She studied the influence of MAST cells on the brain.
That’s why in less insane countries, the car is always at fault when it comes to accidents with “weaker” street/traffic participants such as bikes and pedestrians
(Such countries also have proper driver training, after this a young person would have to retake the exam probably or at least take part in “correctional lessions”, if they didn’t have their license rewoked for a long while in the first place, but oh well ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
The driver is always, always at fault because by driving a two-ton heavy machine on the road, the driver is putting every one else in danger. With great danger comes great responsibility.
I like to keep reminding drivers about this by walking in front of their cars when they’re not expecting it.
No joke, no sarcasm.
I just don’t care about getting hurt as much as I care about teaching these drivers a lesson. I don’t jump in front of cars randomly if they don’t see me, but a driver who clearly looks me in the eye when I’m clearly about to step on a crosswalk — I don’t even hesitate to step in front of them no matter what they’re driving and how hard. (*edit I tell a lie, I actually don’t do it to public transportation now that I think about it) Several times people have had to stomp their brakes and even somewhat slid sideways on an icy road.
I have been yelled at several times, but 9/10 the people realise it’s their mistake. The remaining 10% are egotistical arseholes who know they’re wrong but can’t handle it.
I do this because traumatising the driver with “oh shit I almost ran over someone” could prevent a kid from getting run over by those exact drivers.
Exactly
I’d take all the people who want car-centric infrastructure a lot more seriously if they put any effort into it.
@canihasaccount I hope all the other faculty at NC State gang up on the civil engineering department to demand changes in what and how they teach. NCDOT is a terrible, deeply anti-pedestrian state DOT that does everything it can to prevent meaningful safety improvements and the bulk of their workforce comes from NC State.
A good friend of mine from NC started “Walk Safe Monroe” he’s been advocating for traffic studies on dangerous roads and has gotten sidewalks and speed bumps installed. They won’t change unless you make them change! He is focused on his own town now but he would love it if others opened more chapters in other towns.
Encourage them to make a website so people across the country can make their own chapters per town and city too. It takes us all to make sure we lose nobody else to that.
This is such a good point. Our streets are dangerous by design. You only can have a safe experience walking in a location built before cars were the norm.
This is horrendous to hear. I feel like everyone should carry bricks at every intersection!
At the point motorists will speed up to make a point there is a societal attitude problem.
Obviously this is his fault, but given he’s only 19 this sucks for everyone - even with him getting a lighter sentence. This will stay with him his whole life. And it’s probably a combination of the area and how unfriendly it is to pedestrians, an issue with line of sight, and night now falling earlier. This is definitely the right place to post this. Even in an area around a university with heavy foot traffic there’s always some close calls, and like people said in the article, some people get behind the wheel and think they are entitled, using it to dominate a situation when it’s easier and safer to just let people walk by. Cars suck. Many drivers suck too.
The driver was charged with misdemeanor death by motor vehicle. That’s a special section of law for killing by car, and it’s far too lenient. North Carolina has laws on involuntary manslaughter they’re not charged with.
The problem with explaining away the light sentence is that we have laws to make accidental killing by car OK, but accidental killing by any other method is not. That’s not justice as it’s neither fair nor equitable.
This driver should be in jail for 1 to 3 years as laid out in North Carolina’s involuntary manslaughter code.
Who cares if he’s only 19? He just murdered someone by his own will. He needs to be locked up at a minimum
The higher charge would be some degree of manslaughter, not murder, unless you know of evidence that he planned to do this.
Involuntary manslaughter doesn’t require premeditation or planning.
I’m sure he got in his car and thought: “Today’s a good day to murder someone”. Or maybe you mean he thought: “I see someone crossing the street, let’s murder her”.
There’s no mention of ill intent. There is mention of bad lighting and bad road design. Seems like the guy is guilty of not being extra careful enough in a risky road situation, but why was there a risky road situation near a university in the first place?
When you choose to drive unsafely, you choose to drive with intent to kill.
There is a firm correlation between not wanting to murder others and driving carefully.
And while there are unfortunate accidents, the vast majority of pedestrian and cyclist deaths are caused by arseholes
Not accidents, collisions.
All automotive collisions are avoidable. In this case, it sounds like the driver was at fault. The road designers were at fault and probably politicians are also at fault.
I mean you make one method of transportation (also the deadliest) the main way of commuting with error prone humans (and occasionally vehicles), these things are going to happen.
Yeah but that’s not an excuse either. Even if your infrastructure only supports cars there are still safer vs cheaper choices. And if that Street view link is any indication, paint the damn lines.
FYI - one of my objections to self-driving cars: we never keep up the maintenance on even painting the lines. When I tried self driving, almost every time I took over was where there were no visible lines on the road
@limer @Fredthefishlord But many of those arseholes aren’t driving, they’re sitting in offices designing dangerous streets or vehicles.
The first thing investigators should do is look into the circumstances of the crash. Which seems to have been done in this case, but not satisfactorily.
There is mention of bad lighting and bad road design
The absolute right thing to do here is to fix the bad lightning immediately and the road design ASAP. Additionally, the plans need to be reviewed and anyone who signed them off should be asked why they did so.
In my vision of a just world, there isn’t a need for jail time as long as there’s a good chance at reform. The driver has a few mitigating circumstances going for him: wasn’t under influence, wasn’t speeding. Although they did fail to yield at a sign according to the article.
That being said, losing your licence for at least 4 years seems appropriate. Of course, after such a relatively long time of not driving, they should retake the test because they’ll lose their abilties since driving a car in traffic isn’t like riding a bike in a secluded area.
Another thing that should serve as an aggrevating circumstance is the car. If it was a monster truck, the person should quite obviously rot in jail regardless (which I doubt is the case here). For SUVs, lenghten the loss of licence in milder cases and do jail time for the worse ones.
