weepej wrote:
Nos4r2 wrote:
and they don't care whether or not they kill you.
Its this attitude that strikes me most from some people who pilot machines.
"Well they shouldn't be there" is often said up front when behaviour that could cause death is challenged (in this case a lady on a motorway doing 20mph).
Sure, maybe they shouldn't. That's not going to mean you don't have terrible nightmares for the rest of your life if you strike them and kill or seriously injure them.
True. At times though (as I said before) there is absolutely nothing you can do-as an example I once had someone drive the wrong way up the southbound exit of the m6 at junction 14 (she was stopped 20 yards past the solid white lines at the end of the junction) and join the motorway in front of me at a crawl. It was sudden-almost as though she had floored the accelerator til she got on the motorway then taken her foot off the throttle. The only way I could avoid her was to exit the motorway on the junction across the grass at 56mph. If I hadn't been able to do that she would have been unlikely to survive and there would have been nothing I could do about it.
It's an unfortunate fact of life. No matter how hard you try, people do stupid things and sometimes it's simply not possible to avoid being involved. It doesn't make it a fitting punishment for them when they die and it doesn't stop the nightmares but until people stop doing stupid things it'll carry on happening.
Ref the woman being crushed,I agree. The sentence was shocking-specially as both pieces refer to the 'lorry' as two tonnes. It wasn't an HGV then. If we assume two tonnes was the payload it was at biggest a 7.5 tonner so likely the driver only holds a car licence-and the cab is low enough to see a cyclist! I agree with what Stormin says-it's drivers like this that give us all a bad name. Unfortunately that's what happens when untrained people are allowed out in large vehicles.