Accidents Happen

Unfortunatley.

Heard on the news yesterday about a car crash in Kogarah in South Sydney. The car went onto the pavement and caused injury to nine people, one of whom has since died.
The scene shown was awful and I can't imagine what the people at the bustop where the crash happened must have been thinking when the saw the car heading straight for them.

Of course, as with any car accident the first thing people start shouting about is speed! I have always maintained that it is not speed that kills but people inability to control it. Heck, how slow are we gonna have to start driving? And of course there are a number of ways to reduce speed, the most widely used being the speed bump. Those things are a menace and I personally believe that they can cause serious harm to people. For example, if someone is in the back of an ambulance with certain injuries and they go over a speed bump they could actually kill that person. Okay, it's a bit dramatic but it could happen.
More often it is people with other injuries that suffer, such as those with bad backs. You try going over a speed bump as slow as you want with a bad back and it will still cause pain! I occassionally get severe neck pain and I despise going over those things when I am already suffering as it makes it much worse. I know that speeding is a major issue but why can't they just put in more speed camera's?
I'm just waiting for the first person to take a council to court for injuries suffered/made worse from speed bumps. It will happen one day and then I can rejoice in them all being taken up :-)

But back to that terrible accident...
By all accounts the driver was a 42 year old woman and her instructor was with her in the car. The poor woman was, understandably in shock and I can't imagine what she must be going through. I very much doubt that she will ever get behind the wheel of a car again. The brother of the instructor said on the radio today that he thought that she probably put her foot on the accelerator rather than the brake. This was something that I thought when I heard about the accident last night. I remember when I was learning to drive, I made the silly mistake of having my brother teach me to drive, and that saying about family and teaching is completely true! My big bro' was a qualified driving instructor with a well known driving school in the UK. I was a 17 year old nervous wreck! Made worse by my bro'. However, he did say that there are too instincts when it comes to fear, flight and fight. Well, I was clearly flight! This means that when you panic you basically shut down, it takes over you and you let it. Fight, obviously means that you fight through the fear and control it, your mind stays focussed on the job in hand. Problem is, I've never responded well to being shouted at. That aside, and after many years of being fearful of driving, I realised that I had a major problem, I was more than normal scared. I was having panic attacks when I climbed into the drivers seat of a stationary vehicle!

I overcame this by learning to drive with a female instructor. I told her about my past history and she booked me in for a lesson the following morning, so that it gave me less time to worry about it. I never looked back. But I remember that all of the cars I drove when I was learning had dual controls. It was something that I was insistent on, because if I did something wrong or if I got too out of control with fear, I knew that the instructor could take control of the vehicle. It made me feel safer. And I wondered with that accident if dual controls were fitted, and I would guess with the outcome that they weren't.
I don't think it is legal to have dual controls fitted in learner cars, it's certainly not in people's cars that get used to learn to drive in. But I think if your profession is as a driving instructor you should have your own vehicle and it should be fitted with dual controls. Rather than blaming speed, why don;t we look at other ways that the accident could have been avoided, with the instructor taking control. I'm not blaming the instructor, no one is to blame, it was just a tragic accident. But surely the instructor knew that she was no longer in control of the car and as such could have taken control of the vehicle IF it had dual controls.

There is no right or wrong here only considerations and sadness that such a terrible accident happened :-(