🚀 go-pugleaf

THIS IS LONG. YOU HAVE BEEN FOREWARNED.

In article <1992Apr4.220820.19084@cbfsb.cb.att.com> 
ashaw@cbnewsg.cb.att.com (andrew.shaw) writes:
>From article <1992Apr3.220019.16983@ncsu.edu>
>steve@bucolix.ece.ncsu.edu (Steve Garnier):
>>In article <1992Apr3.151959.9313@cbfsb.cb.att.com> 
>>ashaw@cbnewsg.cb.att.com (andrew.shaw) writes:
>>>From article <1992Apr3.003313.6485@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu>, 
>>>by dabowsky@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu (Kamron):
>>>[unfortunate story of biker friend killed when car pulled out in front]
>>>> Anyway, the driver claimed the same lame story as everyone else,
>>>> "It was an accident, I didn't see her.."
>>>Why is it a lame story?  Do you think the driver deliberately tried
>>>to kill her?  Accidents *do* happen.  
>>I'd prefer to label what you call "accidents" as acts of negligence.  
>>Look, the cager occupied space that belonged to the cyclist, simply 
>>because the cager never observed the cyclist.  Yes, that is a mistake
>>on the part of the cager; a very fatal mistake...but it is not an 
>>"accident". 

>What do you think an accident is?  An accident is a mistake.  As
>differentiated from an intentional act.

An "accident" is an occurrence related solely to fortune or chance; that is,
"bad luck".  Why is it that one driver in a collision can see the collision
about to occur, while the other driver, oblivious to their surroundings, 
never observes the other vehicle?  Do you honestly believe that their 
collision is due only to bad luck?  The only bad luck involved here is that
the conscientious driver finds himself sharing the road with a poorly
trained incompetent obliviot.  Virtually *every* single collision that 
I've ever observed is directly attributable to causal events...not luck.
In short, somebody falls short of properly controlling their vehicle and 
correctly observing and interpreting their environment.  The collision 
occurs as a result of one or more mistakes, and those mistakes are almost
always due to negligence on someone's part.

>>To me, the word "accident" implies "no-fault".

>To me it implies one or more mistakes.  The driver made a mistake in
>pulling out.  The motorcyclist made a mistake in operating a vehicle
>with inadequate protection.

I see....So I can choose to operate a "no armor" vehicle that has tremendous
potential to avoid collisions but suffers badly when struck, and you can 
choose to operate a "light armor" vehicle that performs both avoidance and
crash-worthiness with less-than-mediocre reviews.  Now let's use your logic
for the following scenario:
  Andrew is out on the town tooling down Eat Street in his Yugo.  He's
  about to enter the intersection of Police Avenue and Eat Street.  
  Andrew's got the green light, so he proceeds into the intersection.
  Unfortunately, the driver of an 18-wheeler on Police Street doesn't
  see the red light, and buzzes into the intersection going the legal
  speed limit.  In but a few tiny moments, Andrew sees Mack bearing 
  down onto him, and he becomes road pizza.  Andrew's epitath reads
  "Accidents *do* happen", and he's buried with his Yugo.  The coroner
  is quoted as saying that they couldn't separate Andrew from the Yugo's
  interior.  The coroner's report states that the truck driver made a 
  mistake by not observing the red-light, but he also makes note that
  Andrew made a mistake by driving a vehicle with inadequate protection.
  The coroner drives an M1A1.
Now, if Andrew had instead been riding a motorcycle with transwarp
acceleration, he would probably be alive today, just like Steve Garnier.
In the last 26 years, Steve's survived a lot of this kind of shit.
	
>16-wheelers don't run me off the road.  I can accelerate, deccellerate,
>and swerve faster than any 18-wheeler on the road.  I have also been
>hit many times by jackasses, but since I am protected in a nice steel
>cage, I have never even been injured.

Good for you, but I certainly wouldn't count on your "luck" holding out for
each future occurence.  Last year I was driving my pregnant wife on an
interstate highway in my Mazda 626 LX when an 18-wheeler ran us off the road.
It was raining.  I don't know if he didn't see us, or if he had malevolent 
intentions.  My car will out manuever and out accelerate any 18-wheeler, 
just as I'm sure yours will.  I was in the left of two lanes, the truck in
the right.  My forward acceleration was blocked by another car and so was 
the truck's forward acceleration.  The truck's front axel was even with the
Mazda's.  The truck veered into our lane.  With my palm on the horn, I braked
hard and moved to the left, and decellerated while driving within an inch or
so of the guard rail, and all the while the truck-trailer's tires were about
the same distance from my wife's door.  If that truck had moved a very little
more to the left, no amount of skill would have left us unscathed.  My wife
still recalls this incident in her nightmares.

