IDK about the UK, but in Germany street racers have killed many innocent bystanders, just for the crime of crossing the street at night. So yes please, enforce rules more strongly.
In fact, even ambulances crash into each other every now and then at night, because they usually drive without their horns (technically then they aren't allowed to run red lights, only if it's been sounding for at least 15 seconds, but people want to sleep).
I'm in the UK, and by the time you've reached a certain age, we've all heard of families torn about by bad driving. The couple who we bought our house from, the mother pulled out in front of two racers just down the road from us and ended up with life changing injuries, unable to walk and with brain damage. A little boy at our local nursery died along with his father hitting a van head on who'd crossed the road taking a corner too fast.
It's not just boy racers, but plenty of older men and women who are reckless and inpatient in their usual driving. There are people who think that their luxury cars are an excuse to break the road rules as well as the rules of common courtesy.
Despite the UK having one of the safest road networks in the world, still around 75 people die or are seriously injured per week in car accidents. For a preventable injury that is still far too high.
Purely anecdotal, I noticed there were far more people in fancy cars going at ridiculous speeds in ridiculous stretches of roads with loads of pedestrians and cyclists around when I lived in Bristol compared to the Netherlands. I called them CICs: "Cunts In Cars".
Road design probably plays part in this; a comparatively wide fully asphalted road probably isn't the best design for 20mph. Traffic calming and all that.
It's a prevalent attitude of successful people who are used to lower ethical standards applied to them and being given priority in their day-to-day life. An extra factor is that premium cars (irrespective of wealth) are sought after by people with negative personality traits [1].
I don't know why the difference between UK and Netherlands, maybe due to differences in income equity and judicial fairness? I imagine the behaviour is worse in countries with worse social fairness (Russia, even US?).
In my observation, in the Netherlands someone with a flashy car is quicker seen as a show-off. Generally speaking, it has a somewhat more grounded and egalitarian culture. Someone calling themselves a "Baron such and such" or "Sir so and so" like they do in the UK? The entire country will roll their eyes.
In the UK, it's somewhere in-between the mainland European and American attitudes, where someone with a flashy car is seen as deserving of it through their hard work.
And not everyone who drives like an idiot has a flashy car by the way; lots of those pumped VW things and whatnot as well (in both countries).
Really? American police kill about 1000 people a year and the vast, vast majority of these killings are totally justified cases where deadly force was used to stop an imminent deadly threat. On the other hand about 36,000 people died on American roads last year and it's hard for me to imagine a scenario where any of them could have been necessary.
The real difference is that road deaths are far less likely to trigger a media circus.
I mean, structurally, you're right that police violence is a bigger problem, but I don't really understand the relevance to my comment when this entire thread was talking about cars.
But you don't even know any of the facts of the case? How would you have no hesitation when you have no idea what happened and haven't even listened to the defenses argument?
That's enough for me. Don't care what the arguments are, how much they were peer pressured or what their home lives were like. Obviously if the argument is "the cops got the wrong guy" then I'll listen to it.
I know all of these things, and furthermore, I'm not in the jurisdiction so it's all a hypothetical. I'm saying that in the hypothetical where I am asked to pass judgment on, and sentence, someone who street raced (for any reason) and killed a person, I would with no hesitations sentence that person to life without parole, and would probably only hesitate about an hour before sentencing them to death.
As far as I can find the lawyers are trying to get the only objective piece of evidence - the cars own logs - thrown out. Claim the witnesses are unreliable at judging speed and are clinging to an early statement that it might have been "low speed collision".
If we give them the benefit of the doubt why would they try to get rid of evidence that they were driving within legal limits? Especially when they have to deal with several "unreliable" witnesses claiming that they were driving too fast?
The reality is you never know if you’re really alone. Plenty of people are killed on “empty” country roads because the driver didn’t see them due to inappropriate speed, distractions or a combination.
The parent has a couple of counter examples to that. Seems like the caveats, that sometimes you do actually know you're alone, are exactly the scenarios we're talking about.
Unless you have constant surveillance on the km in front of you, you cannot know you're alone. Things happen. They may not be likely at all, but as a whole we're not good judges of probability.
Also, even if you crash with nobody around at the time, someone else may crash into the rescue team just arriving to help you.
At least in the more remote parts of Canada, hitting a moose at high speed has a very good probability of taking you out along with the moose. So driving respectfully at night is a really good idea.
IDK to me that sounds like downplaying the issue. Drunk driving is not ok, not even in remote parts of Scotland.
As for driving 35 in a 30 zone... I can agree that it's not much of an issue if it's next to a school and you drive in the middle of the night: there won't be any children entering or leaving the school at that time. But generally, these racers drive way faster, and don't give a fuck about any of these rules, red lights, etc. They see the roads as a racetrack. On the computer or console, they can play GTA V or whatever, I don't care. Just if they do it in the real world they deserve harsh punishments, as the risk of killing people is so extremely high.
30 v 35mph is not a trivial increase. It's nearly 20% faster. And kinetic energy scales quadratically with velocity.
According to a popular UK road safety campaign, if you hit a pedestrian at 35mph you're 2.5x more likely to kill them than if you hit them at 30mph (50% chance vs 20% chance)
The thing is expectations and boundaries. As a participant of traffic you need to be able to feel secure, regardless of day or night. So in your example (and I live near a school and 30 km/hour street near it), if there is hardly any traffic at night you don't expect anyone either. Which might make someone driving 50 km/hour even more dangerous than when everyone is driving too hard constantly during day.
Hmmm that's a good point indeed. I never said that you should drive 35 in a 30 zone, just that it's less of an issue than say drunk driving or road racing. Accidents can still happen though.
Surely there are animals frolicking around in these remote parts of Scotland. Think of deer. Traffic rules generally make sense, you should follow them. I live near a school. Its 30 km/hour around the school. People drive 50-60. Its dangerous, even for me. This selfish behavior has to stop.
In fact, even ambulances crash into each other every now and then at night, because they usually drive without their horns (technically then they aren't allowed to run red lights, only if it's been sounding for at least 15 seconds, but people want to sleep).