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Comment by usuallymatt | Hacker News Reader

Same for me. I read stuff like this and always picture it happening to my kids. It somehow makes it worse in this instance that it's a complete accident that no one could have done anything to prevent it. I'm much more sensitive and squeamish since having kids.

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There's plenty that could've been done to prevent this. Most basic and simple would be to institute a traffic law culture in which the driver does get blame by default for hurting a pedestrian so they have pedestrians on their mind every single minute they control their car.

What the hell? Did you read the story? This woman should be blamed for what was completely unpredictable? Do you realize she would be in prison for vehicular manslaughter?

How about not having a 40 or 50 mph speed limit on a residential street?

And mandating fences and sidewalks to give more visibility? Building codes that ensure there is visibility in all driveways? There probably are a lot of policies you could put in place.

I believe she stated it was a rural road or had just turned into a rural road. Commonly now these have a 55mph speed limit and people do live on them. Its not described that she was going 45 or 50 through what we think of as subdivisions now.

I said "institute a traffic law culture", not "apply this ruling to this woman". If the entire culture is based on certain assumptions, many aspects of it change to accommodate it.

For example all of the things nickspacek mentions here would be brought in in due course based on pressure from the drivers themselves: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16107645

So the next person this happens to goes to jail? You're proposing that drivers will ask for speed limits to be reduced because they don't want to fall afoul of this proposed law? Do you realize how silly that sounds?

Legal driving does not mean I have the ability to repeal basic physical laws like inertia. If you're trying to legislate cars off the road altogether, then this is probably one way to do it, but good luck with the general program.

> So the next person this happens to goes to jail?

No, that is not how you build a culture. :)

It was not the driver's fault in this case. The child ran right into a residential road with a high speed limit.

The road should not have had such a high speed limit, should have had speed bumps, and possible the little boy's parents should have had a fence.

Punishing the driver in this case doesn't fix the problem at all.

Punishing the driver would make drivers join with residents in fighting for speed control. The current state is a huge privilege for drivers at the expenses of pedestrians, because drivers aren't required to care about safety.

Tragic preventable automobile accidents will continue to not be prevented, because over-engineering for one particular criterion is its own kind of tragedy.

In this particular case, there is one thing that stands out to me above all others: the mailboxes were on the opposite side of the road from the houses. The second thing that distressed me was that the cop, after investigating and deciding there was no reasonable suspicion that the driver was criminally culpable, went on to lecture the driver anyway.

The road should have had a high speed limit, with no speed bumps. And there should have been no reason for pedestrians to ever set foot on it. Those mailboxes were on the wrong side of the road, because the postmaster decided that the driver on that rural route should not have to turn around twice or exit their vehicle to service those addresses. That boy died to save $300 in postal employee wages per year.

The homes should have had a gravel frontage road--behind a guardrail, bollards, cable, or Jersey barrier--with the mailboxes on the same side of the main road as the buildings.

And the cop should not have been lecturing anybody. That's the judge's job. No arrest? That means no judge, and no lecture. "Here's the number of the guy we called out to tow your vehicle, and the department's photocopied resource list of local businesses that may be helpful to you today, in the aftermath of your incident. I can give you a ride back into town, where you will have an opportunity to give a written statement for the accident report. Then you can use one of the payphones in the lobby to call somebody."

Cops just want to feel like they're doing something productive. Best just to ignore them.

Have you not seen what happens in some parts of the world where people throw themselves in front of vehicles as a form of insurance fraud? And you want to extend that to make the driver guilty of a crime when that happens?

I live in germany, traffic law works like that here, and the insurance fraud you mention is not known here. Not sure why. Maybe because of other aspects of the law culture here.

Maybe because you don‘t get a lot of money if you get hurt, so it doesn‘t pay off?

Because you rarely get damages above 50k for even severe injuries.

How would that help? The kid ran out onto a street with traffic traveling at 50 MPH. Being aware of pedestrians does nothing when it's not physically possible to avoid hitting one.

> There's plenty that could've been done to prevent this

Well, for one thing, putting rural mailboxes on the same side of high-speed roadways as the houses they serve would seem to be an obvious mitigation, though it would probably have some additional mail delivery costs.

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