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Originally Posted by ian@huth
The car driver may not be at fault but the speed that he is driving at is a contributing factor to the severity of injury caused. Does it really matter who is to blame. If the car driver was going slower there may not have even been an accident.
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I was just making the point that speed or the driver of the car are not always at fault, even if a car is speeding the speed alone does not injure or kill a pedestrian but the speed is always the blame, in fact the driver always seems to be blamed. We always get the government statistics stating how many pedestrians are seriously killed or injured each year, but as I said they do not tell the true story. ie: How many of these serious injuries or deaths were caused by drivers running people over whilst they were walking on the pavement, not that many of them I guess.
I have no argument with the facts about faster speeds killing more people, but surely that argument misses the root cause of the problem. ie: the pedestrian walking out in front of the vehicle to start with!
I would hate to be the cause of running someone over and killing them, I never drink and drive and have never had a speeding ticket in my 22 years driving. If however someone walked out in front of my car and got killed, it would not only be my own guilt/feelings that perhaps if I'd stayed at home etc it wouldn't of happened, but you also have to consider that as a driver you are the target to blame by Joe public should such a disaster happen. Summing it up, I think it's hard enough to live with that, without automatically getting the blame from Joe public.
Apart from drink driving and joy riders it's very rare to hear of people being mowed down whilst walking on the pavement.