No matter how careful a driver may be, there is no silver bullet to avoid a road accident. There can be many reasons why an accident may occur. It could happen from obvious behavior like reckless driving, speeding, or running red lights, but even unforeseen conditions may create an accident, such as weather conditions, pedestrians, or pets.
Those can be hard to see coming, especially if you drive in the night and you suddenly see in the middle of nowhere a dog or a pedestrian crossing the road. Even the brightest lights of the world may not help you avoid running through them causing a terrible accident, fatality or injury.
Who to blame? The driver? Not always, but there are some cases that the car model may give the impression that the driver was speeding and was not careful enough to drive on the streets.
How many times have you read or heard in a discussion people blaming the driver of the capable fast car as the person who caused the accident? There is a tendency in human nature to drive the mind into the fastest and most convenient outcome when a person hears or reads an accident case. Someone then asks “What car was involved in the accident?” and the answer may be “a Honda S2000″.
Can you guess what will be the next comment? “Well, there is no surprise then, those S2000s are pretty fast and their drivers are always speeding”. I always wonder how truthful that is.
Here is a real life case scenario entitled, “Car crashes into pedestrians”, in which I believe the Honda S2000 driver could be accused, even thought there was no fault from her side, but from the pedestrians. Once I read the title of the story and that a Honda S2000 was involved, a small part of my mind acted exactly as I described above.
However this was not the case. The pedestrians tried to cross a street between the cars that were stopped at the light when they were hit by the S2000. Eyewitnesses, added that the driver could not have seen them as they walked out from between the cars waiting at the lights. One of the victims unfortunately had serious injures while the other survived with minor scratches.
Did you ever manage to avoid such hidden accident traps?
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on Oct 22nd, 2010 at 11:34 am
Sadly, on the street, the driver is always at fault when they hit a pedestrian. I strongly hold my opinion that the pedestrians were just negligent and they should have enough knowledge that crosswalks were created for a reason. Jaywalking is very dangerous and shows human incompetence and negligence.. If it was a green light, and the s2000 was going at speed limit, I don’t see how the s2000 driver could be at fault. He/she had no clue or vision of the pedestrians cutting in between two cars and popping out of nowhere into the path of the s2000. The s2000 could have drove a little slower to avoid this, which is what I always do on main streets. I do speed sometimes (not going to lie) but I usually drive slow because when I used to drive recklessly as a teen, I came to close encounters with other drivers. Lesson learned.
on Oct 24th, 2010 at 7:50 am
That is why there are crosswalks.In cases like this the driver is not at fault. It sucks to hear of things like that happening. Growing in a large city and being stationed in an even bigger on I have a habit of waiting a just a few seconds before I start to drive away at a green light. I can not even count how many times it had saved my hide from hitting pedestrians and being hit by people running red lights. Driving these days is really one of the most challenging things to do and stay safe. There is only so much one can do in a car to protect themselves from other drivers and other drivers from themselves.