Fla. 8-Year-Old Gets Traffic Ticket For Bike Mishap (irresponsible idiot parents refuse to pay)

"Pete" wrote:

And simply "because they chose to drive" does not automatically make it the
motorists fault either.

Since you are apparently having difficulty acknowledging that cars are
inherently dangerous machines, allow me to draw an analogy:

A truck is carrying a pressurized tank full of nerve agent through
your neighborhood. (Between the chemical plant and the Nasty Warheads
Division of Infernal Weapons Inc., the truck driver decided to drop by
his auntie's house for milk and cookies.) The driver is operating the
vehicle in a careful and circumspect manner, obeying all traffic laws
and observing good driving courtesy, since he does not wish to be
enveloped in a toxic cloud of deadly gas for which there is no known
antidote.

A jackass in a hopped-up El Camino comes zooming through a
limited-visibility right turn without stopping or slowing, with a
Budweiser in one hand and a Kool in the other, loudly singing along to
"Sweet Home Alabama". Sliding through the corner, he cuts wide into
the oncoming lane and sideswipes the truck, rupturing the tank and
releasing its contents.

Which driver is at fault in the collision? The reckless El Camino
driver, of course.

Which driver is responsible for killing all your neighbors with nerve
gas? That would be the one driving around your neighborhood with all
the nerve gas, wouldn't it?

Now put the beer-swilling moron on a Big Wheel trike, and the Infernal
Weapons driver in an AMC Gremlin. (For the nerve gas, substitute a
strawberry-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.)
Who is responsible if somebody gets maimed or killed in the collision?
You say it's the guy on the Big Wheel because he got in the way of a
car. I say it's the guy in the Gremlin-- because a Big Wheel never
killed anybody, and if the other guy had been using one to go visit
his auntie, they would both have been able to ride away from a crash
with no serious harm done.

I suggest that the difference between our two conclusions comes from
your unwillingness to see a car as tantamount to any other infernal
weapon when it maims or kills.

Chalo Colina

3 Nov 2003 14:25:18 -0800,
,
(Chalo) wrote:

Higher penalties are not necessary. Two other conditions, I believe,
are necessary if we are to have a sane balance between mobility and
quality of life:

1) There must be transportation options besides private cars that
allow a person to engage in all normal employment, commerce, and
recreational activities. Such is possible in only a few older
megalopolises in this country. Those places can be identified by the
presence of significant numbers of middle-class people who do not
drive.

2) We must remove the driving privilege from people who collide with
non-drivers, on a no-fault, no-questions-asked basis. Some kid darts
out in front when you're "just driving along", you don't drive any
more. Bump a cyclist into a ditch for malicious sport, you don't
drive any more. Fall asleep at the wheel and take out somebody's
birdbath/dog/grandma, and you don't drive any more.

I'd also include any "road rage" incident in which a weapon is used.
The car itself is the weapon in over a third of the assaults arising
from traffic tantrums.

In many of these conflicts between drivers, the 'victim' party isn't
entirely blameless. Their actions often helped escalate the situation
to the point of violence. Neither active participant in this type of
incident should ever again be trusted behind the wheel.

The removal of the driver's license does not by itself contain any
judgement of "fault" per se. It's simple and easy to implement. It's
not the end of other citizenship privileges because of condition #1
above.

My only fear is that condition #2 would escalate the current,
appallingly high, incidence of 'hit-and-run' collisions even if
condition #1 was met. Fossil addicts already display no scruple when
it comes to mowing down people.
--
zk

"Chalo" wrote in message
om...
"Pete" wrote:

And simply "because they chose to drive" does not automatically make it
the
motorists fault either.

Since you are apparently having difficulty acknowledging that cars are
inherently dangerous machines, allow me to draw an analogy:

A truck is carrying a pressurized tank full of nerve agent through
your neighborhood. (Between the chemical plant and the Nasty Warheads
Division of Infernal Weapons Inc., the truck driver decided to drop by
his auntie's house for milk and cookies.) The driver is operating the
vehicle in a careful and circumspect manner, obeying all traffic laws
and observing good driving courtesy, since he does not wish to be
enveloped in a toxic cloud of deadly gas for which there is no known
antidote.

