Safe Speed Forums

3 weeks ago a 9 year old ran out in front of my car! i was in a 40mph zone but know i was only doing 30-35mph luckily. He ran round a corner and straight into the road before he looked at me. Remembering back it was only 5-10ft before i hit him that i actually saw him. I automatically hit the brakes which caused me to swerve slightly until the car stopped. H hit passenger bumper, rolled onto bonnet an then flipped over driver side of windscreen where he then tumbled on the ground roling a few times. I immediatley got out, screamed for help and dialled 999 where i believe i was quite rude to some operaters .....the child who is 9 sat up 5-10 seconds after landing and started crying, i then breathed. Ambulance arrived 12 minutes later, his mum, dad and few other people were there. Once the child was in the ambulance the police man asked me to go to his car, hand my keys and mobile to my husband whoi arrived after i phone him (which i dont remember doing). i was breathelysed which was 0< read my rights etc and then we went ahead with a statement. Another police officer was interviewing a whitness who was in his caravan and saw the whole thing within 40 ft of his caravan. this police man then told my officer our stories collaberated. I wasnt allowed to leave the scene till he had word the childs injuries were not serious, which happened 10-15 mins later. i phoned my inurance company to tell them. Me and the mother have become close friends through this buti the police officer has not been in contact for 3 weeks and we are both awaiting closure. The mother has alot of questions to ask the police officer like why her child of 9 was not ked what happened (apparently due to age a video link ws needed), why a crash investigation team did not attend and take markings and measurements. I keep ging over the scene myself thinkking was i to blame, did i do something wrong. I saw him 5-10ft before i hit him as he ran round a corner. I stopped about 40 ft from where the impact happened, his injuries were grazes, bruising and a large gash on his face, there were no skid marks on the floor. The damamge to my car is 2 small dents at the start of the bonnet where we believe his thigh hit, a cracked number plate where we believe his knee hit, and a tiny dent further up the bonnet where i think his elbow hit. Have the police dealt with this correctly and is there anything i can do to reassure mum and me that i wsnt speeding, even though i know i wasnt. i apprecite any help.

Hi Amy, and

Having read your description of the incident, it seems to me there was little or nothing you could have done, and it was very much a case of you just having being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thankfully, the outcome was much less serious than it might have been.
Can I ask you exactly where it occurred?

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

Is whether you were speeding relevant?

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

amypeth

Thank you for sharing your story with us. It is great that you are seeking a greater understanding of what happened.
You are always best to seek proper legal advice when dealing with a legal issue. You can check with a neighbouring Police Force to check for procedures. Many solicitors can verify what should and should not have happened in detail.
I believe that I am correct in suggesting that as there are corroborating witness statements, (yours and the witness), there is no need for an investigator, as there is no 'doubt' as to what occurred.

Whilst it would help to view the location perhaps from Google maps ... we can go over what you did and didn't 'do'.
Hindsight is always good to see what you did, what you might have done and what you can learn, to try to help it never happening again, or at least try no to!

When a child isn't thinking and runs into the road you are limited as to your options.
The first is the environment, whenever and where-ever you travel you can assess and anticipate to a degree what may happen or likely to happen. You mention a caravan so I assume for sake of discussion that this is a built up area of some kind, so kids and people are highly likely. When driving trying to keep fully focused looking for any slight change that maybe the first small and only clue as to a potential hazard maybe all that you get before a real danger threatens.
Managing that risk, (potential hazards) and concentrating carefully and so judging well all the time can help us to be ready for these such incidents.
By being 'prepared and alert' helps us to react that much more quickly and of course to be travelling at a speed, so that you can stop in the distance that you know to be 'clear' (free from ALL hazards). By doing this it can help you to ensure that you always select a 'safe speed' for the conditions. Although you are comforted by the fact that you were not 'speeding' all that tells you is that you were legal, not that you were necessarily going to fast or to slow, as it were.
I can understand that this can provide you with less worry legally but making sure that you always travel at a safe speed is crucial for good and safe driving. People can die from only approx 5mph or so, so there is no assumption that can be made, that 33mph is 'dangerous' in the same way that 30mph is somehow 'safe'. Please see http://www.safespeed.org.uk/killspeed.html
It maybe that when you re-travel down this road at the same sort of time of day, that you will consider that a different speed is perhaps more appropriate. Sometimes a much slower speed is safer for short distances that present hidden dangers, or e.g. high population areas, high streets etc., etc.
As you didn't have enough time to stop in time, we can say (after the event in this case) that you may have chosen a slower speed when recognising and now re-considering all the hazard possibilities. However sometimes with the best knowledge, preparation and ability possible, some events can still happen.

Sometimes acting to make an accident less severe is your last and only option, but you have to be aware and ready.
I would recommend that you go on a skid pan, as there are techniques (avoidance braking / cadence braking) that you can do which might have been possible, and which may have helped you to avoid the child. You need to be trained for this and understand it.

