I had to work on a few TAC client reports a few years back. The descriptions of children’s bodies after being hit by a car will haunt me to my dying day. My heart breaks for everyone involved.
What an awful event. It’ll kill tourism for a good while, and they’ll have to make some changes like the bollards near the green area and pub and Anzac memorial.
Drivers need to be held accountable and there needs to be infrastructure in place so that individuals that cannot/ refuse to be held accountable have alternate transportation options.
If you crash your BMW (with dozens of driver assistance features) into a Pub, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle. If you cannot share roads with other road users without getting angry, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle. If you feel entitled to drive a vehicle on the roads, but believe that motorcyclists, trucks, cyclists and pedestrians should not receive those same entitlement, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle. If your attention span is so short that you cannot drive a vehicle without getting distracted by a handheld device, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle.
Shit now I can’t get home because I live in a rural area and have to drive to the train station. It would be unreasonable to cycle that distance and unprofitable to run buses often enough to be useful
Unfortunately, since these Alignments were abandoned by disuse, much of the land has been reclaimed by farmers and developers using colonial-era squatters rights laws. There would need to be extensive Eminent Domain claims raised to reestablish the type of coverage we had before Private vehicles became ubiquitous.
In the short term, it would be time to either relocate to somewhere more practical, or change your lifestyle.
Because that’s something easily doable in today’s economy.
I’ve got no problem with cars being mostly removed from our cities and it’s slowly happening, but the utility of a car cannot be overlooked for non-repetitive and unplanned travel for those of us who don’t like the city
Driving a car creates a higher risk of killing people than anything else most people do in their lives. Just look at the road toll. Don’t kid yourself, we’re definitely talking about a trade-off between convenience and risk to people’s lives.
Yes and the path of least resistance to minimise that trade off is to make roads and cars safer with separated footpaths and bike ways. Car-restricted and Bike-restricted roads should be introduced. Banning cars and trucks outright creates new problems
How are we supposed to move the large amounts of rock to build roads (because you still need them for bikes) and the housing that is required for everyone to move to the city as everyone seems to want me to do here
How would you move any more than 200kg with one of those? At such weight you also need pretty good braking - then you’ve got similar problems to trucks. Why not remove blind spots on electric trucks and call it a day?
It’s unreasonable to live there then. Your choice relies on the rest of the world paying the price of unnecessary car trips and the infrastructure for it. And not just now but people in the future will bear the consequences of your decision to live in a place that requires that.
he was sober and apparently unconscious? afaik he hasn’t been interviewed yet while he gets medical treatment.
I mean if he did it on purpose, sure, but dude you have zero idea - it is entirely possible this is a medical event he had no control over, and he now has to live with being the driver in this awful situation.
can’t you just care about the people affected without immediately wanting some completely uninformed revenge?
you want to jail everyone who drives an SUV for life?
i mean i fucking hate SUVs and melbourne is absolutely filthy with them - i absolutely think they should have a tax penalty to discourage anyone living there from owning them needlessly, but still - if this is some older farmer who had an unexpected minor stroke and has to wake up to the news he’s killed five people, i’m not going to be standing in the fucking hospital berating him about his choice of car and trying to make him feel like a murderer. that’s absolutely fucking awful.
have some opinions on sensible car regulation, sure, but this is gross. wait until you know what happened before calling for blood for owning a type of car or some shit.
I think if you choose to do something that puts people at a higher risk than necessary, you should be responsible for the consequences.
If you drink drive and kill someone, you can’t say it was an accident. If you’re doing burnouts in a crowded street and kill someone, you can’t say you didn’t mean it. Same with speeding. Driving a death machine puts us all at a heightened risk, and when things go wrong, there should be consequences.
The people who died in Daylesford definitely had consequences of this drivers choice. Why shouldn’t the driver have consequences?
agree completely. that’s fucked. I accept it may not have been malicious but it’s crazy irresponsible.
but that detail came out a day after the guy baying for his blood above, my point was if you have no idea what actually happened, focus on having compassion for people affected, not immediately getting a pitchfork and yelling for “justice”.
that kind of justice… well, it usually isn’t justice.
I can’t find anything in the article about his state of consciousness.
Only;
Detectives had not been able to interview the 66-year-old driver from Mount Macedon as he was being treated in hospital for shock and minor injuries
And
He said the driver had been breath-tested and had no alcohol in his system.
We don’t know whether he was disabled due to a medical incident, whether he maliciously targeted the family, whether he was distracted driving, whether the vehicle malfunction or exactly why he crashed.
The thing is, if the X5 was in a roadworthy condition, the driver assistance systems should have been able to either prevent the accident outright or at least mitigate the damage caused by a runaway vehicle.
My dad was diabetic and didn’t look after himself. When he started having regular hypoglycaemic episodes, we would discourage him from driving anywhere and made him upgrade to a smaller vehicle with better safety systems.
He was an entitled baby boomer who didn’t respond well to his Silent Generation Wife and Gen X and Gen Y kids telling him what to do, but he was able to do much less damage to himself and others in a TS Astra than in a big HiLux CrewCab, especially if we hid the keys on him.
Dad never wanted to have a hypo. It was just because he was out there doing something and got distracted from monitoring his bloody sugar. It sneaks up on you so you don’t notice until it hits you all at once.
This is why (in his later years) my mum was forced to be a part-time, on-call carer. Dad would have it under control, until he didn’t.
Having a blood sugar reaction is analogous to the guy that goes to the pub to drink one beer and drive home an hour later, but his mate buys him a beer, his other mate buys him a beer and the next thing he knows, he should be getting a taxi. The problem is that the diabetic can’t keep track of how many empty beer glasses there are.
just saw this as a follow up, thought you might be curious. i feel bad for everyone honestly. dude has to be an idiot but god, what a consequence to live with.
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