Sorry to have to quote you twice but just re-read this and did a double take...Originally Posted by sideways14a
You're saying that the average car driver is not expecting a "high-speed vehicle" as you call it, in the oncoming carriage way, to do something unpredictable like come towards them at speed ?
Footsache.
Ok the bike was speeding.
BUT.
The car driver should have been looking. Not 10 meters in front of him.
He turned across the road like the self entitled speed kills I only want to do 40 mph so will pull out in front of people manner.
If speed kills then lets limit the speed on every motorised vehicle to 15 mph. It will save lives. Think of the children.
Ok the bike was speeding.
BUT.
The car driver should have been looking. Not 10 meters in front of him.
He turned across the road like the self entitled speed kills I only want to do 40 mph so will pull out in front of people manner.
If speed kills then lets limit the speed on every motorised vehicle to 15 mph. It will save lives. Think of the children.
Well yea, except for the fact he didn't see him at all.
He had 7 seconds in which he should have seen him, but didn't. That was the basis of the case against him.
He made no error of speed judgement or anything like that, he just was not looking.
Do we know the age or the driving experience of the person in the car? I feel that these days they tend to give driving licenses away in packets of cereal boxes and that there are far to many people driving on the road that are in there own little world and completely oblivious to what is happening around them. I would not at all be surprised if this was a contributing factor, I personally think that both parties are at fault the car driver for not paying attention and the bike rider for riding at excessive speed approaching a junction. The hard truth is that no matter what any of us think or say it's not going to make the blindest bit of difference, there will I'm sure be other incidents with the same outcome in a matter of days
He wouldn't have only had 2 seconds though, would he? He would have had double that: Same reaction time, and more than double of 'doing' time.
No one is blameless here. TBH it feels pretty crass to be arguing semantics when a guy's life has been lost, but at the same time it fuels discussion. I'm not anti biker in any way at all, however, to me, if you insist on doing a ton coming up to a junction, no matter what you are in control of, you're going to have some seriously bad luck at some point. Yes, the driver shouldn't have gone, but at the same time, it's not unreasonable to expect him to make judgements on what the speed of the motorcyclist appeared to be (remember, humans are, atrociously bad at guessing speed)
To say it would make no appreciable difference is way off the mark to me. Plus the fact that the impact speed would have been MUCH lower. Crap extrapolation (as my A level physics was appalling) but if we say that he had 1 second to react, and 1 second to perform a manoeuvre at 100, then surely if he was doing 50 he'd have the same 1 second to react, and 3 seconds to slam on the anchors. I'm not too up on braking distances for motorbike, but I would have thought that slowing from 50 to 0 in 3s isn't unachievable, is it? Certainly a lot more realistic than 100 to 0 in 1s.
Stopping distance goes up with the square of speed doesn't it? Or something like that? So it would take 4 times the distance to stop from twice the speed.
Most of us drive enthusiastically on the roads, but most of us are sensible enough to say 'junction coming up, I'd better back off a bit, and at least cover the brakes'.
EDIT: Quick Google and some fag packet maths suggests car stopping distances are about 125ft from 50, so you're looking at 500 from 100. I am NOT solely blaming the rider here, but the world is full of morons on vehicles, anticipating that in predictable scenarios is surely part of good road craft?
Last edited by Si; 08-09-2014 at 13:14.
eh ?? .... when havent they given them away, the driving license has always been a piece of piss to get ... when did you do your test ? .... I want to see what you think was so much harder then than now.
Back in '89 the hardest part of my test was getting the car to start using a manual choke ... followed next by the notorious 5 questions from highway code at the end .. at least today you get the randomness of the theory test
Last edited by Johnny; 08-09-2014 at 13:10.
I think the point is, if he was doing the speed limit (i.e. 40 mph less than he was doing) the car would of been out of his way or at least far enough over the carriage way that he could go behind it, before he got there. But totally agree, whether going 50 or 100 mph, when a car turns in front of you, that close, you're going to hit it.
From what I gather the motorcycle test used to be whether you could get to the end of the road and back without falling off, thankfully it's a bit more in depth now...although not much!
Well when I passed mine back in '87 it was with a Welsh tester who hated the English and having a very Strong Birmingham accent at the time living in Wales I had to work for it
But I still say driving standards have deteriorated over the last decade...
Roads are more congested tho, so people drive like twunts trying to navigate the morons who dawdle along.
