I was out in the car today, driving across Dartmoor in gentle snow. Plenty of bicyclists out, and a few horse riders.
Got home and checked the Teletext, and a story caught my attention.
In Wales today, a car skidded straight on at a bend and ploughed into an entire cycling club group of 12 riders. 4 killed, aged between 14 and about 60. One other rider had both legs broken - and he was the father of the dead 14 year old.
How many lives ruined? Mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, children, brothers, sisters? The car driver himself, and his family too.
I used to ride every week with a bicycle club, with members from their late teens to their 70s, and I could picture the scene, and the terrible aftermath: the guilt, the pain, the tears, the anniversaries. I don’t often weep at news stories, but I did at this one.
Cheerful post? Well everyone reading this cycles, and many of you drive cars. Was it a moment’s inattention? Was he driving irresponsibly? Did he need to be driving in the snow? Did he have the experience? Were they wearing bright clothing and riding sensibly?
Thanks for the link. Some changes in detail on the story, and perhaps I feel sorrier for the driver than I did, but still a terrible tragedy for all concerned.
As an insurance assessor and investigator, I’ve dealt with fatal accidents and serious injury accidents. There’s too much of it going on. 9-10 people a day killed on the roads in the UK. However, the link with a sport I did for many years made this story especially hard to read.
That is so sad. I was just reading, not a full minute before I clicked this link, about a shark attack off the coast of Brisbane. A gang of what are expected to have been bull sharks attacked and killed a 21 year old woman as she swam with her church group in shallow water.
I can’t imagine what shock the families of everyone involved in that bike incident must be feeling. It’s terrible to lose a family member, and possibly even worse to know that you were responsible for killing four.
I live in Prestatyn (where one of the cyclists was from) and this is about 5 miles away from Abergele, where the accident occured.
It was very icy this morning. It was raining last night and the weather turned cold and froze very quickly. So quickly that the raindrops were frozen in raindrop shape on top of my car.
My hubby was telling me earlier this morning that the newsagent, who lived in Abergele took one look at that particular road this morning and decided it was too dangerous, so went round the other way. However, I would have expected the gritters to have been out since then.
Very tragic.
Personally I think that cars should be seperated from walkers and cyclists and would advocate lots more cycle routes that are seperated from roads, not just a little bit of the road painted off with a bike sign on it. Cars are the most dangerous things around. Keep them away from everyone else, that’s what I say.
Cathy
PS the Abergele straight was still closed off at 5pm when my parents tried to come to my house and were diverted.
Cheerfull post or not, thank you for posting this. The questions you ask are things everyone should think about when they drive or cycle, this story is a stark reminder of that. This time of the year (in the northern hemisphere anyways) is especially bad, for both drivers, and cyclists, so please be carefull, if not for your own sake, then for the sake of others.
Tragic indeed, and having read the story I wonder whether, this road having such a dangerous classification, it had been properly gritted by the authorities (as is usual in the UK during poor weather). Certainly the locals, and the earlier accident, suggest the ice problem was known in the general area, on the day. Gritting however can sometimes lead to a false sense of security for some drivers, who in a few cases might assume that ALL ice had been dispersed.
I have only once experienced rain that immediately froze solid on hitting a cold motorway. I was driving slowly, very slowly, and the extreme slipperyness was being demonstrated by the police who repeated fell over trying just to stand up on a road surface that was covered entirely by little hemispherical ice spots.
I don’t like to ride on roads even in ideal conditions, too many friends have had near misses on bicycles.
We had a similar accident this year in Redmond WA (just east of Seattle and a little north of where I lived). The local cycling club was out for a road ride along a stretch of road that is popular with bicyclists. A car coming the opposite direction somehow ended up swerving across the road and hitting the group. One cyclist died. It was mother of one of the men in the MTB club I’m a member of.
Something was clearly wrong with the driver because he fled the scene on foot and ended up stripping his clothes off and trying to hide near a golf course. I haven’t kept up with the story to find out how it has been resolved and what the driver has been charged with.
In the Summer of '91 I did a cross-country bike ride from Portland Oregon to Washington DC. It was charity ride in that we got pledges for the ride and did some community service along the way. Two days before the end of the ride four of the riders were hit by a semi truck and trailer just outside of Fredericksburg Virginia. Two riders were killed and two ended up in the hospital with minor injuries (broken bones and abrasions).
I wasn’t riding near that group and didn’t even know that there had been an accident till I got to the place we were staying at for the night. I didn’t even take the route along the highway. I stayed on the rural country roads. But those roads didn’t all have names. If you missed one of the turns or asked for directions you’d end up on the highway and that’s what happened to those riders.
The riders were on a highway with a wide shoulder. The accident happened at an area where two lanes merged to one lane. A car behind the semi decided to try and pass the semi as the semi was merging to the single lane. The semi locked up its brakes and skidded into the cyclists. I really wish the truck driver would have merged on top of the car that cut him off rather than skidding into the cyclists. The car driver would have earned it. I believe the truck driver was cited for having unsafe brakes but I don’t know what came of that.
