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Path: num2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!num1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!number.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border3.nntp.dca.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!goblin1!goblin.stu.neva.ru!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID:  From: Ding Dong  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: More driver wriggling Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2011 09:33:14 +0100 References: <7c811ade-136f-4ff9-aa31-19ea91014cfb@z14g2000yqh.googlegroups.com>   Lines: 54 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Reply-To: ding@dong.invalid Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Injection-Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 08:33:16 +0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: mx04.eternal-september.org; posting-host="8psORfuBq3je/hVXnlNHEQ"; logging-data="22894"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org";	posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+Pf7iKJqaQE6gSLdmLqDvfN7lHUy3sC6Q=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; rv:5.0) Gecko/20110624 Thunderbird/5.0 In-Reply-To:  Cancel-Lock: sha1:HovQJO1hTxqY4Jz+m9BotpAraTk= Bytes: 4376 Xref: perfectly-safe.chapmancentral.co.uk uk.rec.cycling:820462

On 05/08/2011 07:43, Doug wrote: > On 4-Aug-2011, Ding Dong  wrote: > >> On 04/08/2011 17:04, Simon Mason wrote: >>> Driver who was done for driving without due care and attention, >>> represents himself in court and adopts the kitchen sink approach. >> >> You sad, sad git. *Any* opportunity to have a go at a motorist and >> you're right in there. People have more-or-less given up replying and >> trying to reason with you, haven't they? >> > Why do you want to ignore or discount the fact that drivers, mostly > motorists, kill or injure cyclists? Cyclists don't kill or injure drivers > during a collision so why should this one-sided conflict be allowed by law?

Because the usefulness of motor vehicles is correctly judged (by sane people) to massively outweigh the impact of the unfortunate collisions. Tens of millions benefit from cars every day; a couple of thousand deaths involve cars every year. (You see, most reasonable people judge being able to go where you want, when you want as "useful", rather than as "an unwelcome freedom" like you, Simon Mason, Chapman and "Brake" do.)

So the idea is to carry on using cars but to minimise the collisions that they are involved in. This effort was steadily paying off until 20 years ago, when the anti-car brigade (you know, people like you) infected the road safety debate and started inflicting speed cameras, and other anti-car measures which don't really improve safety, on us all in place of genuine road safety improvements. As a result, deaths have stopped falling the way that they were. Congratulations, car-haters.

So if you're really and truly bothered about these collisions (which I don't think you are) then you will grow up, accept the car's continuing role in society, and start campaigning for genuine road safety measures. You can either try to discourage car use (which has been shown to be futile, hasn't it?) *or* you can try to make it safer; the two aims are completely incompatible (rather than being "one and the same" as some would like us to think), and you need to decide which is more important to you. If you continue to try (in vain) to discourage car use then you must accept that until you succeed, it won't be getting any safer (in fact if anything it'll be the opposite), and you and your ilk will be responsible for that.

Considering how many journeys there are, and how often cars mingle with other cars and other road users (and the speeds at which they do it), drivers are amazingly good at staying out of trouble and preventing collisions. The vast majority of people go through their whole lives without being involved in a fatal collision, and yet we all benefit every day from road transport (even the car-haters have their goods brought on trucks, which shows how hypocritical they are). It's a shame that some people are determined to see only the negatives of motoring when there are so many positives. It's even more of a shame that such people these days have such a disproportionate and unrepresentative influence on policy (rather than being correctly treated as impractical loonies like they used to be).