A jackass in a hopped-up El Camino comes zooming through a
limited-visibility right turn without stopping or slowing, with a
Budweiser in one hand and a Kool in the other, loudly singing along to
"Sweet Home Alabama". Sliding through the corner, he cuts wide into
the oncoming lane and sideswipes the truck, rupturing the tank and
releasing its contents.

Which driver is at fault in the collision? The reckless El Camino
driver, of course.

Which driver is responsible for killing all your neighbors with nerve
gas? That would be the one driving around your neighborhood with all
the nerve gas, wouldn't it?

Now put the beer-swilling moron on a Big Wheel trike, and the Infernal
Weapons driver in an AMC Gremlin. (For the nerve gas, substitute a
strawberry-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.)
Who is responsible if somebody gets maimed or killed in the collision?
You say it's the guy on the Big Wheel because he got in the way of a
car. I say it's the guy in the Gremlin-- because a Big Wheel never
killed anybody, and if the other guy had been using one to go visit
his auntie, they would both have been able to ride away from a crash
with no serious harm done.

I suggest that the difference between our two conclusions comes from
your unwillingness to see a car as tantamount to any other infernal
weapon when it maims or kills.

The 'car' does not kill. Assinine actions by the operator does.

Let's bring this back to earth a little bit. No nerve gas, no beer swilling.

Planet Chalo has no cars. People generally take buses to work.

5PM, dark, rainy afternoon, a person steps off the curb, directly in the
path of a bus. Assuming that Planet Chalo exists in the same universe we do,
the same alws of physics apply, and the bus cannot stop in time.

Who is 'at fault'? The bus driver? The people on the bus, for choosing that
mode of transport? Or the chucklehead that did not bother to adhere to some
common sense rules.

I *do* agree that operating a car can be dangerous. Far too many people do
not take the necessary precautions. And the current system seems to pander
to the driver. "I didn't see him" is far too common a defense.
But, sometimes....it *is* the other persons fault.

Change it to a bike rider (since no one drives anymore) and a person
stepping off the curb directly in front of the rider. Bike rider knocks him
down, the ped cracks his head, brains spill out...who is at fault?

oh yeah...the 'nerve gas truck driver' would not be doing that. Nerve gas
transport is *very* tightly controlled. Escorts, approved, restricted
routes...all that stuff.

[somewhat OT rant]
When I was in Germany, for years and years people had been saying "Get rid
of the chemical weapons!"

Eventually, the DoD and the US Army said "OK, and here's how we're gonna do
it. Truck to the railhead, then off to a ship to the incineration point on
the other side of the planet."

Large, noisy protests about "No...you can't transport that through the
countryside!"

"ummm....ok...how SHOULD we do it?"

"But you CAN'T transport it through the countryside!!!"

"You don't want it here, but we can't move it? **** it...we're gonna do it
anyway"

And so they did. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

Pete
"Because he chose to drive" is not evidence of fault. "Because he chose to
drive like an ass" is.
That seems to be our difference of opinion.

Is this a street or a playground?

Until earlier this century, that would have been an utterly nonsensical
question. Streets, at least residential streets, were for playing in,
and for walking in, and a few other things like that. Once car-worship
started, nearly all the streets were replaced by roads, which have
always been primarily transportational. But streets and roads have
funamentally different origins: a road is a space set aside for getting
from one place to another; a street is the public space between
buildings.

Peter

"Zippy the Pinhead" wrote in message
s.com...
....snip...

Chalo's point is that there should be no such things as cars. Once
you understand that, you understand why he thinks that kids, peds,
etc. have the right to run pell-mell into the street.

In Chalo's world, there would be no cars.

That's the key to making any sense at all of what he says.

That may well be what he'd like to see, but that has absolutely nothing to
do with reality. I presume that he's not a complete Luddite and would
accept the existance of, say, trains. If idiot children run pell-mell onto
train tracks and get turned into axle grease, would the engineer be at
fault? Regardless of his view of reality (incidentally, if he's that far out
of touch with reality, I'm assuming he must be a Canadian politician), he
needs to learn that everyone is responsible for his/her actions.

"frkrygowHALTSPAM" wrote in message
...
....snip...
But I _do_ think we have a structural problem in our society. We
sacrifice far too much for the convenience of people driving cars.