It looks very much like the driver who hit the cyclists at Abergele will not be charged with anything and that it will be put down as a freak accident. He’ll still have a life sentence of the memories though.
When I was young a driver hit a young cyclist and killed her. I was completely the cyclist’s fault, she cycled out of a concealed entrance without looking and the driver did not stand a chance. Nevertheless he was unable to live with this and committed suicide a couple of years later.
A quick skim through the BBC news website shows many cases where people have been killed because of someone driving recklessly but only small fines and short driving bans have been given. Murder someone and you’re put away for years; kill someone using a car and you just have to use the bus for a few months.
I don’t think the roads are going to get any safer until driving bans are made much longer or even permanent.
I thought it was clear that he wasn’t driving recklessly.
Raise your hand if you are guilty of putting off getting new tires when the tread gets low. (That’d be about all of you, I’d figure) How are they defining “faulty tires?” Would a car with perfect tires have slipped on the ice?
As someone who has spent many years of his life investigating motor accidents:
The difference between a fatal accident, a multiple fatal accident, and an embarrassing prang is little more than good or bad luck.
I dealt with a fatal accident that was primarily caused by a motorcyclist on a powerful superbike overtaking on a left hand bend. The car he hit had faulty brakes, one shock absorber incorrectly attached (i.e. only at one end!), no tax, MOT, insurance or even Vehicle Registration Document. The driver wasn’t properly qualified. Bad luck - they could have made it home safely, but they were hit by a registered roadworthy insured bike being ridden by someone who had a proper licence.
On the other hand, you or I could make a misjudgement on ice or snow, , or adjust the radio at the wrong moment and hit a wall… or hit a group of cyclists. 5 seconds difference and 5 people die, or no one is hurt.
Every driver should take full responsibility for the roadworthiness of his vehicle, and the way in which it is driven. However, it is unfair for the severity of the consequences to affect the severity of the punishment. That is random. The punishment should be linked to the severity of the negligence.
And yes, generally, penalties for these serious motoring offences should be stiffer. Unfortunately, there is an entire underclass of people for whom bans mean nothing. See how many accidents involve people who are banned from driving at the time.
I remember walking home from the pub one night around ten years ago, up a hill to my house. It was around 11pm and the roads were deserted. As I toiled up the hill, I could hear a car approaching from behind. As it got closer, something made me turn around, I don’t know what. As I turned, the car (which must have been doing close to 40 or 50mph) veered towards me. The only thing between me and it was a parked car, which the driver promptly smashed into with an incredible cacophany of noise.
Broken glass and shards of metal flew everywhere.
I stood unharmed five feet from the wreckage of both cars.
Snapping out of shock, I ran to the car that had been moving, and pulled open the door. As I yanked it open, the driver fell out.
No seat belt on. Stinking of beer.
He couldn’t even stand up and had no concept of what had just happened or what he had done.
By now, lights had started blinking on behind curtains and people had come to their doors.
A quick phone call to the police, and five minutes later, Mr Drunk-driver was being taken away by the local constabulary.
It wasn’t until I got home that I realised that if that parked car hadn’t have been there, then Mr Drunk-driver would have ploughed into me.
Or maybe five seconds either way and the result of his actions would have been completely different.
I got the shakes thinking about it.
Later on I felt angry. Very angry, that this idiot could have ended my life, and not even be aware of it - just lost in his drunken state.
I realise that the original thread here was not about drunk drivers, but it took an incident like this to make me realise how precious a life can be and how easily it can be snuffed out oh so quickly.
That’s the thing. Driving is just seen as “something everybody does” so the responsibility of being in control of a ton or two of lethal high-speed metalwork is lost. If you drive when drunk the chance of actually coming to harm is pretty slim, so there’s little incentive to think for a second and do the right thing. If long term bans were more often used and backed up by sufficient enforcement, the incentive to err on the side of caution would be far larger.
The thought that “you will probably get away with it” is the reason for the vast majority of dangerous driving, and without countering that nothing is going to get any safer.
I thought that in the UK, as well as several countries on the continent, one drunk driving offense was all one got. Then, their driving privileges were permanently revoked.
Sorry about the close connection and strong reaction that you had to this disaster. Although they occur constantly, some of them just grab us and won’t let go. I hope it does not long affect your prolific production of prose which, in contrast, is so uplifting to us all.
But that creates other problems. Impounding a car or outright taking a car for breaking some law is inherently unfair and unproportional. It punishes some people more than others depending on the car they happen to be driving. A person who happens to be driving an $80,000 SUV gets punished more than someone driving a $300 clunker.
There are places that have tried impounding or taking cars for things such as propositioning prostitutes. I cannot, and will not, ever agree that it is right for a government to take a car as punishment for a crime. It is inherently unfair and is not proportional. Besides, it gets into grey areas like what to do if they are driving a borrowed car, a rental car, a company car, or even a stolen car.
I’m all for getting tough on people who drive while drunk or drugged, but taking their car is not the way to go about it.