No, but seriously

My current rental car (yes, another business trip) is a 2007 Ford Mustang with 18,500 miles on the clock. Well you all know my opinion of American cars - crap. The paint on the Mustang is wafer thin - it drops off if you so much as walk too close to it. The inside is a vast sea of hateful, hard, rattly, scratchy grey plastic. The suspension is prehistoric - driving over a bump in the road feels like falling down stairs in leg irons. God - it's just - bloody wonderful actually. Ok so the rear wheel drive is suicidal in the wet, but this latest generation Pony Car has the 'it' factor for me. It's surprisingly roomy inside and the view through the windscreen is nowhere near as cramped as it was on the previous model. The power steering is the usual over-done affair but because the front wheels aren't driven, I can feel a lot more of what the road is doing, and it does take a lot less effort to steer it in a straight line than most American land yachts. The engine noise from inside is wonderful though. Even the sound of the electric radiator fans winding down after I've turned the ignition off - it sounds like a spaceship cooling down its hyperdrive. I found it a bit overpowering to start with - narrow windows all round, hugely overdone engine, deep seats. It was like piloting a submarine for the first day. But today I had my bonding experience with it on I-280 going down to Cupertino. The Mustang is one of those cars that is such a fun car that it's actually easy to overlook all its niggles. If you don't own one, rent one for a few days. Ford have a winner on their hands here - unusual for that company - but the Pony Car lives on nicely in this current revision.

I've come to the conclusion that there are three types of driver when it comes to emergency vehicles.
Type I - let's call them the average motorist - are those who respond quite well. They slow down or pull over and leave room for the fire engine or ambulance to get through.
Type II are what I like to call the automobilista nervosa. They're the ones who see the lights or hear the sirens and all common sense goes out the window. They crash into each other, drive up kerbs, mow down pedestrians and generally lose all control of themselves, their vehicles and their common sense.
Type III are the blissfully ignorant. These are the same people that can drive from Salt Lake City to Las Vegas with the left hand indicator going. These ones don't use their mirrors, don't see the flashing lights, and don't hear the sirens until it's too late. By which point, they normally single themselves out as the only car that hasn't pulled over (type I) or driven into something (type II), by being the one car stuck in the middle of the intersection blocking traffic and being blitzed by emergency vehicles.

Try to be a type I - it makes everyone's lives so much easier.

With Exxon Mobil's announcement of their $11.7Bn profit for the last quarter, any shred of doubt about profiteering has gone down the drain.

Of course, suggesting that $4 a gallon has anything to do with the record profits just makes you an anti-patriotic retarded terrorist as far as the oil companies are concerned. The excuse as always is "we're just passing the cost on" but that's obviously not true. Then we get fobbed off with "it's complicated". No it isn't. The oil companies pull oil out of the ground, or buy crude, then refine it, then slap on a healthy profit margin before raping the public blind. It's really not that complicated and to suggest that the public don't understand this is to illustrate how out-of-touch the oil companies are with reality. Even the financial analysts said three months ago that supply and demand could not justify the $4 gallon despite the high price of crude.

So now the price of oil is coming down again, which is great, because it means the price at the pump is coming down too. Or not. Despite oil falling to a 4-month low this week, the price at the pump is at a 4-month high. Once again, the public is fobbed off with horseshit excuses. The best one is this : "well the stuff in the underground tanks is the expensive stuff we bought previously, so it has to be sold off before we can bring the price down". Ok - that's fine. I can live with that - it'll only take 3 days because no petrol station in existance has underground tanks that can hold more than 3 days-worth of product.

But of course it doesn't take 3 days. It takes weeks if not months before the prices come down. Which is the converse of when the price goes up. Well surely we should apply the same argument shouldn't we? "Well the stuff in the underground tanks is the cheap stuff we bought previously, so it has to be sold off before we can put the price up".

Ah yes - but it doesn't work like that. When the price of crude goes up, the price at the pump goes up the same morning. Again, "it's complicated" and the regular consumer like you or I wouldn't understand the technicalities of it. We're too simple.

The facts are simple - oil companies profiteer all the time. In reality, the price at the pump should lag the cost of crude by about 3 weeks. That's about the amount of time it takes to ship, refine and distribute the product. Any time the price goes up on the same day is clear proof of profiteering.

See - it's not that complicated.

Am I arrogant, insensitive and boorish? Or am I trying to put across an argument that people don't want to hear? That's the question when it comes to this entry's subject, which is this : pedestrians in traffic.

Around Christmas 2007, two teenage girls scaled the fence at the side of I-15 one night - the motorway close to where I live - and ran across traffic. The section of motorway they chose to do this on is poorly lit, and it was in the middle of a blizzard. As you might expect, one of them was hit and killed as they tried to dodge 10 lanes of fast-moving traffic. Why did they do this? To get to the mall on the other side of the motorway, which as it turned out, could have been accessed by a pedestrian underpass only 300m from where the girl was killed.

Nobody initially came forward as the driver "responsible" for the girl's death. The police went all-out to find whoever it was, and did eventually arrest someone, jailing him for - wait for it - failing to stop.

In what universe or reality is that death in any way, shape or form the fault of the driver who hit her? The police even admitted that the damage to the driver's car was so slight that it's entirely likely he didn't even know he'd hit her. More likely he winged her and she was thrown in front of a truck. But charging him for failing to stop? So - what - are we expected to slam on the brakes in motorway traffic now when some mental case tries to dodge traffic? Surely the consequences of that would be far more dire?

So here's the question then : why is it the driver's responsibility not to hit pedestrians in traffic? Why is it not the pedestrian's responsibility to not step into the road in the first place?
Better yet - why are they not accountable or responsible for their actions?

By this warped logic, I ought to be able to drive my car on the pavement (sidewalk), mowing people down who weren't paying attention enough to get out of my way, and then being able to blame them for the damage to my car. Of course that's a ridiculous example but at it's most basic level it's no more ridiculous than blaming the motorist for the actions of wayward pedestrians.

I find it intolerable that there are campaigns that seek to blame the driver for the stupidity of the pedestrian, and trust me, they are amazing in their idiocy; over 80% of pedestrian casualties are their own fault (see The Facts On Speeding for more info).

It's at this point where I'm always accused of being insensitive, or having no idea what it's like to hit someone in a motor vehicle. Sadly, I do. Years ago, I was commuting home on my motorbike when a businessman who was running along the pavement using his cellphone suddenly decided he just had to be on the other side of the road. I braked, but it didn't stop me hitting him square in the back and throwing him 15m down the road, hospitalising him. I was fortunate though - there were eye witnesses who corroborated the events, and I wasn't charged with anything. Given the anti-driver bias nowadays though, had I not had witnesses, I imagine I'd have spent time behind bars.

So a conundrum then. Obviously any sane human being wouldn't want to go around killing pedestrians simply because they walk into traffic. But then wouldn't any sane human being not want to stray into traffic on foot in the first place?

You'd think it would be easy. Green = go. Red = stop. So many times though I've seen people who take off when their light is still red. I saw another one recently. We were all waiting at the lights, and the left-turn lane remained a red arrow whilst the straight-ahead lanes went green. The car in the front of the left-turn lane obviously saw the rest of the lights go green, and ignored his red arrow. As he turned across the now-oncoming traffic, a particularly quick driver on the other side t-boned him and closed the intersection.

Wonder if he'll used "colour blind" as the excuse for turning through a red light?

New article online now : Crash / dog boxes

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