You mean killed? What’s with weasel words like “fataly hit” and other bullshit?
The article opens with “A driver who hit and killed an elderly man in Brisbane’s north…”, so the journo did not mince any words. Headlines are made by editors.
Can’t upset the advertisers. It would be shocking if real estate and car sales didn’t have massive editorial influence. The language around road carnage is manufactured by the industry to diminish their role and that of drivers.
Hey at least this one uses active language, instead of that “elderly man was hit by a car” bullshit we usually get.
Note: the archived version seems to be a little out of date, and missing some details.
The “elderly man” in question was in his early 70s, which isn’t what I’d normally classify as “elderly”. Old, perhaps, but elderly implies a certain visibly increased frailty to me that comes more in your 80s. Anyway, sharing this for two reasons. One is that the guy was my principal in primary school, and a man my parents knew well (the deputy principal at the time was a very close friend of my parents, and still is—I see him most weeks).
The second is that you just know no one, anywhere, is going to be talking about the infrastructure or the way it contributed to the problem. No transport engineer will ever face the mildest criticism over this. But the road in question is far higher-speed and far wider than is reasonable, particularly Kittyhawk Drive, the road he was presumably crossing at the time based on the description. If Kittyhawk were reclassified as the Neighbourhood Road it so clearly should be (as opposed to a District Road), and the crossing converted into a wombat crossing, and narrowed to 1 lane each way, it would be so much safer, and so much less likely for the mistakes of one reckless idiot to result in the death of an innocent man just going for a walk.
I’m presently trying to explain this to my parents, who responded when I gave them the above spiel ending with “we never fix the damn underlying problems” with “and we never will. does any country really?” Yes! Some places do! @notjustbikes@notjustbikes.com has some excellent videos for getting these points across. Namely, The Wrong Way to Set Speed Limits and Why Cars Rarely Crash Into Buildings in the Netherlands.
“In relation to how he’s reacted, until you’re in that situation, you don’t really know what you’re going to do yourself,” he said.
Yeah, nah. I feel pretty confident I wouldn’t be pulling that bullshit.
The catch is you wouldn’t get in that situation in the first place. Running a red light isn’t something reasonable car drivers do.
That cop was being so apologetic to the perpetrator. It was maddening!
They were about 4 sentences away from pulling the old “boys will be boys!” and dropping the whole thing