Is your car fitted with ABS ? Is your car front or rear wheel drive ?
Modern cars have been carefully designed to try and ensure as much as possible that when people collide with vehicles, especially cars, they will slide, than 'collide', as this helps to reduce the more serious and fatal injuries.

I assume from what you have said, that you (perhaps) did not think about what might happen if someone appeared unexpectedly, and that you didn't consider, that you could not see all the pavements or house entrances ?
I hope that this helps a little. I hope that you are less shaken up now.

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Safe Speed for Intelligent Road Safety through proper research, experience & guidance.

Did you misread it? 30 - 35 in a 40 limit is below the posted limit.

The problem here is the child's running into the path of an oncoming vehicle - without even looking.

It is all too often a question of chance. Sometimes somebody NOT looking means they continue on their path and you are able to take evasive action, while those that realise they have made an error try and change course and become unpredictable.

I rather suspect that this child has been extremely lucky due to the shape of the vehicle, which appears to have "scooped" him up rather than simply "flattening" him at the front of the vehicle.
Perhaps the OP could fill in the details in this respect, along with a Google StreetView link.

Railings which would prevent this sort of scenario are a hindrance to long vehicles and invariably end up damaged and dangerous to pedestrians - what is needed is some other barrier to prevent easy access to the carriageway that does not hinder users - not sure what that might be though.

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Don't think I misread this.

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Regulation without education merely creates more criminals.

Given what has been said about the absence of collection of any evidence then it comes down to your assertion that you were doing 30-35mph being believed. The level of injuries sustained would seem to support this. Either the child's mother will believe you or not and you can do little about this.

What do you think would be her reaction if you said that her child should have been under better control and have been taught some road sense by 9 years of age? The truth is sometimes unpalatable. It's not just drivers who are responsible for road safety.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Hi Amy. I'm a traffic cop and a forensic collision investigator.

The normal police response to an incident such as this would be as follows;

Firstly we’d ensure the scene was safe, then we’d check for casualties. If an ambulance is required we’d ensure it was travelling – often they’re already on scene because they are the first service to be called, they then contact us. First aid would be the initial priority.

The police officer would then try to assess what has happened through balancing the first account information from witnesses with the physical evidence. If the child’s injuries were deemed by the on scene paramedics to be life threatening or if the manner of driving of the motorist was likely to have been dangerous, the officer would request an RPU (traffic) supervisor and the specialist Collision Investigation Unit attend. It would appear that neither of those conditions applied in your case. The officer has then interviewed you under caution which would be fairly standard procedure. His colleague took a statement from a key independent witness which corroborated your account.

I could say a lot about the physics of the impact but it would appear from what you say that you responded appropriately to the incident. Your reaction time and the appropriateness of your speed in the circumstances are the key factors from which any culpability would be judged. If you saw the risk, then dealt appropriately with it as soon as you perceived the danger, then your reaction was appropriate. Regarding speed, forget the speed limit, the important thing to consider is, was your speed appropriate for the circumstance. My thoughts are that if you were doing 30 to 35mph in a 40, that’s probably going to be OK in most circumstances. If the circumstances changed and there were a lot of giddy kids messing around then it probably should be lower again, the correct speed is NOT prescriptive and depends on varying hazard definitions.

The child was 9 years old and running (possibly at 3 metres [10 feet] per second) which is a running speed we often use for that age of child. It would take him 1.5 seconds to run 15 feet, a distance which could easily take him from a first 'point of perception of danger' to the front of your car. 1.5 seconds is a reasonable react and respond time, more than two seconds would give us cause for concern. If you had seen him running for a ball, or it had been obvious to you for a few seconds that he was going to blindly run out in front of you, or if your reaction was delayed for some reason, then questions would need to be asked.

From what you say, it would appear you did everything you could to avoid or mitigate the impact.
If you had been braking when you hit the child, and are accurate about the post impact stopping distance of 40 feet, I’d anticipate your impact speed was 28 to 32 mph if conditions were dry and flat. This speed has the potential to cause serious injury or worse, but the fact that the child was running will potentially have reduced the effect of the impact because he may well have had a lighter foot contact with the ground at the point of impact.

If you and the mother of the child are concerned that you haven’t heard anything, contact the officer in the case to see what is happening, and if the police still have an interest in the case. Three weeks is not a long time in terms of police paperwork, but there is absolutely no problem with making contact if you are keen to speed up the closure.

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Fixed ideas are like cramp, for instance in the foot, yet the best remedy is to step on them.

