the recipe is only eighty years old; cream is still not an acceptable ingredient
I agree: no cream. Lots and lots of black pepper on the eggs is good though.
For more spice, for any pasta dish, put a good amount of finely ground pepper (i.e the cheap supermarket stuff) in the water along with the salt.
I have a Peugeot pepper grinder (I believe the company has diversified into other products) which I inherited from my grandparents who used it daily. It's nice enough that it was probably a wedding present to them in 1923. A century of use has loosened up the mechanism just enough to produce the perfect medium to coarse grind.
Trump is likely to have a meltdown when the US Fed cuts interest rates at their September meeting.
Today’s non-farm payrolls show a softening of the job market but not so bad that there’s talk of a recession . So for Harris an interest rate cut and inflation pressures easing are a help going into November .
Isn't Trump and meltdown a daily occurrence anyway
True but he’s going to go into major meltdown mode . The last thing he wants is the Fed cutting interest rates . In other US news Gavin Newsom has done Harris a huge favour by vetoing legislation in California that would have provided an open goal to the GOP .
I am very relaxed now Harris has replaced Biden, and just find Trumps meltdowns pathetic and he will lose by quite a margin in November
Please do not worry about Trump, it will be over for him soon
I think it's easy forget, from our safe vantage point on P.B. , how almost as many Americans regard Trump as their best, flawed hope as regard him a danger to the Republic.
The couple I met were utterly charming, educated engineers, she Greek-American and he from New York Irish, and completely convinced.
‘Broke’ Tories slashing jobs at HQ as donations dry up, insiders say ... ... in November 2023, the Conservatives quietly but substantially increased the limit on what parties can spend on campaigning during a general election, from a little over £19m to £35m – not the actions of a party that expects to be out-gunned financially during the contest. ... The loss of the party’s largest individual donor [after shooting Diane Abbott-gate; if he said it in the post-riot zeitgeist he'd face imprisonment] was compounded by a catastrophic start to the election campaign, in which Sunak became embroiled in a row over leaving the D-Day commemorations early, while several members of his team were alleged to have placed bets using inside information on the date of the election.
These scandals, combined with the party’s poor showing in the polls, meant donations collapsed. Across the five weeks of the election campaign, Electoral Commission figures show that the Labour Party raised £5 for every £1 the Conservatives managed – totalling £9.5m to the Tories’ £1.9m. By contrast, in 2019 the Conservatives raised £19.4m in donations versus a mere £5.4m for Labour. https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/broke-tories-slashing-jobs-hq-3262303 (£££)
What donors remain are now being tapped up by the various leadership campaigns rather than CCHQ funds.
This is an interesting story on the effect of increased Council Tax on second homes in Wales.
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
Good to see him supporting restaurant and cafe owners in his constituency of Clacton...by eating in Mayfair
I'll bet that every restaurant in Clacton is shit, but I don't know for sure.
Clacton is the sort of place where, if it was in Bulgaria or Greece, it would have a local family-run restaurant with amazing food.
There's a lot of good food in England, but the difference in the distribution is interesting.
I bet there’s at least one good Indian. And probably a Thai. The saviour of many a gastronomically bereft British town
Unfashionable view but I think most Indian and Thai (as well as Chinese) restaurants are poor in this country. They wouldn't pass muster in Delhi, Bangkok or Beijing. You're better off in a gastropub or bistro kind of place where the staff are likely to have had training.
My experience in Delhi and Beijing (I’ve not been to Thailand) is that the food there - like for like - really isn’t dissimilar to what you find in Britain. I’ve had some shit stuff in both, and some very good stuff. Just like here. .
If I take Edinburgh, which is a reasonably sophisticated city, I would say there are probably two or three actually good Indian restaurants (Dishoom is one I eat at and the only restaurant my Indian colleagues will go to), seven or eight acceptable ones, the rest are poor. There are three or four acceptable but no really good Thai restaurants. The better Chinese restaurants tend to be hole in the wall places exclusively serving Chinese students. If you head out to the suburbs you will struggle to find even acceptable ethnic food. By contrast there are a good two dozen Scottish/French fine dining places of the same standard as Dishoom.
My benchmark for acceptable is what I cook every day without trying very hard. I'm looking for something more refined when I eat out.
Mother India is very good and the Tuk Tuk Indian Street food is also extremely tasty and excellent value. Tattu is possibly the best Chinese restaurant I have been to in this country. Simply superb.
Dishoon is excellent but the refusal to allow bookings is an irritant. I have gone to the door a lot more often than I have gone in.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
A car driver wouldn't do so. Why should a cyclist?
This is an interesting story on the effect of increased Council Tax on second homes in Wales.
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
A car driver wouldn't do so. Why should a cyclist?
Because they might die.
The cyclist is in the right, but that's not much consolation if dead.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
A car driver wouldn't do so. Why should a cyclist?
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
As it is a sign of a careful and cautious driver, especially if a more vulnerable user like a cyclist or motor cyclist and at best she was close to the speed limit if not over it
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Not in that situation, but sometimes when approaching a nasty crossroads on a country road SLOW signs are put up on the main road. Doesn't make it any less the main road driver's right of way but does reduce accidents.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
A car driver wouldn't do so. Why should a cyclist?
Self defense. Obligation to herself, not to the driver. This would not have happened to me as the cyclist because I am always aware of the absence of crumple zones and airbags between me and the outside world.
This is not victim blaming, just a statement of the obvious.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
Of course you can compare a per mile basis because that's a like-for-like comparison, comparing longer trips to short ones is not a like-for-like comparison.