Your assessment of the level of protection afforded to you by your cage
is grossly exaggerated.  I've buried friends from motorcycle wrecks, and
I've buried friends from car wrecks.  A good side-collision in a cage,
and you're in the morgue.  Don't boast about the level of protection your
cage affords you, unless you drive the heaviest armor in the food chain.

>>Nobody claimed that the cyclist was totally blameless; if anything, when a
>>motorcycle is operated correctly, it avoids collisions better than virtually
>>any other vehicle I can think of.  Avoidance is a means of reducing risk,
>>and it's a parameter in the overall risk equation.
>
>I agree with collision avoidance; I agree that the driver should not have
>pulled out; however I do not agree that "I didn't see her" is a "lame
>excuse": it sounds to me like an unfortunate statement of the fact in
>a regrettable situation.

"I didn't see them" is the most fucking lame excuse that can be offered!
When a driver says this, what they are actually saying is that they "didn't
observe an object that was actually there".  That suggests to me that the
driver is incompetent as an observer, at the very least.

>>The biker loses in a collision solely due to momentum exchange and a lack
>>of protection, but a car offers very, very little protection to its 
>>passengers in a side collision.
>
>If you are operating a vehicle that you *know* offers you *no* protection
>in the event of a collision, and a collision happens, don't you think you
>may have been negligent in your choice of vehicle?  

Nope.  Not unless I cause the wreck.  I haven't contributed to the cause of
the wreck by choosing the best vehicle for avoidance.  

>BTW, having just been in a side collision, I can tell you that
>door beams are great.

Yeah.  And I personally knew 3 teenagers that would be 38 today if the doors
on an Olds 98 were truly great protection.  They got slammed in the side by
a Chevy Nova at an intersection.  BTW, they were all wearing their seat belts.
Heavy doors sure are great.

>>To *assume* and blindly state that "motorcycles are _known_ to be dangerous" 
>>simply because they lose in a momentum exchange is the kind of intellectual
>>pablum that's vomited forth by unknowledgable people on a daily basis, and
>>it's conveniently used to absolve others of their negligent behavior.  I hope
>>you meant to say that "motorcycles are _perceived_ to be dangerous".
> 
>You are absolutely right.  The motorcyclist was
>	1.	not seen
>	2.	unprotected
>	3.	killed
>Obviously the motorcycle was not dangerous.  Just think how much worse
>it would have been if she had been jogging down the road at 40mph.

More pablum.  You assume that your car will be seen.  You assume that the
level of protection of your cage is adequate to save your ass.  You assume
that a cage will save your life.  If you're hit from the side with
sufficient force, you're dead.  After some threshold of force is obtained,
it doesn't matter if you're in a cage or on a bike.  In the event that
deadly force may be directed towards you, avoidance is the supreme solution.
In 26 years of riding motorcycles, I have *never* been struck in the side 
by another vehicle; at least not until I was sitting at a gas pump.  BTW, 
contrary to what you may have heard, I survived. :-)  And I'm not maimed.

>>>What do you want to do to the poor driver, execute him?
>> 
>>I'm fairly certain that the "poor driver" isn't as bad off as the poor
>>cyclist, nor the poor cyclist's family.  I would also venture to say that,
>>if the driver were executed, said driver wouldn't kill any more cyclists. 
>
>Are you maintaining that there are serial cyclist-killers driving around?

Andrew, do you recognize sarcasm, especially when the next sentence states
it as such?

No, I don't think that there are a *lot* of serial cyclist-killers running
around, but I have had loons try to kill me in the past.  I was on my bike,
and they were usually in pickups...Y'know, the kind with Charlie Manson
eyes...I avoided them with transwarp acceleration and riding skill.

>>If we don't revamp our approaches to licensing, training and 
>>enforcement, the carnage will continue.  The driver who commits manslaughter
>>should lose their vehicle license, at the very minimum.
>
>Well, I'm all for more training and stringent licensing requirements.
>But if you think that you can create the perfect, risk-free environment,
>you are sadly mistaken.

I don't ask for perfection.  What I ask for is an improvement over the 
present half-assed piece-of-shit training/licensing/enforcement system/policy
today's road users are subjected to.  There really isn't an "acceptable
level of death" IMO, but maybe we can reduce the carnage below the present
horrendous level if we could get society to take off the blinders and
recognize that there's a *huge* amount of needless slaughter going on,
under the euphemistic label of "ACCIDENT".

Steve Garnier - 1979 Yamaha XS1100SF Special with 156,000 miles and *climbing*
DoD #00000005 - KotF (The Daemon's Byte and Keeper of the Flame), NC Chapter
Internet:steve@bucolix.ece.ncsu.edu  UUCP:{?,gatech,uunet}!mcnc!bucolix!steve