The utter lack of funding over the last 20 years has really hurt things, roads and junctions need improving to handle the increased number of cars on the road - but there's just no money to do that, they can't even keep ontop of all the pot holes that appear
I expect the knee jerk reaction to that junction will be to stick in a speed camera, but if it's a fairly busy and fast road then really you need something like a roundabout in place to slow everyone down and make the turn safely.
My point is that if the biker was doing a sensible speed then the car driver "might" not have turned in on him. Some folk just dont have a good perception of speed or what distance can be covered in time so its just mental to trust a car at a junction at 100mph.
That said it doesnt let the car driver off either as claiming you didnt see the biker is no excuse, i would have said i saw him but didnt appreciate the closing time.
but his admission to not seeing the bike or the car following kinda points to the conclusion he didn't even bother to look.
I agree, I would have said I didn't appreciate the speed of the bike - but thats not the admission he made, and thats probably the basis of his conviction.
I'd have far more sympathy for the driver if it was just a mis-judgement of speed, but it wasn't.
If you career across a busy A-road without even looking then you deserve to be in front of a judge.
Last edited by R3K1355; 08-09-2014 at 14:07.
Some of this might be valid except I already did the doubling. He had about a second. At 50 he would have had 2 seconds. At 25 he would have had 4 seconds and a chance of avoiding the car.
However, any motorcyclist riding at 25 along that road could reasonably expect to have been whacked up the chuff by someone on the same carriageway long before reaching that junction.
And that is my point. I'm not condoning his speed. 100 is not right. However, 50 wouldn't have helped him a lot, IMO, so I think anyone saying that his speed was a major contributing factor is talking out of their hat.
And I politely disagree. His stopping distance would have been a quarter, and his impact speed substantially less.
I really dont think you can take the drivers word to what he "saw" as gospel to be honest ..... one second he was turning across the road and in a split his car crumpled up with a massive bang and he realises that he has just been involved in killing someone.
what he actually remembers doing, what he thought he saw, what he admits to ... its going to be massively skewed by shock.
what we can reliably state though is that the biker did himself absolutely no favours with regards to being seen in time driving at that speed, being seen and recognized at doing a substantial speed and in the case of an incident doing a speed that you are likely to be able to survive from.
so yes ultimately in this case regardless of what the car driver saw, in my opinion the biker deserves at least 50% of the credit for killing himself
I recon he did see the biker but said he didnt because... well how does it sound in court saying you did see the chap you just killed...
I wouldnt be surprised if he did clock the bike and made an error of judgement in pulling out due to not identifying its closing speed.
But hey if thats what he said in the dock then....
I think the speed was a big factor in changing an avoidable accident to an avoidable fatality.
power-crazed Head-Mod
The riders speed for sure didn't help him out but JW is right, at 50 he still doesn't have a leg to stand on if a car does that at a comparable distance.
I have cars doing silly things in front of me every other day. Just today a couple of cars blocked at some lights by a bus decided they would just go for it when the bus had moved, even though they had a red light by that time. The only thing that stopped them was realising they were about to T bone me. There is a lot of self entitlement on the road.
Being fair, the rider was speeding and I personally think it's daft going that fast around other vehicles and especially approaching a junction. The car driver... Well, we know he says he didn't see the bike so I suppose he didn't look. There's no excuse for that. I see things like that all the time and it is quite annoying, you know the ones that didn't look or only just spotted you because they suddenly stop with a jolt.
I ride as though I'm invisible because to some people I probably am, I always expect the car in the junction to fly out and plow me into the nearest bus shelter.
Edit... But the point of the video wasn't to show people that either the car driver or rider are fools. It was simply to make people think.
Last edited by spencer_foxwell; 08-09-2014 at 16:38.
That's an extremely tough one to call though IMO. This weekend I've seen one bike travelling at about 60 go skittling down the road bouncing end to end with the rider being thrown into a hedge, back onto the road and all around the place - and he gets up and walks away just with an incredibly fecked bike..... and then a 15-20mph low sider that didn't do a lot of damage to the bike, but has put the rider in hospital for a couple of days.
Ironically in some circumstances those going the fastest hit the hardest and get thrown clear and just end up pin-balling down the road instead.
There are plenty of other incidents in the news of bikers being killed by SMIDSY car drivers emerging from junctions at much more legal speeds. Just luck of the draw IMO (and not saying that I do 100mph past junctions because I don't, nor do I condone it).
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