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Because they are on a bike and don't want to die. I cycle and will always take care crossing a junction because I would rather be alive than dead but right.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Not in that situation, but sometimes when approaching a nasty crossroads on a country road SLOW signs are put up on the main road. Doesn't make it any less the main road driver's right of way but does reduce accidents.
Which would be relevant if the cyclist was going past a slow sign when this incident happened?
Where they? Or where they simply travelling with right of way at less than the speed limit, which is perfectly legitimate?
Oktoberfest has arrived in Colorado and after a morning hiking, I am lunching in the square of a mock Alpine village listening to a pretty terrible mock oompah band. This place has an interesting back story - the US 10th Mountain Division trained in these parts, and after a disastrous start to its war record, battling the Canadians in Alaska - a friendly fire incident that killed 200 - went on to fight with bravery and distinction in the Italian Appenines and Alps.
Returning to the US, many of the veterans were mountain and skiing addicts, and played leading roles in creating the US skiing industry, and two of them dreamed of creating an Alpine ski resort in Colorado. And so in 1962 this place was opened in what had been uninhabited wilderness.
So allowing their kids and grandkids to enjoy this terrible band
Good to see him supporting restaurant and cafe owners in his constituency of Clacton...by eating in Mayfair
I'll bet that every restaurant in Clacton is shit, but I don't know for sure.
Clacton is the sort of place where, if it was in Bulgaria or Greece, it would have a local family-run restaurant with amazing food.
There's a lot of good food in England, but the difference in the distribution is interesting.
I bet there’s at least one good Indian. And probably a Thai. The saviour of many a gastronomically bereft British town
Unfashionable view but I think most Indian and Thai (as well as Chinese) restaurants are poor in this country. They wouldn't pass muster in Delhi, Bangkok or Beijing. You're better off in a gastropub or bistro kind of place where the staff are likely to have had training.
My experience in Delhi and Beijing (I’ve not been to Thailand) is that the food there - like for like - really isn’t dissimilar to what you find in Britain. I’ve had some shit stuff in both, and some very good stuff. Just like here. .
If I take Edinburgh, which is a reasonably sophisticated city, I would say there are probably two or three actually good Indian restaurants (Dishoom is one I eat at and the only restaurant my Indian colleagues will go to), seven or eight acceptable ones, the rest are poor. There are three or four acceptable but no really good Thai restaurants. The better Chinese restaurants tend to be hole in the wall places exclusively serving Chinese students. If you head out to the suburbs you will struggle to find even acceptable ethnic food. By contrast there are a good two dozen Scottish/French fine dining places of the same standard as Dishoom.
My benchmark for acceptable is what I cook every day without trying very hard. I'm looking for something more refined when I eat out.
Mother India is very good and the Tuk Tuk Indian Street food is also extremely tasty and excellent value. Tattu is possibly the best Chinese restaurant I have been to in this country. Simply superb.
Dishoon is excellent but the refusal to allow bookings is an irritant. I have gone to the door a lot more often than I have gone in.
The important thing, which I didn't say, restaurants are entirely subjective. As long as you find one place you like, it doesn't matter if all the other places you don't eat at are crap.
I'm sure if I went to Clacton I would find a perfectly acceptable place to eat in.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
Of course you can compare a per mile basis because that's a like-for-like comparison, comparing longer trips to short ones is not a like-for-like comparison.
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
The death rate per mile flying to the moon is less than driving per mile so according to you it is safer. That is clearly nonsense.
You just can't compare the per mile death rate for journeys that are not comparable in distance, which you have just said and with which I agree. Bike journeys on average are much much shorter than car journeys.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
When I go to London I swap my usual watch for a £15 Casio. Why the hell would I do that when I:
a) own the watch b) have the right not to be robbed
Asinine. Also I lock my house and my car when not occupying them. Idiotic.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Not in that situation, but sometimes when approaching a nasty crossroads on a country road SLOW signs are put up on the main road. Doesn't make it any less the main road driver's right of way but does reduce accidents.
Which would be relevant if the cyclist was going past a slow sign when this incident happened?
Where they? Or where they simply travelling with right of way at less than the speed limit, which is perfectly legitimate?
Legitimate or not drivers are less likely to see cyclists or motorcyclists when pulling out of a junction than they are a car
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Because they are on a bike and don't want to die. I cycle and will always take care crossing a junction because I would rather be alive than dead but right.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Not in that situation, but sometimes when approaching a nasty crossroads on a country road SLOW signs are put up on the main road. Doesn't make it any less the main road driver's right of way but does reduce accidents.
Which would be relevant if the cyclist was going past a slow sign when this incident happened?
Where they? Or where they simply travelling with right of way at less than the speed limit, which is perfectly legitimate?
And as they take their last breath in intensive care they can say 'But I had right of way'.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Because they are on a bike and don't want to die. I cycle and will always take care crossing a junction because I would rather be alive than dead but right.
Wuss.
Although I liked, I had to also post I liked because I laughed out loud.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
Of course you can compare a per mile basis because that's a like-for-like comparison, comparing longer trips to short ones is not a like-for-like comparison.
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
The death rate per mile flying to the moon is less than driving per mile so according to you it is safer. That is clearly nonsense.
You just can't compare the per mile death rate for journeys that are not comparable in distance, which you have just said and with which I agree. Bike journeys on average are much much shorter than car journeys.
No astronauts ever died travelling to the moon, so its moot whether you compare per distance or per trip, the solution is zero death rate.
So maybe you should compare like-for-like.
