Safe Speed Forums

http://menmedia.co.uk/manchesterevening ... rash_death
http://menmedia.co.uk/manchesterevening ... _on_trial_
http://menmedia.co.uk/manchesterevening ... e_a_train_
http://menmedia.co.uk/manchesterevening ... nstruction

I posted up this story when it happened. I recall uploading photos of the actual site as passed to me by my sisters who live in that area. I think Moie will know the road anyway.

Discuss. Why use the wrong vehicle to reconstruct as evidence in a court of law? How the hell does that help prevent future outrages and help us all learn from mistaked made by any party involved.

_________________
If you want to get to heaven - you have to raise a little hell!

Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

PS - to all polive officer reading this - no one is "bib bashing" here. I have posted links to a story which appeared in the Manchester press. I happen to know that road .. as do my sisters .. their spouses and their own 17 year old drivers. At the time this story appeared in the press - I posted it up. I also posted up the photos of the actual site. I should have searched and resurrected from archived pages .. but I just could not find my original topic .. perhaps because I have been reading up on some of the news I've missed since last December when we were last in UK. I am sorry if I fail to reply to folks (all of you actually ) I like and RESPECT FULLY on here .. but I leave for USA in a couple of days,. I am hoping Wildy will find a spare moment to log on to at least say HOWDY-DOO when she gets back. (William is meeting her and I gather she's going to spend night with one of my sisters or IG's sister down in the big 'burb).

We will be back . later .. much later.

Chow.. take care.. drive safely and my best wishes and kind and well intentioned thoughts to all kindred spirits who regard safe driving .. safe cycling.. safe road usage as one of life's fundamentals.

Have a beer with me and mine in mind

_________________
If you want to get to heaven - you have to raise a little hell!

Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

Now ,I know the O/T police are out and about . But on his first post on here in a long time , I hope they will forgive me in saying - WELCOME BACK ,MM- nice to hear you ,to hear you ,nice -hope all's well .

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Hi Botach


Nice to speak to you again too. Alas - I leave in a couple of days. Vrenchen has been in Euroland since July. SHe returns with me this time. I've been "jetting back and forth" as my work is not the same as hers. I am currently here on sad terms as couple of my own relatives passed away.

Tis a shame that this story appears in press - but ...that road is full of hidden junctions and the car the van hit had had to nose out to get a better view and I gather that was when it got hit. Just after the T junctiion - visible traffic lights. I guess we are asking why the hell they used a vectra an not the traansit which hit the car to reconstruct a fatal?

_________________
If you want to get to heaven - you have to raise a little hell!

Smilies are contagious
They are just like the flu
We use our smilies on YOU today
Now Good Causes are smiling too!

KEEP SMILING
It makes folk wonder just what you REALLY got up to last night!

Smily to penny.. penny to pound
safespeed prospers-smiles all round! !
But the real message? SMILE.. GO ON ! DO IT! and the world will smile with you!
Enjoy life! You only have the one bite at it.

Welcome back for a short stay MM, sorry to hear that it is in sad circumstances.

_________________
My views do not represent Safespeed but those of a driver who has driven for 39 yrs, in all conditions, at all times of the day & night on every type of road and covered well over a million miles, so knows a bit about what makes for safety on the road,what is really dangerous and needs to be observed when driving and quite frankly, the speedo is way down on my list of things to observe to negotiate Britain's roads safely, but I don't expect some fool who sits behind a desk all day to appreciate that.

welcome back MM, its a shame you cannot post from the USA

Oh for pity's sake!!!!!

"...But Judge Timothy Clayson stepped in after three days of evidence to express ‘concerns’ that a Vauxhall Vectra car was used instead of a van in a police reconstruction to determine speed.

He said a car’s tyres would have produced a different set of results to a van – adding that Pc Hannan’s vehicle had a steel prisoner cage in the back and would have been heavier and gripped the road better."

What a load of utter TOSH!

I hope the judge is being mis-quoted here. Anyone who believes that making a vehicle heavier makes it stop better is in serious need of some education! Apart from that, the prisoner cage wouldn't have been that big a percentage of the vehicle's total weight. The main difference would have been in the height of the centre of gravity - more weight transfer off the rear wheels and on to the fronts under braking. That's one reason why Transits can't stop as well as light sports cars. I'd laugh if the accident investigators had used a Vectra for the reconstruction on the strength of the stopping distance table in the Highway code, that assumes all vehicles take the same distance to stop!

The other thing was the fact that the deceased wasn't wearing a seat belt, whilst the other two (with nminor injuries) were. Some account should have been taken of that.

From MM posts elsewhere , it's possibly on mixed circumstances - some bad news- some good-lets hope the good outweighs the bad .

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

But the Judge didn't say that a heavier vehicle stops better. He said that it gripped the road better which is true - increasing weight on the driving wheels is a standard way of getting out of mud or snow.