Ian

seems like your fault in this incident is minimal, but naturally (and healthily!) you want to analyse to see if you could have done better.
(if only all drivers did this on a continual basis and weren't just forced into it when something goes wrong!)

but i need to question the timeline here:
30-35mph
5-10ft between seeing the chile and impact
you imply you had time to hit the brakes & hard enough for the car to veer sideways a little (this implies max braking close to wheel lock, but no skid marks means maybe it wasnt really max braking).

if we use 0.75sec reaction time (http://www.safespeed.org.uk/background.html) even at 30mph you've gone 33ft before hitting the pedal, even if you have superhuman reactions and were covering the pedal lets say 16ft. so still not time to actual get the car to max braking before impact.

as an alternative say you had a whole 1.25seconds before impact 'normal' reaction time you get 0.75s & 33ft before hitting the brakes, you then manage half a second at 0.9g (pretty much max braking in ideal dry conditions) covering another 18ft but dropping your impact speed to 19mph.

i have no doubt its extremely hard to judge & accurately recall relative distances / timings especially under such traumatic circumstances but the 5-10ft doesn't quite match the rest of the description from what i can see.
if you wanted to get mathemetical you could go back to the scene and try and estimate the distances involved, where you saw the child, where the impact occured, where the car stopped and work back from there.

sorry i missed the 40ft ... somewhere about 30mph impact speed work out about right.
so speed before you started braking depends on what the pre impact distance / time really was.

Also worth bearing in mind that not all the child's injuries would correspond to impacts on the car. Quite often, pedestrians hit by cars also suffer injuries as a result of landing back down on the ground too. I'd be interested to know more about the car. Assuming it was an ordinary passenger car (not a large MPV or 4x4), it might be new enough to have been subject to the "Pedestrian Protection" Directive (which requires the front end to be more pedestrian-freindly than older cars).

Thankyou all for your replies. I drive a vauxhall zafira (large people carrier) which was registered in 2004 and is also an automatic. i am not very good at deciphering distances but husband was there at the scene and has told me roughly. I am 99.9% sure what speed i was doing but its just the mum who thinks the police havent done anything to try and help ease her mind. we are in close contact and regularly update each other, she says she beleives me, although she would like conformation from the police, and they did everything they should have done at a accident scene. It happened outside golden sands caravan park, shore road, cresswell. the police say shore road but google picked it up as beach road. The caravan site was on my left, i knew i was approaching as i know these roads very well. 100 ft or so before the entrance on the right hand side of the road a small section is barriered off due to cliff corrosion which took some road with it! so i had slowed down for this, its my right of way through the sectioned off road, the i started to speed up. He ran out from the passenger side, the entrance when travelling from this direction is quite hidden. Zafiras also have serious blind spots due to large window pillars. As soon as i saw him, i braked. like i said the car swerved, came to a stop and i ran out, the child was lying in the middle of the caravan entrance on the other side of the road. if you look at google map you will see the whole entrance. The area is not built up, i have driven that road 100's of tiimes and never had anything like this happen or nearly happen. my insurance crash investigator came yesterday and looked at car etc, he also said due to where it has hit on my car (about 5inches into the front of the bonnet from lights on passenger side, will measure it so i have been exact.) he said the airbags would have deployed had i hit him at over at 21mph ish. He said as i had slowed down for the barriered off bit of road, then started to speed up, then braked, i probably wasnt travelling as fast as i thought i was.Also his injuries support that, and the damage to my car. I know it wasnt my fault, but the guilt that i hurt a child is still there. I have worked with kids all my life and have 3 of my own so safeguarding them is paramount. Its the mum i suppose thats making me feel worse, she couldnt be nicer but when she talks she puts my speed up etc and keep correcting her, its like she is waiting for to tell her something different!.. thanks again for replies, i may go down and take pics etc so you can see the road from my view and take a tape measure down so i can give accurate measurements.

forgot to say, i have held a clean license for 8 years and have never been pulled over, stopped, had a speeding ticket etc. I am a vary aware driving some would say i am slightly over cautious! Have looked at another car yesterday as driving the zafira just brings back memories now. Apparently he is healing very well, almost all road rash has gone, bruising gone etc. Doctors just checking the stiches on his face for few more weeks and then he is totally discharged then i beleive that is when motor traffic pc said the case would close. Have tried to contact him, but between him being on nights and annual leave its virtually impossible lol. What i need to know now, is can i sell my car? my insurance have been out and photographed etc.

I'm afraid that I'm going to have to be blunt now because quite frankly,people like the childs mother do tend to make my blood boil.

Although it's normal to try and shift the blame for any accident from someone you know's fault, to someone you don't know, I believe she should be showing you more compassion and instead of trying to shoulder the blame more into your direction, she should be thankful to you that you weren't driving too fast to stop when you did and had the reactions to stop as you did. She should also be thankful that her son wasn't running onto a busier or faster road and hopefully, realise that this experience will have taught him a valuable lesson, at a much lower cost to him than it could have been. It's a fact that he's very unlikely to dash out onto any more roads ever again like that.

