"Neil Williams" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 10 Sep 2005 22:58:31 +0100, "Martin Underwood" a@b wrote:

I disagree. If you're on the road between one kerb and the other,
drink-drive laws should apply: you don't have to hit someone to cause an
accident. IF you cause another vehicle to go out of countrol (possible
causing much more damage than you yourself could cause) because he was
trying to avoid hitting you, you should bear 100% of the blame.

How on earth would you propose to enforce that?

Think about an extreme (fictitious) example. I'm driving along a
2-lane-in-each-direction single carriageway (i.e. no central
reservation) at 35mph. You're following me in a large articulated
lorry at 40mph, and wish to overtake. You do so, and I decide at the
same second to move to the right lane without looking. There is a car
coming up the right lane of the other side of the road at 60mph, but
for whatever reason (e.g. blind bend or dip) neither of us can see it.

To avoid hitting me, you swerve into the oncoming traffic as it
appears clear (but isn't). You and the car collide at a closing speed
of 100mph, and the car is written off and its driver seriously injured
or killed. I'm not hit at all.

Who bears the blame for that mess? I would argue that one single
person does not. OK, I've triggered the situation by being a prat,
but you have also taken misjudged evasive action which had a worse
consequence than you would have had by hitting me at a closing speed
of 5mph.

It is just not that simple.

Agreed. Instinctively you tend to avoid the accident that you can see right
here and now, only to find that there's another much more serious accident
waiting to happen such as a collision with an oncoming car. I did some
training on a skid pan and the instructor told us that this was a common
occurrence, even with highly-trained police drivers who know that they have
to take the lesser of two evils but still instictively stear away from the
low-speed impact into the path of oncoming traffic. He also said that in an
incident where you are trying to avoid something (child running into the
road) you must fight the tendency to look at the thing you're trying to
avoid and look at the safer place where you want to end up. And that's
bloody difficult!

I'd say that you as the root cause of it bear a lot of the responsibility.
And if your car wasn't hit and incapacitated you'd probably escape without
the police even being aware that you existed unless there were witnesses.

To add to that, what about a heavily-drunken pedestrian stepping into
the road causing the same thing? Just as possible, indeed from my
experience a lot more likely.

Heavily drunk pedestrian bears the blame - especially if witnesses say that
he did so without any warning that would have given driver time to react: he
may have been walking apparently normally and then suddenly stumbled out
into the road. If he was lurching all over the pavement beforehand, it's
more reasonable that the car driver might have had chance to react.


I was once driving down the A34 and I saw a car with his brake lights
permanently on. Several times he had to brake and other cars nearly went
into the back of him.

It's sad the police won't respond to such things - goes with my
statement that more of them are required to allow them to actually do
so.

Agreed - and they need to treat this as being important, rather than
concentrating on catching speeding drivers.

When I reported it, the policeman on the front desk said "Oh, he probably
just had his fog lights on". So I reminded him that this is still illegal
except during fog, and that the high-level brake light was on anyway, so it
wasn;t the fog lights.

However, if anyone was to run into the back of someone with brake
lights permananently *on* (rather than off where you wouldn't know
there was a fault until you'd followed for a while), at least some of
the blame must go to them as well. If I see a car with brake lights
stuck on, I will hold right back, knowing I will get no notification
of what could be an emergency braking. I therefore potentially need
another several seconds of braking time because I'll need to notice
deceleration rather than red lights - and if I hold back I may also be
able to see over[1]/round the car to determine what might cause him to
brake as an assistance to my judgement.

True. I sized up the situation very quickly after I joined the road and he
overtook me. My immediate thought was "no-one's going to be able to tell
when he brakes - I'd better keep a long way back from him; I think I'll stay
in the other lane, right out of his way". Judging by the flurry of brake
lights from other cars behind him every so often, other people hadn't worked
that one out! One of the difficulties with holding too far back is that your
ability to judge whether you are gaining on a car in front increases as you
get closer: the comparative size of a car that's 200 yards away compared
with 150 yards away is much less than between one that's 100 and one that's
50.

Much more dangerous is the car whose brake lights aren't working at all. I
always feel happier when I'm following a car if I occasionally see his brake
lights come on because then I know that his lights are definitely working!
When I was learning to drive, I actually asked my instructor (shows how
naive I was) whether it was legal to slow down simply by lifting your foot
off the accelerator, on the grounds that if I did this, cars behind me
wouldn't have the benefit of my brake lights to tell that I was slowing
down! Nowadays, I use this as much as possible to give a gentle deceleration
and to save wear on the brake pads. When I took my advanced test, my
examiner humorously commented that I was the only driver who just braked
after coming out of the bend - as I came up behind the car in front that
hadn't accelerated out of the bend as quickly as I'd anticipated. As you get
more experience you learn to anticipate this better, but I was younger at
the time.