Longer trips of course have a greater risk of having incidents, but per mile there is no significant difference between the risk of cycles and the risk of bikes. The reason cars on aggregate have a higher incident rate is because there are more cars on the road, travelling further, so more opportunities for incidents to happen.
Comparing total cycle incidents to total car incidents without controlling for total mileage of each is an utterly invalid comparison. It'd be like a car brand, lets say BMW, comparing total incidents involving BMWs and total incidents involving non-BMWs. Without controlling for mileage, of course BMWs would come across as safer than non-BMWs so could they legitimately say that driving a BMW is safer than everyone else?
But that would just be because there are more non-BMWs on the road than there are BMWs. Every single brand could make that dodgy comparison and then we'd just be left with every single brand being safer than everyone else which is clearly nonsense.
Control for mileage and you can get a legitimate comparison.
Bacon, mushroom and cream sauce, with some cheddar, or parmesan if you're lucky, grated in, poured over over-cooked pasta probably has a name
But it's not carbonara
Of course its carbonara if that's what you call it.
Recipes, like languages, evolve.
Arse to that
Don't abandon all tradition
That's tryhard woke
There's no such thing as tradition.
Quite right. I remember my old dad telling me that. He told me that he heard it from his own father, who got the word from my great grandfather, who in turn...
In that time I've walked just under seventeen million steps
I wonder how many people have walked more than me
Posties with longer service?
In the last two years?
The pedometer downloaded to my iPhone indicates I have managed just over 11 million steps in just over two years. Given I’m 61 and in a sedentary job I don’t think that’s too bad. Mostly achieved walking round London. I generally only take the tube if it’d take me more than half an hour to walk.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
Of course you can compare a per mile basis because that's a like-for-like comparison, comparing longer trips to short ones is not a like-for-like comparison.
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
The death rate per mile flying to the moon is less than driving per mile so according to you it is safer. That is clearly nonsense.
You just can't compare the per mile death rate for journeys that are not comparable in distance, which you have just said and with which I agree. Bike journeys on average are much much shorter than car journeys.
No astronauts ever died travelling to the moon, so its moot whether you compare per distance or per trip, the solution is zero death rate.
So maybe you should compare like-for-like.
Longer trips of course have a greater risk of having incidents, but per mile there is no significant difference between the risk of cycles and the risk of bikes. The reason cars on aggregate have a higher incident rate is because there are more cars on the road, travelling further, so more opportunities for incidents to happen.
Comparing total cycle incidents to total car incidents without controlling for total mileage of each is an utterly invalid comparison. It'd be like a car brand, lets say BMW, comparing total incidents involving BMWs and total incidents involving non-BMWs. Without controlling for mileage, of course BMWs would come across as safer than non-BMWs so could they legitimately say that driving a BMW is safer than everyone else?
But that would just be because there are more non-BMWs on the road than there are BMWs. Every single brand could make that dodgy comparison and then we'd just be left with every single brand being safer than everyone else which is clearly nonsense.
Control for mileage and you can get a legitimate comparison.
You should probably control for road type too: motorway driving is incredibly safe for pedestrians on a per mile basis, but bicycles are (understandably) not allowed there.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
The cyclist had right of way. Do you drive or cycle or e-bike or scoot or tricycle? Do you understand how the rules of the road work.
Even if a cyclist had right of way if they were going over 30mph or even over 20mph where that was the limit or driving too fast for the conditions if it was heavy rain say and hit and injured a pedestrian, they could be liable and charged with 'wanton and furious cycling'
I've just watched the video. Good grief. 100% the driver's fault. I can't see any blame attaches itself to the cyclist whatsoever. Looking at the driver's reaction, I think it a simple case of "didn't see". It happens, usually without serious consequence. But I can't see any respect in which this is in any way the cyclist's fault.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not paying attention, they were also partly to blame
As a cyclist I went in with a preconceived view that @hyufd was wrong, but on viewing the video I have sympathy for the driver. The driver was in the wrong, but at worst it was careless driving as the cyclist was hammering along and I could imagine making the same mistake as a driver. It could be argued that the cyclist was a bit reckless passing a junction at that speed.
Would you say a car driver or motorcyclist would have been in the wrong in passing a junction at that speed (thanks to MattW we know it was 19 MPH)
@Richard_Tyndall After I made my post I then saw your post about 'what if it had been a motorcyclist travelling at that speed' and I immediately had second thoughts about what I said because I thought you made a very good point and I now have my doubts.
You make a very valid point and all I can say to defend that part of my post regarding the speed of the bike is that motorcyclists and cyclists are a lot less visible and should accordingly ride a lot more defensively, and also they are a lot more vulnerable. It is a lot easier to see a car than a bike.
It doesn't take away from the point that the car driver was at fault, but a bike is much harder to see and he was travelling very fast and was very vulnerable. A car is much bigger and much safer if hit.
So I do think it makes a difference whether you are riding a bike or driving a car. That doesn't take away the responsibility of the driver to look properly, but one must have sympathy because most of us have made mistakes like this before, but have been lucky enough to get away with it.
I think there are a couple of important points in this.
One is that drivers (and sometimes pedestrians and cyclists) expect pedestrians to move at walking pace, and cyclists to move at the pace they (the driver) moved at when they were last on a cycle (eg at the age of 11), and are not good at judging the speed of a motorcyclist. We need to address that.
Second is that speed estimation skills are poor amongst average drivers anyway, and 80% think they are "above average". Otherwise why would there be such a fuss about "but I can't keep below the speed limit"?
