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Comment by maccard | Hacker News Reader

I live in the middle of a medium sized city in the UK, and drive late at night a couple of times a year for various reasons (day out in another city, late gig, visiting friends, etc). On pretty much every artery road here, if someone was sitting in the middle of the road and I was travelling at 60mph, there's absolutely no chance whatsoever that I would see them. For example, see [0] - this is a major road within a few miles of Edinburgh that is completely unlit with a sidewalk/pavement on one side.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/@55.8891577,-2.9952163,3a,75y,14...

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I drive in Edinburgh all the time. Not a single time have I ever driven where I couldn't either see what was up a head, or where my headlights didn't illuminate far enough out that I could not perform a safety stop. If that means you have to drive at 40 on an unlit national road instead of 60, then you drive at 40.

There simply is no excuse where "I didn't see them" is acceptable unless they literally run out into the road, or appear from behind a blind corner (and you should slow down around blind corners anyway for this reason).

I've never once been in an accident, I have seen plenty of bad drivers around Edinburgh. The limit is not a target, but a legal maximum. You drive to your conditions.

Anything else is just blaming the dead manslaughter victim. Which the author seems to do, or at least has zero sympathy for killing a woman and is salty at the "idiot laws" that put him in jail for ending someone else's life.

There is a difference. He hit them on a crosswalk, not in the middle of nowhere. While not totally blaming zloirock, I don't understand why a driver shouldn't be punished for killing a pedestrian on a crosswalk.

There are no crosswalks on highways. It's basically like someone sitting on a traintrack and blaming the train operator for killing them.

There are court documents detailing the case available online, and zloirock himself admits it in GitHub comments after being pointed at it (although his tone is somewhat passive-aggressive):

> and where did I write that it was not in the zone of action of the pedestrian crossing sign?

> https://github.com/zloirock/core-js/issues/1179#issuecomment...

There is also no reliable information whether the accident happened inside a city or on a highway, but multiple witnesses are mentioned, and I doubt that there are many people on highways at 3 AM.

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