Nuxx:4e301c03$0$2523$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk

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!goblin3!goblin.stu.neva.ru!nntp-feed.chiark.greenend.org.uk!ewrotcd!feeds.news.ox.ac.uk!news.ox.ac.uk!zen.net.uk!hamilton.zen.co.uk!shaftesbury.zen.co.uk.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <4e301c03$0$2523$da0feed9@news.zen.co.uk> From: Nuxx Bar  Newsgroups: uk.rec.cycling Subject: Re: Another driver who should not have been there. Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 15:09:07 +0100 References: <16-dnalKUqOuQLLTnZ2dnUVZ7r2dnZ2d@eclipse.net.uk> <99a6kvFefhU1@mid.individual.net> Lines: 69 User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.7; en-US; rv:1.9.2.18) Gecko/20110616 Thunderbird/3.1.11 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <99a6kvFefhU1@mid.individual.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Organization: Zen Internet NNTP-Posting-Host: c680b712.news.zen.co.uk X-Trace: DXC=9Fo5i?9oPWn]RGn>>0bnok4Z\OSV:fEn On 27/07/2011 10:41, Simon Mason wrote: > >> "A woman has admitted hitting and killing a cyclist while driving >> without a >> licence. > >> Sandra Humphreys, 43, struck promising medical researcher John Allen >> as he >> was riding to pick up books from a library. > >> She could now face jail after pleading guilty at Salford magistrates' >> court >> to causing death while driving without a licence and causing death while >> driving without insurance." > >> http://menmedia.co.uk/manchestereveningnews/news/s/1453760_driver-admits-hitting-and-killing-cyclist-while-driving-without-licence-in-eccles >> > > IIRC, this (welcome) change to the law was brought in partly as a > reaction to an outrageous case where a failed bogus asylum seeker, > driving a car without a licence, insurance or any of the other legal > niceties, ran down and killed a small boy in a Sussex coastal town some > years ago. > > There was no available evidence that the driver had committed an offence > in connection with the actual incident, but it was clear to anyone > approaching the case with an open mind that in several different senses, > that driver should not have been in that place, in that car, at that > time, on that date, and that therefore, in a real sense, he had caused > the tragedy by disregarding all the rules. Had he obeyed the rules - all > of them - the boy would still be alive. > > It comes too late to achieve justice for the dead child, but at least > the new law is having some sort of effect.

Hmm...I didn't know about that, and while I can see where you're coming from, I wonder if the whole approach of "You shouldn't have been there and therefore you're going to be punished even though we can't prove that the actual collision was your fault" is the right one.

I can see how it's attractive in the case you mention above (where, let's face it, it's pretty likely that the driver had actually committed an offence at the time anyway). But what of a generally law-abiding person who makes a genuine mistake by forgetting to renew their insurance, and then, a few days later, has a drunk pedestrian running out in front of them and being killed in the resulting, inevitable collision? They should certainly be punished for driving without insurance, but jail seems a bit harsh, doesn't it?

Unfortunately I can see the whole "shouldn't have been there" principle being taken to extremes by the wrong sorts. It means that "they" will not only seek to make it more and more difficult to drive at all by imposing all manner of crazy limits on emissions, amount of sleep that one has had, how one's steering wheel is adjusted compared to the length of one's arms, and pretty much anything else that they can think of, but when those crazy and deliberately draconian limits are trivially infringed in some way and then something awful happens to occur which wasn't the driver's fault, "they" will take great glee in seizing the opportunity to throw the book at the driver as a result.

Yes, I am forever jumpy about what sneaky, spiteful things the car-haters might do next given half the chance. Given the last 15-20 years, do you blame me? As it is, I would already expect a dreadful, screeching, sanctimonious, staged fuss to be made if someone happened to be driving at 31mph in a former NSL (now 30mph) when a fatal collision occurred which was in no way their fault (and which they couldn't have avoided even by going at 30mph). After all, they "wouldn't have been there" (at that point in the road) if they'd been driving slower....