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That's not entirely the case that we put everything on pedestrians.
If a car drives over a family the driver is going to have a trial for manslaughter charges. The driver is liable for their injuries and they legally have to have insurance to cover that.
Cars need to get safety tested, need to be licensed, drivers need to be licensed, etc.
It would be difficult to kill someone on a bike or walking by comparison.
You'd be shocked at how little traffic violence is treated as manslaughter. In Ontario, Canada, a lady only got a temporary driving suspension for driving through a group of girl guides at 120km/h in a school zone, killing one and injuring several others. The driver even denied responsibility in court.
The public dialog is still that pedestrians and cyclists need to be careful around cars with victim blaming when people are hit. When school starts, the kids better be careful. Where are all the signs and messaging around how drivers need to be careful? I constantly see drivers speeding and rolling stop signs in school zones but it's completely normalized and shrugged off.
That story was about an 80 year old woman who got the wrong pedal, she wasn't cruising at 120 just flying down the road. She shouldn't have been driving at all.
You're not wrong though.
What the fuck are the tests and license for if this person is able to obtain one. We need stricter testing and license requirements
No disagreement there.
Iโve always felt we should retest frequently even for healthy young people.
Traffic laws change. Street signage changes. Car safety features change.
Itโs in all of our best interest that people arenโt driving with 25 year old ideas and 25 years of bad habits.
If a car drives over a family the driver is going to have a trial for manslaughter charges. The driver is liable for their injuries and they legally have to have insurance to cover that.
This rarely happens (at least, in Canada), from what I've seen in recent pedestrian and cyclist fatalities.
For starters, most are hit and runs, and often go unsolved.
When someone is caught, they almost never see a manslaughter charge. To add insult to injury, they'll usually get a traffic violation and not a criminal charge. Failure to obey a road sign (even if that caused someone to die), for example.
And any consequences for actually killing someone tends to go with the lightest jail sentence you can imagine.
We had a truck driver kill sixteen people. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, but only served 3. Less than six months for every person killed. He would have gotten more if he hit someone's mailbox.
I've heard of testimonies where people who have had their partner killed by a driver are not covered financially and any money that gets paid out goes to their insurance company, and not their family.
Being a pedestrian or cyclist in north america is incredibly high risk.