Speed estimation is not difficult, and all new cars are required to have and the skill can be effectively addressed through initial, and continuing education *. All it needs is to judge yourself, or to count lamp posts, white lines, or parked cars at 5-6m each, to get a good enough estimate.
This is an interesting story on the effect of increased Council Tax on second homes in Wales.
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
Of course you can compare a per mile basis because that's a like-for-like comparison, comparing longer trips to short ones is not a like-for-like comparison.
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
The death rate per mile flying to the moon is less than driving per mile so according to you it is safer. That is clearly nonsense.
You just can't compare the per mile death rate for journeys that are not comparable in distance, which you have just said and with which I agree. Bike journeys on average are much much shorter than car journeys.
No astronauts ever died travelling to the moon, so its moot whether you compare per distance or per trip, the solution is zero death rate.
So maybe you should compare like-for-like.
Longer trips of course have a greater risk of having incidents, but per mile there is no significant difference between the risk of cycles and the risk of bikes. The reason cars on aggregate have a higher incident rate is because there are more cars on the road, travelling further, so more opportunities for incidents to happen.
Comparing total cycle incidents to total car incidents without controlling for total mileage of each is an utterly invalid comparison. It'd be like a car brand, lets say BMW, comparing total incidents involving BMWs and total incidents involving non-BMWs. Without controlling for mileage, of course BMWs would come across as safer than non-BMWs so could they legitimately say that driving a BMW is safer than everyone else?
But that would just be because there are more non-BMWs on the road than there are BMWs. Every single brand could make that dodgy comparison and then we'd just be left with every single brand being safer than everyone else which is clearly nonsense.
Control for mileage and you can get a legitimate comparison.
You should probably control for road type too: motorway driving is incredibly safe for pedestrians on a per mile basis, but bicycles are (understandably) not allowed there.
True and we did this last time the discussion was had. Controlling it doesn't significantly alter the data, both cars [excluding motorways] and cycles from memory had the same risk to others per mile.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Not in that situation, but sometimes when approaching a nasty crossroads on a country road SLOW signs are put up on the main road. Doesn't make it any less the main road driver's right of way but does reduce accidents.
Which would be relevant if the cyclist was going past a slow sign when this incident happened?
Where they? Or where they simply travelling with right of way at less than the speed limit, which is perfectly legitimate?
Legitimate or not drivers are less likely to see cyclists or motorcyclists when pulling out of a junction than they are a car
This is an interesting story on the effect of increased Council Tax on second homes in Wales.
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
The cyclist had right of way. Do you drive or cycle or e-bike or scoot or tricycle? Do you understand how the rules of the road work.
Even if a cyclist had right of way if they were going over 30mph or even over 20mph where that was the limit or driving too fast for the conditions if it was heavy rain say and hit and injured a pedestrian, they could be liable and charged with 'wanton and furious cycling'
I've just watched the video. Good grief. 100% the driver's fault. I can't see any blame attaches itself to the cyclist whatsoever. Looking at the driver's reaction, I think it a simple case of "didn't see". It happens, usually without serious consequence. But I can't see any respect in which this is in any way the cyclist's fault.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not paying attention, they were also partly to blame
As a cyclist I went in with a preconceived view that @hyufd was wrong, but on viewing the video I have sympathy for the driver. The driver was in the wrong, but at worst it was careless driving as the cyclist was hammering along and I could imagine making the same mistake as a driver. It could be argued that the cyclist was a bit reckless passing a junction at that speed.
Would you say a car driver or motorcyclist would have been in the wrong in passing a junction at that speed (thanks to MattW we know it was 19 MPH)
@Richard_Tyndall After I made my post I then saw your post about 'what if it had been a motorcyclist travelling at that speed' and I immediately had second thoughts about what I said because I thought you made a very good point and I now have my doubts.
You make a very valid point and all I can say to defend that part of my post regarding the speed of the bike is that motorcyclists and cyclists are a lot less visible and should accordingly ride a lot more defensively, and also they are a lot more vulnerable. It is a lot easier to see a car than a bike.
It doesn't take away from the point that the car driver was at fault, but a bike is much harder to see and he was travelling very fast and was very vulnerable. A car is much bigger and much safer if hit.
So I do think it makes a difference whether you are riding a bike or driving a car. That doesn't take away the responsibility of the driver to look properly, but one must have sympathy because most of us have made mistakes like this before, but have been lucky enough to get away with it.
I think there are a couple of important points in this.
One is that drivers (and sometimes pedestrians and cyclists) expect pedestrians to move at walking pace, and cyclists to move at the pace they (the driver) moved at when they were last on a cycle (eg at the age of 11), and are not good at judging the speed of a motorcyclist. We need to address that.
Second is that speed estimation skills are poor amongst average drivers anyway, and 80% think they are "above average". Otherwise why would there be such a fuss about "but I can't keep below the speed limit"?
Speed estimation is not difficult, and all new cars are required to have and the skill can be effectively addressed through initial, and continuing education *. All it needs is to judge yourself, or to count lamp posts, white lines, or parked cars at 5-6m each, to get a good enough estimate.
* When we get some continuing education.
When I was a motorcyclist (Yamaha RD200) I always assumed car drivers were dangerous psychopaths who were deaf and blind and trying to kill me. It's why I am still here, because a fair number are.
In that time I've walked just under seventeen million steps
I wonder how many people have walked more than me
Posties with longer service?
In the last two years?
The pedometer downloaded to my iPhone indicates I have managed just over 11 million steps in just over two years. Given I’m 61 and in a sedentary job I don’t think that’s too bad. Mostly achieved walking round London. I generally only take the tube if it’d take me more than half an hour to walk.