She should be directing any anger that she still shows, towards her son, for the anxiety that he has caused to all concerned.

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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.

Graball, I suspect the mother is feeling guilty and hopefully lucky too, that the consequences were not more serious.
It is easy to sit calmly and criticise but from another persons perspective it probably seems normal to try and seek answers to events which have caused such a scare.

Years ago, my cousin ran across a busy road when she was twelve, straight into the side of a passing van. As it was she had concussion and bruises and no lasting harm.
Had the van been going ever so slightly slower, she could have been struck by the front of the van, and possibly killed.
In my experience, when a trauma strikes you start to look at and consider tiny details like this!

She has no memory of the event, and cannot explain why she dashed out - but her parents were distraught for months after every time she and her brother and sister went out... as were mine!

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Time to take responsibility for our actions.. and don't be afraid of speaking out!

Just stop talking to her. She's trying to make herself feel better by shifting the guilt to you.

She's not your friend. You didn't know her before her silly son ran out into the road. Just drop it.

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Malcolm W.
The views expressed in this post are personal opinions and do not represent the views of Safespeed.

Well, to be fair, the child's mother, like the rest of us, has been subjected to 'speed kills' propaganda for years. Some of it has to stick somewhere.

The driver had the misfortune to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Had she been driving slower or faster, or had she started her journey a few seconds earlier or later, she would not have been driving past the caravan park entrance at the time the child ran out, and the collision would not have happened. Whatever speed she happened to be doing, or even might have been doing, was nothing more than purely circumstantial, and had no causal link whatsoever. A bit of simple arithmetic ought to be enough to satisfy anyone of that.

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

Perhaps if they start changing it to "stupidity kills",we might see less stupid behaviour in general and things like this , (a) wouldn't happen and (b), the driver wouldn't always be the first in line to receive the blame, when it blatently isn't their fault and (c) we wouldn't have reduced speed limits at every spot that a drunk decides to lie down and die on a busy road. (we had one near us recently, pushing a bike up the middle of the road when drunk....dead now but guess what the next step will be?)

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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.

I had a similar experience almost 30 years ago when a drunk ran out from in front of a parked Ford Transit in front of my car.

The resulting collision put him on life support for a fortnight and I believe he still walks with a limp. It was 5 months before he was able to leave hospital.

As in this case, the accident was completely the fault of the pedestrian.

I have a good understanding of how Amy must be feeling. It's very easy for folks just to say "Look, it was the other parties fault and no charges are being pressed against you so put it all behind you". People said this to me, but I still felt completely wretched about what had happened. It does take a lot of time for these facts to sink in, but eventually they do.

Ian H. Can you clarify something for me regarding this incident? Amy seems to be saying that she had to give a statement at the scene of the accident. Is this proper? The Officer who attended the incident I was involved in sat me in his car and asked me to tell him briefly what happened. So I did. He asked if I had been drinking and I told him I did not drink. He then told me that I had to give a proper statement THAT DAY, but he would not be taking one at that time as he wanted me to have time to calm down and gather my thoughts. Later that evening I went down the local station and gave the statement. Was this just the individual Officers way of dealing with such incidents, or part of a set procedure? Have things changed?

It just seems rather rough on Amy to have to give a statement with all the fall-out of the accident still going on around her.

I think it's easily forgotten that the driver is usually a "victim" too in these instances. I don't think anyone comes out of them smiling, to be honest - maybe the odd joyrider, perhaps. The driver tends to get less sympathy because they're in a tin box and are rarely physically damaged, but that doesn't mean they don't suffer too. Nothing like that has ever happened to me (or, I imagine, to the majority of drivers) and I don't mind admitting that it's through nothing other than luck / divine providence / call it what you will.

I'm pretty sceptical about the "at about 21MPH it would have set the airbag off" claim, to be honest. This was only a 9 year old child, not another car! Airbag deployment strategies vary from car to car and I'm not familiar with the Zafira, but they tend to be set off largely by the level of deceleration that the car is experiencing - and a 9 year old kid wouldn't have slowed a Zafira down much! A 2004 Zafira is unlikely to have been type approved to the "Pedestrian Protection" directive, so you might be able to replace it with a newer and smaller car and make some small improvement, but it will be just that - small. I can understand that the car now has bad memories and you might want to swap it. Maybe the best thing that anyone can do is focus on the positives. There's a kid out there would could have been much worse off but is not. I firmly believe that the best possible road safety will be achieved when ALL road users (and people responsible for those road users) accept that road safety is a SHARED responsibility. That said, I also believe that while powered transport exists, there WILL be collisions, and that's a price that society as a whole must decide whether it is prepared to pay for the benefits that the motor car brings.

I've a feeling that time will be the best healer here.