Another tragedy that affected me quite a bit as a cyclist - Peter Root and Mary Thompson, who died in Thailand in February this year after being hit by a pickup truck. The driver was only 25 years old and was leaning down to pick up a cap from the floor when he hit the cyclists (he was also seriously injured). It’s all the more poignant to see the couple’s (very well-made) videos and blog (which doesn’t seem to have been changed since their death).
Its better than saying “accident”, which implies something which nothing could be done to avoid.
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I think about this quite regularly. I’ve concluded that the effect is probably the opposite of what you think. When we punish someone for something like this, we tell ourselves that that person is a criminal… a bad person, not like the rest of us. That’s reassuring. It’s not like we’d doze off or space out and hit someone—that’s something a criminal would do. People like us don’t have to worry about that kind of thing. (I’m not trying to say that’s how you personally see it, but it does seem to me to be the emotion behind the punishments societally.)
My experience is that I’ve made a potentially fatal mistakes about once every 30,000 or 50,000 miles on average. I’ve always either been lucky or had a more attentive person react, and I’ve never been in an accident. However, always knowing it could work out otherwise has made me more attentive.
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Right. Punishment under the law is a pretty clever thing actually - it works in multiple ways, at multiple levels, to change behaviour.
It’s also a very simple way for people with nothing else to lose (not necessarily last roll-o’-the-dice gamblers, but maybe people with no close family or kids, no long-term hope of a better life etc) to register that something will happen to them if they’re busted for dangerous driving.
Hmm, I always thought “accident” was the opposite of an intention. But You know, traffic management circles. Is that a rotary club? 
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I have to admit that going through some of the rotaries in Boston (“traffic circles with teeth”) can make one feel like one has been hit with a rotary club.
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When I first heard about this guy I thought “Oh he’s gonna get hit by a truck.”
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