That's quite an impressive total, and hardly sedentary!
I've just checked my Garmin, and in the last year I've done 5,658,076 steps, with all the running and walking I do.
A million steps is roughly 500 miles (vague average, with 0.8m stride...). That means you have done 5,500 miles in two years, or about 7=8 miles a day (if my tired brain's done the maths correctly...)
I admit that before I visited the town museum here yesterday, I didn't know that the Japanese had ever invaded Alaska. But they did, occupying three of the Alaskan islands, assumed to be for use as airbases in order to bomb Alaska and western Canada.
Naturally, the North Americans didn't fancy the Blitz experience, and so the US and Canadians planned an invasion to retake the islands, landing at different points so that the defending Japanese would be surrounded. The only flaw in the plan was that in the meantime the Japanese had clearly decided the occupation/bombing plan was unfeasible and had gone home, leaving the Americans and Canadians to meet each other mid-island, with tragic consequences
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
Why the hell should anyone slow down approaching a junction if they:
a) have right of way b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
Not in that situation, but sometimes when approaching a nasty crossroads on a country road SLOW signs are put up on the main road. Doesn't make it any less the main road driver's right of way but does reduce accidents.
Which would be relevant if the cyclist was going past a slow sign when this incident happened?
Where they? Or where they simply travelling with right of way at less than the speed limit, which is perfectly legitimate?
Legitimate or not drivers are less likely to see cyclists or motorcyclists when pulling out of a junction than they are a car
Why
Because we are a lot smaller. It happens to me all the time when I am cycling and practically never when driving.
This is an interesting story on the effect of increased Council Tax on second homes in Wales.
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
In that time I've walked just under seventeen million steps
I wonder how many people have walked more than me
Posties with longer service?
In the last two years?
The pedometer downloaded to my iPhone indicates I have managed just over 11 million steps in just over two years. Given I’m 61 and in a sedentary job I don’t think that’s too bad. Mostly achieved walking round London. I generally only take the tube if it’d take me more than half an hour to walk.
That's quite an impressive total, and hardly sedentary!
I've just checked my Garmin, and in the last year I've done 5,658,076 steps, with all the running and walking I do.
A million steps is roughly 500 miles (vague average, with 0.8m stride...). That means you have done 5,500 miles in two years, or about 7=8 miles a day (if my tired brain's done the maths correctly...)
Yes, it indicates just over 5,000 miles, so my stride is not perhaps as long as that. I calculate that I’m doing around 48 miles a week on average. I like walking, and there’s always stimulation from walking around London.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Come on, the cyclist had right of way. Are you seriously claiming, that if it was the other way round - if the cyclist had come out of the side road without checking properly and got flattened by a car coming along the priority road, you blame the driver?
That said, it was impressively fast for a lady in her 70s! Speed limits don't apply to bikes, but if she was doing well over the (motorised vehicle) speed limit then I'd have some sympathy that cyclist had some fault. But if that's a 30 then it's unlikely.
That's a downhill, and she was doing ~19mph (ie not fast) as measured from the video and physical features locatable from Google Maps. There was quite a lot of interest at the time; quite a few people were surprised that the grossly neglectful driver received a very rare appropriate punishment. You get to 30mph+ at that location just by freewheeling, from comments by people who are from the area.
My view is that he probably pled the prospect of Causing Serious Injury by Dangerous Driving (in this case broken bones and a bleed on the brain) down to the same for Careless by offering a guilty plea in the hope that he would avoid prison, which is mandatory for CSIDD with a minimum of 26 weeks; that's perhaps what a lawyer would suggest, and is a standard tactic. CSIDD is more difficult to prove, due to case law.
The camera makes it look as though she was cycling uphill not downhill. It is it Brookside Avenue and Wildcroft Avenue in Coventry. This link is the driver's eye view.
A junction with clear views, and the driver's error was in not pausing when he was unsighted for 1-2 seconds by preceding vehicles, but driving straight into space he could not see to be safe before he made his decision to proceed. That in my book is "far below the standard to be expected of a competent and careful driver", and therefore Dangerous not Careless.
There was the usual concern in debates at the time to find a way ... any way ... to blame the cyclist to avoid looking the behaviour of the driver in the eye, "Going too fast", "Should have slowed down" .. Yada Yada Yada. Some demanding there was no fault and it was an "accident".
One interesting one is that an activist called Alan Myles (from Edinburgh) dubbed a car into the video instead of the cyclist, and suddenly some people thought it was a different collision, and I don't think anyone was rabbiting on about how the car should have slowed down.
Of course had it been a cyclist cycling too fast who killed or seriously injured a pedestrian they could have been done for neither death or serious injury by dangerous cycling or death or serious injury by careless cycling as no laws exist for those unlike for driving. Hence IDS' bill is so vital to ensure cyclists who kill or seriously injure are held accountable as much as drivers are
Not so, they just use old legislation from Victorian times,
It's about a factor of 50-100 difference between bad events due to cars and cycles. Mass and velocity will do that.
(And yes, if there's a gap in the law, by all means close it. Just be aware that didn't see it as that much of a priority.)
There's also a factor of 50-100 difference between mileage travelled by cycles and mileage travelled by cars, so on a per mile basis cars and cycles are roughly as dangerous as each other.
You can't compare on a per mileage basis when on average one goes a lot further than the other. A per trip is a better comparison. To see how logical that is compare safety of driving to travelling to the moon on an Apollo mission. On a per mileage basis the moon trip is much safer, but nobody in their right mind believes that to be true.
