I’m not so sure we can assume that the cruiser was visible. He’s travelling at a high rate of speed and may not have been visible at the decision time.
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True enough. I am not assuming one way or the other. My statement is that whether you see the vehicle or not, if you are the vehicle crossing traffic lanes the responsibility is yours to ensure the lane is clear. If you read my additional replies you will see I also state:
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Sort of. There are still rules, like having to come to a complete stop before turning right on a red, and yielding to pedestrians.
9 out of 10 times I’ll just turn right and take the next legal U-turn, especially on 4+ lane roads. Our apex predator binocular eyes are great for focused targeting, but are shit for wide-field motion tracking from multiple directions.
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Well, according to the accident investigator.
That’s not what the accident investigator stated. Which suggests that had he not been speeding, the other driver would have had sufficient time to make the turn.
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And on the other hand I accidentally cut off a cop while avoiding someone who cut me off. The cop was cool and just gave me a warning even though I didn’t have my drivers license on me. Wish those numerous good apples could do something about the rot around them.
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Life in prison?
was that vehicle exceeding the posted speed limit?
It. Does. Not. Matter.
Aside from the investigator saying otherwise, a quick estimate of the speeds and distances involved says there wouldn’t have been an accident if Ferguson had been going the speed limit.
Let’s assume he was going an average of 60 MPH (the video says he was going 66 five seconds before, but he might’ve slowed down some). The video says the speed limit there is 40, so he was going 1.5x the limit. That means that if he’d been going the limit, the SUV would’ve had 1.5x the time to safely cross the lanes before the car got there. The impact was near the back of the SUV – it looks like the left side of the police car hit around the rear wheel of the SUV, which means that if the SUV had made it another 4-5 feet forward it would’ve been clear of the car. At the time of impact, the front of the SUV had already crossed two full lanes, and gotten partway into the reversible center lane; lane width should be 10-12 feet, so it had travelled more than 20 feet before impact. If we assume constant speed, in 1.5x of that time it would’ve made it at least another 10 feet in the extra time – close, but enough time to be clear of the police car. And that’s an underestimate because I’m pretty sure those are full-width lanes, the SUV had made it partway into the center lane, and the SUV was accelerating (at least in the early part of the crossing) so its final speed was faster than the average.
More simply: I count about 3 seconds between the SUV starting to pull out and impact. If Ferguson had been going 40 instead of 60, there would’ve been another 1.5 seconds before he got there, and the SUV would have been safely across by that time.
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These thread always devolve into, “My armchair lawyering is better than your armchair lawyering.” So here’s mine. The elderly couple is unfortunately at fault ONLY because the stupid laws are written stupidly. There is no reason someone should be responsible for someone else’s terrible driving. Period. This cop is an asshole who shouldn’t be allowed to operate anything more dangerous than a bicycle.
Do you live in England, New Jersey or Massachusetts? Because it sounds like you come from one o’ them communardal traffic circley type places. 
Good point, laws do vary from place to place.
I was proceeding from a stop in a Dodge Dakota pickup when I was t-boned by a speeding driver. The judge ruled that I’d hadn’t done anything wrong and that I was not required to have x-ray vision and see through houses and trees and stuff to gauge the speed of the oncoming car, so the other guy was 100% at fault. This was in northern Delaware in the 90s or early 00s.
(All the glass blew out and it took forever for all the safety glass chunks to work their way out of my right ear canal… every time I showered some more would fall out.)
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RI actually. Which has mostly the same traffic laws as Mass. 
We have one important difference. In MA if you hit someone’s rear end it is your fault NO MATTER WHAT. I had a person get pushed into the drivers side of my car. So their rear hit my drivers door. I was at fault and was told I should have moved out of the way. I asked “how by levitating my car horizontally?!??”
In RI. It’s only your fault if you hit them directly from behind with the front of your car moving forward. Small miracles…LOGIC.
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