Suburban commercial areas are unreachable except by car. That is, in
most places, people can't safely walk across the street from K-mart to
Barnes & Noble. Most city centers have been gutted, indirectly because
of cars. Schools and libraries and even parks are out of reach of kids,
because of cars.

At the very minimum, our residential neighborhoods should be treated
differently.

Now there's an intelligent post with which I can agree. I spent some time
on a business trip in the DC area (Tyson's Corners) a few years ago. The
hotel was less than 1 mile from the office. No sidewalk or safe roadside on
which to walk, so I had to drive to the office, despite the beautiful
weather. The hotel was across the road (not a highway, a freakin' road)
from a shopping mall (restaurants, movie theatre, etc). There was not
pedestrian crosswalk and, at least when I was awake, the road was just too
busy to j-walk, so I had to drive across the road to get supper. I've
travelled a lot in the US and very few places seem interested in pedestrians
(or cyclists).

"Zoot Katz" wrote in message
...
....snip...
The infrastructure required for the efficiency of individual motorised
transportation creates a dehumanising built environment. The scale is
distorted. The "spaces" between "places" becomes greater and filled
with maniacal tyrants in killer machines. Sprawl is the direct result
of the road gang's machinations. People left the cities for the
suburbs and malls.

Neighbourhoods were leveled for highways. Towering projects were built
and people were stacked to leave enough room for cars to dominate the
ground. Those remaining were cut by the highway so died and became
slums. Drugs are a temporary escape from such conditons.

Of course, television and air-conditioning also helped kill the sense
of community by removing people from their front porches. They gave up
_their_ streets to the cars just passing through. Without "eyes" on
the street, the scum rises.

Zoot, before there were cars there was still the problem of excessive growth
in cities. Consider London before the tube. The city had grown so large
and so densely populated that there were traffic jams with horses and
people. Even had cars not appeared in quantity, roadways would have had to
been enlarged at the expense of neighborhoods. Cars are not truly the
problem. We haven't really figured out how to build a large city and still
rationally cope with the inherent traffic problems. There are some folks
who've made suggestions but I've not heard of any attempt to put their
suggestions into practice on a large enough scale to judge their efficacy.

Jeff

On 3 Nov 2003 13:32:12 -0800, (Chalo) wrote:
"Pete" wrote:
Actually, I think a closer analogy would be - a person running out into an
active shooting range without looking or checking.

Do you really think that a residential neighborhood street where
children play should be the moral equivalent of an active shooting

It's not the moral equivalent. It's the physics equivalent; and
it's the analogy equivalent that you made anyway -- a street is
where cars drive; a firing range is where guns fire.

range, where anyone standing in the "line of fire" should expect to
suffer death or injury?

Nope, residential neighborhoods shouldn't have streets. You should
start building residential neighborhoods that don't have streets.
Good luck finding people who want to live in them.

Chalo Colina
--
Rick Onanian

On 3 Nov 2003 14:25:18 -0800, (Chalo) wrote:
so, but "just" the burden of having to live in a dangerous, noisy,
paved, polluted, ugly, congested, sprawling, inconvenient urban milieu

Sounds like a dreadful place. Why do you live there?

The prisoners' dilemma is well illustrated here. There will have to
arise a class (or classes) of citizens for whom car driving is not a
perceived individual net benefit, before positive change will come to
the whole. In due time I have no doubt this will occur. How dire
circumstances must become before folks are coerced out of their cars
is unclear, though.

I doubt that it will occur; but stranger things have happened.

Chalo Colina

On Mon, 03 Nov 2003 22:51:15 GMT, "Pete" wrote:
"Chalo" wrote
Do you really think that a residential neighborhood street where
children play should be the moral equivalent of an active shooting
range, where anyone standing in the "line of fire" should expect to
suffer death or injury?

Or do you believe that people...kids...should be able to simply walk out
onto any street, and expect the laws of physics to simply not apply? That
the cars can stop instantly, and not hit them.

Actually, it appears that Chalo believes that it is OK for children
to die in car accidents, but that the drivers must then be faulted
and severely punished regardless of what actually happened.

Pete
--
Rick Onanian