Of course you can compare a per mile basis because that's a like-for-like comparison, comparing longer trips to short ones is not a like-for-like comparison.
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
The death rate per mile flying to the moon is less than driving per mile so according to you it is safer. That is clearly nonsense.
You just can't compare the per mile death rate for journeys that are not comparable in distance, which you have just said and with which I agree. Bike journeys on average are much much shorter than car journeys.
No astronauts ever died travelling to the moon, so its moot whether you compare per distance or per trip, the solution is zero death rate.
So maybe you should compare like-for-like.
Longer trips of course have a greater risk of having incidents, but per mile there is no significant difference between the risk of cycles and the risk of bikes. The reason cars on aggregate have a higher incident rate is because there are more cars on the road, travelling further, so more opportunities for incidents to happen.
Comparing total cycle incidents to total car incidents without controlling for total mileage of each is an utterly invalid comparison. It'd be like a car brand, lets say BMW, comparing total incidents involving BMWs and total incidents involving non-BMWs. Without controlling for mileage, of course BMWs would come across as safer than non-BMWs so could they legitimately say that driving a BMW is safer than everyone else?
But that would just be because there are more non-BMWs on the road than there are BMWs. Every single brand could make that dodgy comparison and then we'd just be left with every single brand being safer than everyone else which is clearly nonsense.
Control for mileage and you can get a legitimate comparison.
You should probably control for road type too: motorway driving is incredibly safe for pedestrians on a per mile basis, but bicycles are (understandably) not allowed there.
The nature of most cycling (urban areas, densely populated, "London, Cambridge, Bristol, Edinburgh, Oxford") means that you are in close proximity to lots of pedestrians during short journeys in city centres. You would need to do a complex bit of modelling where you select only the kind of car journey that matches that profile.
It's a silly argument anyway; the laws of physics are enough.
In that time I've walked just under seventeen million steps
I wonder how many people have walked more than me
Posties with longer service?
In the last two years?
The pedometer downloaded to my iPhone indicates I have managed just over 11 million steps in just over two years. Given I’m 61 and in a sedentary job I don’t think that’s too bad. Mostly achieved walking round London. I generally only take the tube if it’d take me more than half an hour to walk.
That's quite an impressive total, and hardly sedentary!
I've just checked my Garmin, and in the last year I've done 5,658,076 steps, with all the running and walking I do.
A million steps is roughly 500 miles (vague average, with 0.8m stride...). That means you have done 5,500 miles in two years, or about 7=8 miles a day (if my tired brain's done the maths correctly...)
6,015,086
17 million (/2) is quite something, BL. If you are anything like Edinburgh posties, your calves have together more girth than your torso.
No wonder when we are jailing people for tweets made rather than giving them community orders and fines. Prison should be mainly for those who have killed with intent, killed while dangerous driving, committed violent crimes or serious sexual offences of assault or rape or stolen large amounts of property ie those we need to protect society from and who need a long period of rehabilitation before they are released.
The number of people jailed for tweets is very small and is not why the prison population is at a record high.
We are also jailing some people for careless driving who stopped at the scene, weren't drunk or on drugs or speeding and sometimes didn't kill as well. Another offence which should have a community order or suspended sentence only as the maximum not an immediate jail term
I'm interested in your logic. Surely, morally, imprisonment can't exclusively require intent? The outcome, there, ^ was catastrophic and avoidable. The road rules are there for a reason and have to be enforced, right?
If that happened to you, or a loved one, surely you would expect your society/government to exact some form of visible punishment?
BTW, credit to the family who (presumably?) allowed that video to be released.
Imprisonment should largely require intent yes or extreme gross negligence at most. The outcome there was a cyclist riding very fast was hit by a driver who failed to see them but was not drunk, had no drugs in their system, was not speeding and stopped at the scene.
If that happened to me or a loved one I would expect a community order or a suspended sentence as the maximum, prison should be confined to those who are genuinely dangerous or pose a serious threat to society as I said
Have you watched the video and read the article?
Do you think the cyclist did something wrong?
Aren't people who disregard the road rules a serious threat to society?
Yes I have watched the video and read the article and the cyclist was riding very fast clearly without looking properly as well.
The driver should also have stopped for longer and looked more closely but the cyclist was not without fault either.
So no, a driver who was not speeding very fast and not on drugs or drunk and not doing an illegal manoeuvre on a motorway say is not a serious threat to society no and should not be in prison. At most a community order and driving ban for a few years would suffice
Zero blame can be afforded to the cyclist in that collision. They were going at below the speed limit (which doesn't apply to them) and had no time to react to the late maneuver from the driver. I hope they've rinsed the driver's insurance for damages.
It's pure bigotry from you, I'm afraid. If you think that's "very fast", it looks like Epping will be getting blanket 10mph speed limits in the near future.
Oddly enough, I also agree that it should be a shorter sentence, or none at all. But it should be a much, much longer driving ban.
Wrong, blame can be apportioned to that cyclist who was clearly going very fast along the road without looking properly too and if they had hit a pedestrian crossing the road rather than a car would have caused that pedestrian serious injury.
I agree though driving ban at most not prison for the driver
Ladies & Gentlemen: car brain in action.
A cyclist follows the rules of the road to the letter yet is blamed for an crash that they could neither predict nor control caused by a car driver who utterly failed to yield the right of way as they were required to by both the rules of the road & their duty of care to other road users.
One can reasonably argue about whether a custodial sentence is appropriate in this case. Arguing that the cyclist bore any responsibility for this crash is simply car-centric, driver responsibility minimising thinking that should not stand.
