Quote:
Originally Posted by astroron
Matt this the sort of post we have come to expect from Stuart i'm afraid.
Cheers  |
Thanks for keeping an open mind Ron.
Perhaps you'd like it better if everyone was allowed to make unsubstantiated claims about others on the internet, oh wait, that's exactly what you just did!!
So, because I make the point of not jumping to conclusions on flimsy, undivulged evidence, I'm the one jumping to conclusions, your and Kunama's logic escapes me. I made no conclusions, I merely pointed out that the guilty driver may have had some extenuating circumstances which didn't mean that he was "hooning". If that upsets you, fine.
This is the dilemma facing all free thinking people when we examine road toll statistics. We have witnesses who say that the driver was speeding, they have no evidence that he was doing so, but what do you think gets written in the copper report under cause of accident? This is where the "Speed Kills" mantra has come from. If you care to examine the stats a bit more in-depth then you'll find some facts that would lead you, if you can actually manage the logic, to some conclusions that will tell you that the government is lying to us (Shock, Horror!).
Have a look at this NZ study as an example.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/ar...ectid=11283273
In it, if you can't be bothered to read it, it examine the reasons why the NZ road toll, like the one in Aus, has been dropping steadily over the last 30-odd years despite the fact that many more people use the road. You'll see that the greatest contributors to road safety have been better cars and better roads. Trying to keep people from driving whilst intoxicated and from excessive speeding come in third, lumped together. A report in SA on road deaths in 2010 showed that a lot of people involved in fatal collisions were either intoxicated or didn't have their seat belts on.
So, to re-iterate, what I objected to was the instant labelling of this bloke a hoon, it's a cop out perpetuated by the TACs of this world because the real problem is far more complex and difficult to tackle.
Action on education and better roads (rather than more roads) is the only way to tackle the problem, not slogans.
To hotspur, if you had ever been involved in a MVA, sometimes you don't think in the most logical way. I was involved in a serious accident a few years ago in outback Qld. Whilst sitting in the car waiting to be seen by the ambos a nurse who had stopped at the scene was talking to me, she noticed the smell of fuel from the vehicle I had been sitting in for about 15 minutes. When she asked me about it, I remember telling her, yeah, I smelled that a while ago. It was then that she moved me to a safer place. So sometimes all is not as it seems in the first place.
Cheers
Stuart