It is difficult not to make a comparison with the way cyclists injured when not wearing helmets have been treated.

_________________
When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race. H.G. Wells
When I see a youth in a motor car I do d.c.brown

Years ago, I went for one of those fun "karting" evenings and the chap said "now remember, there's no advantage to being light or heavy, the heavy guys have more grip in the bends and for braking, while the lighter guys have more acceleration". That (whilst heartening for fat gits like me!) wasn't actually true because the extra grip goes only towards stopping (turning) the extra weight. The two pretty much cancel each other out. Aerodynamic downforce, on the other hand, has no penalty in that respect, though, of course, it comes with a heavy drag penalty.

I'd have expected the Tranny to be worse than the Astra because it's centre of gravity was higher, so the rear brakes and tyres couldn't do as much stopping as those on the Astra for any given rate of deceleration / lateral acceleration. Also (and this, in practice, might have been a bigger factor) I'd guess that the Transit tyres would be optimised more for durability than for grip. The aghast reaction from me was more due to the cursory and superficial treatment the technical aspects of an investigation had assumed rather than anything else. Courts seem to place a great deal of credence on the results of crash investigations carried out by "experts". Like every other walk of life, I'm sure some of them are very good, but from the very small amount of their work that I've seen, I've been quite surprised at how poor / incomplete some of it seems!

Unless he was being misquoted then, given the context, he very strongly implied that the heavier vehicle stops better.

_________________
Only when ideology, prejudice and dogma are set aside does the truth emerge - Kepler

Just to throw some more ideas into the hat -

Was the Transit SWB, or LWB .( the first is FWD, the second RWD) .Possibly only the likes of RAC/AA use the heavier versions with bigger engines on SWB .Whilst the older non turbo versions( FWD) have decidedly more rear grip than the newer RWD .On moist roads ,the RWD can be slightly twitchy.This is someone who spent the first part of driving in RWD cars/vans )
Secondly, Transits have a load sensitive valve on the rear brakes , which ,from more than a few thousand miles driving, I've found needs a good payload on rear to make rear brakes a good deal more effective .

So any comparison to a vectra - suggest person that thought that should attend for an eyesight test

_________________
lets bring sanity back to speed limits.
Drivers are like donkeys -they respond best to a carrot, not a stick .Road safety experts are like Asses - best kept covered up ,or sat on

Merci vilmal on Ted's behalf for all the kind words above. (He doing the suitcases ready for our trek back tomorrow - he ist so much better orgaanised at this than me ..... He do much neater packing. It has been an odd summer - we combine with hols .. I had to attend to some work stuff over here .. while he had to balance his own work with commutes over here to see me und the kittens...so we went to Silverstone.. drove our cars on nice bendy roads instead of all those straighter ones over there - und just in the last week - Ted's family experience that dreadful circle of "it happen in threes" One was just "old age" - but the other two were youngish. One of them was just too awfully reminding of our Paulie -awaiting surgery but in his case - his operation was cancelled just as they wheel him up for surgery ? ! England's NHS Sorry this should be a soapbox rant. But anyway - we each thought we had loads of time to say Hi to internet chums .... und end up saying "Hi und bye" on last minute!

I just thought I would take as aside to fill in some explanation.


Back to topic - from reading the story in Bolton press - reader comments that they used a top of range Vectra to reconstuct the incident. I think there are some photos of this road from when Ted post up the story when it first occur some pages back in this section. I drive this route this morning on way to motorway back up here - (spent night with in-law after I got back from Switzerland)

Road ist 30 mph limit. It has a sharp bend before narrowing a bit - with a dip as it head under a railway bridge., Just after this slight dip .. there ist another slight dip in the road. You then have another very slight curve which obscure the rather wide junction where the deceased's car was emerging from. Just on the other side of the junction - the main road curve again sharply before you get traffic lights. It ist thus a road which would take toppest skills at high speed. The article does not state which level this officer was skillwise but the driver investigating this would have been und he should have been reconstruct in same type of vehicle given the rahter bizarre lay-out of this road.

I thought I would try to explain what the road actually look like/feel like to drive. I cannot find Ted's original post on this story. He got family to send photos at the time. I suppost Green Lane can always be google-mapped all the same. Reader comments on the article seem to show local anger over this all the same.

_________________
Nicht ganz im Lot!
Ich setze mich immer wieder in die Nesseln! Der Mad Doc ist mein Mann! Und ich benutzte seinen PC!

UND OUR SMILEYS? Smile ... und the the world smiles with you.
Smiley guy seen when you read
Fine me for Safe Speed
(& other good causes..)

Greatest love & Greatest Achievements Require Greatest Risk
But if you lose the driving plan - don't lose the COAST lesson.
Me?
Je ne regrette rien!