Agreed. The cyclist was doing nothing wrong at all. The fault lies entirely with the car driver. And given that the cyclist suffered serious injuries including a bleed on the brain I do actually think a custodial sentence was justified. We jail people for unintentional manslaughter all the time (indeed we curently have justified calls for that to be applied to those responsible for Grenfell) and given it looks to me like the only reason the cyclist wasn't killed was because she was wearing the correct protective headgear, it seems right and proper that a similar standard should be applied here.
The cyclist was clearly cycling too fast and not looking properly, the fault was not 100% with the car driver.
Just because the cyclist suffered serious injuries does not mean a custodial sentence was justified at all. Indeed even drivers who killed someone have not gone to jail if not driving dangerously or not at fault before as jail should be based on intent and danger to the public NOT outcome.
We rarely jail people for unintentional corporate manslaughter either, normally at most it is a significant fine.
What exactly is 'too fast' and where are the rules governing that. The cyclist does not appear to have been exceeding the speed limit so where does it say that they have to travel slower than other riad users?
You seem to like making up non existent rules just becuase they suit your argument.
Even if not too fast the cyclist was clearly not looking properly enough either
1) How do you know? 2) If the cyclist had decided not to look where she was going but insteaf at the car which was about to hit her, what could she have done differently? Evasive action is almost impossible. 3) It really, really isn't the responsibility of the cyclist to avoid any road user who might try to drive into her.
She should certainly have slowed down approaching the junction rather than continue at full pelt as she did
A car driver wouldn't do so. Why should a cyclist?
A car driver should do so too
Nobody at all, car or cyclist, goes along a main road on which they have priority slowing down at all the side roads just in case some madman careers out of it and crashes into them. Yes, slow down at busy junctions like signal controlled crossroads where priority changes or is ambiguous. But the behaviour you're suggesting just doesn't happen, and nor need it.
Comments
I didn’t think that was possible
The previous Government, their failure to hold a promised comprehensive review of road safety for an entire decade, and their lunatic Transport Ministers with their transport policies based on beliefs determined by Parliament to be conspiracy theories, and the hundreds of people who have unfortunately been killed unnecessarily on our roads in the interim are all in the past and are now sunk costs.
We now have a Government that *is* carrying out a review of road safety, and by the look of it addressing a lot of basic, long-neglected and that needs to be our focus.
I can take or leave IDS's proposal; it's about bar number 29 or 86 or something on the pareto chart of things needing to be addressed in road safety, anyway, and will have vritually zero practical effect. At root it's an irrelevance, but Knick Knack Paddywack, why not throw IDS a bone.
What I won't forgive him for are 1 - Standing Up and Parliament and lying his head off about a series of innocent people in pursuit of a political hit, and 2 - Turning this into a self-serving project where he has given cover for people who want to abuse vulnerable users of our roads.
One certainly hopes so, Sir. But we should perhaps recollect that our friends across the Atlantic sometimes show surprisingly eccentric judgement in such matters.
(I prefer it dry with butter but I’m not judging anyone who likes a slick of cream. After all Heinz were making it - with cream - before “it” was invented).
@Big_G_NorthWales is more of a tartar than I am on eye tests for elderly drivers.
I think this is one where the new Govt may pick up the reforms that were being considered by the previous Govt.
They got you, they got you good.
I am interested in the likely impact on the National Conservative movement here of a Trump loss. Will some people suddenly stop being sympathetic to him - but I don't even have a current list of those who still are.
Four Yorkshiremen coincidentally being about the level of Conservative representation in that fair country.
(It isn't exactly, it's a joke, but you get the idea.)
'I can't be racist because my wife has two black eyes'.
Lovely fellah.
Chris Coghlan's maiden speech. I mentioned previously he is one to look out for.
This was a very nervous performance, but very moving. Worth a listen.
I met a very charming, educated couple on a Dodecanese island here two weeks ago, who said they were voting Trump to save America.
Ashley Neil also had a harrowing video clip that strengthened my views somewhat.
A key part of this agenda is to make sure that cost-effective and safe alternatives are available so there is as little pressure as possible which could cause people to deceive the DVLA. I'm on a 3 year medical license, so I understand the pressures.
Cats?
(Not as dramatic as the headline, as it's an increase of perhaps from 38 to 135 for sale in an area of ~3000 dwellings. And it looks to me as if some of them may be trying to manipulate conditions to avoid the increase for a year.)
Second homes for sale treble after council tax hike
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyl52jz73vo
You were right first time
You make a very valid point and all I can say to defend that part of my post regarding the speed of the bike is that motorcyclists and cyclists are a lot less visible and should accordingly ride a lot more defensively, and also they are a lot more vulnerable. It is a lot easier to see a car than a bike.
It doesn't take away from the point that the car driver was at fault, but a bike is much harder to see and he was travelling very fast and was very vulnerable. A car is much bigger and much safer if hit.
So I do think it makes a difference whether you are riding a bike or driving a car. That doesn't take away the responsibility of the driver to look properly, but one must have sympathy because most of us have made mistakes like this before, but have been lucky enough to get away with it.
The couple I met were utterly charming, educated engineers, she Greek-American and he from New York Irish, and completely convinced.
...
... in November 2023, the Conservatives quietly but substantially increased the limit on what parties can spend on campaigning during a general election, from a little over £19m to £35m – not the actions of a party that expects to be out-gunned financially during the contest.
...