If the design is found to be faulty not because the engineers were lazy or ignorant but because of a lack of funds, then a portion (say, 20%) of the county’s yearly budget should be appropriated and spent on road improvements. First at the scene, but also as a systemic overhaul elsewhere in the jurisdiction.
The 20% is on a per-grave accident (caused by a lack of funding) basis. Capped at 80% yearly, but the remainder gets pushed onto subsequent year(s) in full). That seems like a good way of keeping councils accountable and fixing damage even if they aren’t.
The solution to road deaths isn’t throwing people in jail. Sure, road “accidental” road manslaughter punsihments are lenient, but such deaths are always going to happen because tha’s what happens when you mix foot and car traffic at scale in almost any way. Especially in the way the US is doing it, although all other places have their own traffic death problems as well, so it unfortubately isn’t a solved problem.
Review, educate, fix and improve infrastracture to hopefully prevent. Jail time should be reserved for the most heinous cases (DUI, deliberate slaughter and reckless driving). Giving anyone unfortunate enough to run someone over won’t fix bad infrastructure. It also won’t get us anywhere near 0% road deaths.
I believe jail time should be used not especially sparingly, but instead that prisons should be reduced in security and allow external jobs for low level offenses. Some people really do respond to negative enforcement, and having that in a humane way allows you to sentence people for lower level offenses, creating greater deterrence while still allowing them to continue parts of their life and importantly their jobs even through the punishment.
But traffic accidents against cycles are usually due to reckless driving. A driver is driving a multi ton machine, it is their responsibility to look out and be careful. Hitting someone when you fail to do so, is murder and should be treated as such. Reckless driving is driving with intent to kill.
Importantly, enforcement rates matter even more so than the actual punishment. No matter how strong the punishment, people will freely do it if they get off Scott free, so enforcing the law and holding reckless drivers accountable even without hitting people is an important FIRST step in stopping reckless driving. That means real punishment for running stop signs and failure to use turn signals, etc. but that requires police reform.
Throwing them in jail doesn’t solve it. But it can make an example of them, and potentially reduce future bad drivers.
I’ve been doing a lot of walking around town since pandemic and it’s those rolling stops that are the most frightening. I don’t know what happened here, but. ….
Say you’re crossing a side road. Someone coming up the Main Street can’t really see you. Once they turn you’re right there. Coming to an actual stop at the red light or stop sign can make all the difference for whether they can see and avoid.
If you didn’t stop, you are responsible for an unsafe choice that killed someone. That shouldn’t be only a misdemeanor
He didn’t commit a murder because he didn’t plan to murder her. Accidents aren’t murder and not everyone is to survive the day.
Correct. Killing is allowed if you do it at random with an SUV.
Did the traffic engineer who created an intersection leading to death commit murder or manslaughter?
What about further traffic engineers who reuse this exact intersection knowing it leads to death?
If there is a better design, known hazard, there’s an argument for holding the town responsible for not fixing it
My town has been doing a great job in the last few years of focusing 🧘♀️ n the most dangerous roads and intersections, and making a real difference
To call this particular intersection engineered is a bit of a stretch. It looks more like it’s just there without have had any thought put into it at all.
Inaction is an action. Copy pasting another design without thought is an action. Not applying engeering judgement as an engineer is why civil engineers in Canada wear an iron ring to this day.
If someone died at an intersection, then it is insufficiently engineered. If someone was seriously injured at an intersection, then it is insufficiently engineered.
Collisions, no matter how frequent, should lead to no more than minor injuries.
Yeah. That’s what I was getting at.
Good argument for the town not refreshing the paint on the road contributing to the hazard
I consider them less responsible, but still responsible. Let’s call it a 65/35 split. If they have no choice but to use that design, then whoever forced them to do it.
People are responsible for their own behavior, but there are proven ways to reduce traffic speed in road design, and not using them is a deliberate choice. Maybe made for sensible reasons, but it’s still a choice known to increase the likelihood of someone dying, just like driving fast.
Holy false equivalency, Batman.
For two people way smarter on the topic than me:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/201978334-killed-by-a-traffic-engineer
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/54979228-confessions-of-a-recovering-engineer
No and no. I did not mean to say that the driver committed manslaughter. I meant that, at best, a prosecutor could go for manslaughter and not murder. However, this sounds like an accident. Shit happens.
Maybe that’s the real problem, accepting it with “shit happens “. There are many things we should be doing to prevent the majority of these senseless deaths. And it only takes holding onto the outrage to get it done.
I think that becoming aware of all of the problems of the world via the internet has really messed us up. Yes, it is bad that this kid hit this lady and she then died. Is there anything that I can do about it other than feel bad? No. So, the arising defense mechanism is, essentially, “shit happens”. This allows me to be aware of all of the horrible things without falling into a state of despair and hopelessness.
If this event was local to you and you can take action to make that area safer, definitely go for it.
Unhinged take, you clearly don’t even know what will means. It’s a tragic accident
Calling it a tragic accident pretends it was not wholly avoidable if a driver was driving safely
I feel like someone needs to make the simpsons bus meme, with the sign reading how blaming and increasing the punishment for the individuals with systemic problems isn’t going to solve the issue.
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Not a single word on whether the car was an SUV. The likelihood it was is quite high, sedans are configured to not cause death in these events.
edit: typo
It’s in the US so it’s almost obligatory some oversized “my penis really is big, I promise you!” bucket
and it was a neighborhood street, and apparently the driver was turning. Probably got pushed under by a high bumper of an SUV or truck
I almost got hit by a garbage truck yesterday at a crosswalk. The guy couldn’t see a giant orange vest with reflectors during the middle of the day, I was walking my bike to the sidewalk and the guy didn’t slow dowm
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