Category - General

While I was checking links for that story about the learner who accidentally killed her mother, I came across this one from February (which I somehow missed at the time).

A father was being given a driving lesson by his wife, and they had their 4 year old daughter in the back. His satnav – an old one – told him to take a right turn across a 60mph road. Their car was t-boned by a car coming the other way and the 4-year old girl was killed.

The road signs clearly and copiously say “NO RIGHT TURN”, but older satnavs don’t contain the correct information.

Obviously, a very tragic story. The inquest decided that there was no point pressing charges, even though the driver was clearly and definitely in the wrong – a perfectly sensible decision.

However, you can’t help but think about the issue of blame and responsibility (let’s imagine no one was killed and those involved were other people, just to remove the emotion here). After all, at least one person in the car was an allegedly qualified driver, and ignoring road signs is a major hazard these days for the rest of us. It couldn’t have been much of a driving lesson in terms of quality if this sort of thing was the outcome, or if they were using a satnav in the first place.

I can hear the pedants out there already, screaming: “But teaching people to use a satnav is important”. Yes, but that is almost certainly not what was happening here. If it was, the whole situation becomes ten times more serious because of the obvious ignoring of road signs involved.

Around this way, there is a NO RIGHT TURN junction on the A60 into Ruddington. It is on a blind bend, there are double white lines and a hatched region. There are appropriate signs. The speed limit is 40mph. And yet there are certain people who interpret NO RIGHT TURN as only applying to non-residents or those under the age of 60 – a handful of them use it regularly (along with a smattering of white van men who have added the inability to read road signs with pictures to their overflowing toolbox of poor literacy).

I’m always surprised at how tragedies involving children usually don’t delve into what is likely to be the usual behaviour of those involved. Like routinely taking such illegal or dangerous routes.

Maybe the authorities ought to consider that if you don’t penalise people for breaking the rules (and the law) more and more of them start to assume it is OK to do it. Not prosecuting someone for the accidental death of their own offspring is one thing, but banning them from driving due to clearly dangerous behaviour likely to impact others is another matter entirely. After all, you can’t bring a deceased child back – but you CAN do something about not adding anyone else’s to the list!

This snip in STV reports that an Austrian man has been allowed to wear a pasta strainer on his head on his driver’s licence photo.

Under the mistaken belief that he has a sense of humour, I would guess, Niko Alm said he must wear the utensil for religious reasons. He claims to be a member of the…

…Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, whose followers call themselves ‘Pastafarians’…

The Austrian authorities have taken 3 years to decide he can do this. Apparently, they asked for him to be assessed by a doctor to make sure he was mentally fit to drive.

I think the doctor should also have been asked to assess the authorities.

Incidentally, Alm is an atheist. In other words, he doesn’t have a religion – he’s just a base-level shit-stirrer.

(I won’t file this under “funny”. Alm isn’t. He’s just an idiot.)

The Green Car Website reckons that a flying car approved for use in the USA could soon be approved for use in Europe.

It’s called the Terrafugia, and can do 35mpg on the road at up to 65mph. It’s a two-seater and can fly at 115mph, whereupon it uses 5 gallons of fuel per hour!

In the UK, it would cost £150,000 – and already you can pre-order by paying a $10,000 deposit.

The article explains that Terrafugia is Latin for “escape from land” – reflecting a desire for cars which could escape from the congested roads and soar above the traffic.

What it doesn’t say is that it is also a reflection on how out of touch with reality some people really are!

Apparently (well, obviously), you will need a drivers license AND a pilot’s licence. But anyone who is stupid enough to think it will solve any problems in the UK, with overhead cables and trees, and other air traffic, shouldn’t be let outside alone – nevermind about have driver’s and pilot’s licences!

Precisely how (and where) you would attain take-off velocity anywhere other than at an airport is currently not being considered.

Its wingspan of just under 30 feet also raises questions. You’d need one of the wider stretches of the M25 to even think about launching it – and we all know what the M25 is like in terms of getting up to 3rd gear, let alone take-off velocity.

One of my pupils raised a valid point. He said it’s bad enough with crashes in two dimensions, without adding a third. Of course, that would also raise issues for innocent road users already adversely affected by lunatics on the road coming at them from the left and the right. You wouldn’t want to add above to all that, would you?

A nasty story in the BBC News. Giles Furnival is an epileptic who had not informed the DVLA of his illness. He was suffering several fits a month, yet somehow decided that suddenly being inside a car which didn’t have a driver (when a fit came) and was going at anything up to 70mph (legally) wasn’t a risk to himself or anyone else.

In September last year, he was travelling “at speed” on the M25 when he had an epileptic fit. It appears he veered on to the hard shoulder, then veered back and hit the car being driven by a male and his girlfriend. The woman, Laura Williams, died.

Furnival was jailed for 3½ years, banned from driving for five, and instructed to take an extended test (fortunately, the law on epilepsy effectively means he won’t be able to drive for much longer if he keeps having fits).

But he should have been put away for a lot longer and banned for life. Laura Williams won’t get a second chance, but this evil specimen has.

The law associated with epilepsy is rather complicated in many respects. However, it is extremely simple in one main area: if you are having frequent fits then you are not fit to drive and cannot do so. You need to have gone 12 months without a seizure before you can even be considered fit to think about driving again.

A very old post.

I said a couple of posts ago that we could do with people like the Irish Judge who refused to overturn a test fail decision. Then, I came across this story in The Northern Echo.

Sandra Summers, 47, missed her slip road on the A66 in Teesdale, was driving on grass, and hit a lorry. She carried on driving from the scene of the accident on the wrong side of the road for about a mile before two lorries helped stop her. For anyone who hasn’t been there, the A66 is one of the most dangerous roads (and most likely to be closed due to an accident) in the country.

She was found to have FOUR TIMES the legal limit of alcohol in her.

There was the usual type of excuse (a family bereavement), entirely out of character, extremely sorry, doesn’t usually drink except on holiday… blah-blah-blah.

And guess what the sentence was? Suspended 12-week jail sentence and a 28-day 9am-6pm curfew. Oh, and a 3-year ban.

So, not a lot, really.

I agree with the comments being left at the foot of the story. She should have been fined, locked up, and banned from driving permanently.

The British legal system is a joke.