The loss of the party’s largest individual donor [after shooting Diane Abbott-gate; if he said it in the post-riot zeitgeist he'd face imprisonment] was compounded by a catastrophic start to the election campaign, in which Sunak became embroiled in a row over leaving the D-Day commemorations early, while several members of his team were alleged to have placed bets using inside information on the date of the election.
These scandals, combined with the party’s poor showing in the polls, meant donations collapsed. Across the five weeks of the election campaign, Electoral Commission figures show that the Labour Party raised £5 for every £1 the Conservatives managed – totalling £9.5m to the Tories’ £1.9m. By contrast, in 2019 the Conservatives raised £19.4m in donations versus a mere £5.4m for Labour.
https://inews.co.uk/news/politics/broke-tories-slashing-jobs-hq-3262303 (£££)
What donors remain are now being tapped up by the various leadership campaigns rather than CCHQ funds.
The fat and flavour comes from the guanciale (very fatty cured ham)
https://www.conwy.gov.uk/en/Resident/Council-Tax/Council-Tax-Premium-Update.aspx
Dishoon is excellent but the refusal to allow bookings is an irritant. I have gone to the door a lot more often than I have gone in.
But it's not carbonara
Recipes, like languages, evolve.
The cyclist is in the right, but that's not much consolation if dead.
a) have right of way
b) are travelling under the speed limit.
What an asinine thing to suggest.
In that time I've walked just under seventeen million steps
I wonder how many people have walked more than me
: "Dick Cheney will be voting for Kamala Harris,” per @TexasTribune
https://x.com/AlexThomp/status/1832130500842156339
This is not victim blaming, just a statement of the obvious.
Don't abandon all tradition
That's tryhard woke
Your Apollo mission comparison is faulty since there is no alternative method to get to the moon, you can't drive there. The valid comparison is with flights and the excellent safety record of planes is made by comparing planes to automobiles and other transport on a per mile basis.
Where they? Or where they simply travelling with right of way at less than the speed limit, which is perfectly legitimate?
Returning to the US, many of the veterans were mountain and skiing addicts, and played leading roles in creating the US skiing industry, and two of them dreamed of creating an Alpine ski resort in Colorado. And so in 1962 this place was opened in what had been uninhabited wilderness.
So allowing their kids and grandkids to enjoy this terrible band
Your invented "traditions" are utterly meaningless claptrap, clinging to them is certainly a snooze.
I'm sure if I went to Clacton I would find a perfectly acceptable place to eat in.
You just can't compare the per mile death rate for journeys that are not comparable in distance, which you have just said and with which I agree. Bike journeys on average are much much shorter than car journeys.
a) own the watch
b) have the right not to be robbed
Asinine. Also I lock my house and my car when not occupying them. Idiotic.
Cream does not help
Wankers can call pasta and cream etc carbonara; I can correct them, and cook something much better
So maybe you should compare like-for-like.
Longer trips of course have a greater risk of having incidents, but per mile there is no significant difference between the risk of cycles and the risk of bikes. The reason cars on aggregate have a higher incident rate is because there are more cars on the road, travelling further, so more opportunities for incidents to happen.
Comparing total cycle incidents to total car incidents without controlling for total mileage of each is an utterly invalid comparison. It'd be like a car brand, lets say BMW, comparing total incidents involving BMWs and total incidents involving non-BMWs. Without controlling for mileage, of course BMWs would come across as safer than non-BMWs so could they legitimately say that driving a BMW is safer than everyone else?
But that would just be because there are more non-BMWs on the road than there are BMWs. Every single brand could make that dodgy comparison and then we'd just be left with every single brand being safer than everyone else which is clearly nonsense.
Control for mileage and you can get a legitimate comparison.
One is that drivers (and sometimes pedestrians and cyclists) expect pedestrians to move at walking pace, and cyclists to move at the pace they (the driver) moved at when they were last on a cycle (eg at the age of 11), and are not good at judging the speed of a motorcyclist. We need to address that.
Second is that speed estimation skills are poor amongst average drivers anyway, and 80% think they are "above average". Otherwise why would there be such a fuss about "but I can't keep below the speed limit"?
Speed estimation is not difficult, and all new cars are required to have and the skill can be effectively addressed through initial, and continuing education *. All it needs is to judge yourself, or to count lamp posts, white lines, or parked cars at 5-6m each, to get a good enough estimate.
* When we get some continuing education.
Thank god for tradition
The council tax hikes are enough
I've just checked my Garmin, and in the last year I've done 5,658,076 steps, with all the running and walking I do.
A million steps is roughly 500 miles (vague average, with 0.8m stride...). That means you have done 5,500 miles in two years, or about 7=8 miles a day (if my tired brain's done the maths correctly...)
Naturally, the North Americans didn't fancy the Blitz experience, and so the US and Canadians planned an invasion to retake the islands, landing at different points so that the defending Japanese would be surrounded. The only flaw in the plan was that in the meantime the Japanese had clearly decided the occupation/bombing plan was unfeasible and had gone home, leaving the Americans and Canadians to meet each other mid-island, with tragic consequences
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/second-homes-flood-market-after-29879662
It's a silly argument anyway; the laws of physics are enough.
You definitely didn’t read the thread a few days ago.
Carbonara was invented in 1944 for American GIs who wanted breakfast pasta.
Banging on about the traditional Carbonara recipe is the gastronomic equivalent of pronouncing bucket bouquet.
17 million (/2) is quite something, BL. If you are anything like Edinburgh posties, your calves have together more girth than your torso.
Yes, slow down at busy junctions like signal controlled crossroads where priority changes or is ambiguous. But the behaviour you're suggesting just doesn't happen, and nor need it.