Having narrowly avoided a wing mirror which parted company from a motor bike this morning and last week spotted a very long length of plastic pipe in the road my question is who is responsible for clearing the accumulation of exhaust, tyre and bumper bits which litter the verges and how often are they supposed to do it?
A colleague a few years back hit a glass fibre fish pond in the same stretch of road causing considerable damage to his motor and hilarity at his insurance company.
Any odd bits of rubbish been spotted by the back room?
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Whilst trying (not) very hard to restrain my natural cynicism, maybe the answer here is that road rubbish clearance will fall into the category of local road maintanance? Could it be that the body responsible is well aware that they may not be completely fulfilling their legal requirements, but it is in fact cheaper to pay compensation to those few that suffer damage and then complain than it is to do the job?
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In the film 'Fight Club' where Edward Norton's character is saying how he works for a large car manufacturer, and his job was to work out what to do when a dangerous design fault was found:
A) Do a recall and fix the fault on everyones cars
B) Pay compensation for accident injuries/deaths occuring because of the design fault
If A cost more than B, they did nothing
I think this is the kind of thing Dipstick is getting at.
(And yes, i watched 'Fight Club' for about the fifth time last night)
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And the other thing that gets me wound up is the amount of rubbish left by contractors after they've dug up the road.
Favourite nasties are the aluminium frames for their road signs, bits of red and white plastic board, old cone bases( usually quite hefty lumps of plastic)and other objects calculated to puncture or smash glass.
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re fight club
This is based on what happened to ford
www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm
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That is a truly incredible link tone, i had no idea that story was based on anything so scarily real. Im surprised i hadnt heard about that before actually, guess im too young
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re fight club This is based on what happened to ford www.fordpinto.com/blowup.htm
Actually, there's apparently more to it than that. Apparently there was no particular explosion problem with the Pinto. The following was posted on AlfaOwner by TorontoSpider, with links to the information:
Yes the Pinto/Bobcat got slammed by 60 Minutes for blowing up on a rear end collision, but their journalism practices are more than suspect. That program was the same one that tried to prove many years later that Audis suddenly and inexplicably accelerated and caused accidents. When that happened, however there were enough real media outlets that took a look at how they rigged their tests and exposed the TV program for fraudulent practices -- namely for deliberately rigging the test.
"ABC News has analyzed a great many of Ford's secret rear-end crash tests," confided correspondent Sylvia Chase. And they showed that if you owned a Ford--not just a Pinto, but many other models--what happened to the car in the film could happen to you. The tone was unrelentingly damning, and by the show's end popular anchorman Hugh Downs felt constrained to add his own personal confession. "You know, I've advertised Ford products a few years back, Sylvia, and at the time, of course, I didn't know and I don't think that anybody else did that this kind of ruckus was going to unfold." You got the idea that he would certainly think twice before repeating a mistake like that.
"If ABC really analyzed those UCLA test reports, it had every reason to know why the Ford in the crash film burst into flame: there was an incendiary device under it. The UCLA testers explained their methods in a 1968 report published by the Society of Automotive Engineers, fully ten years before the 20/20 episode. As they explained, one of their goals was to study how a crash fire affected the passenger compartment of a car, and to do that they needed a crash fire. But crash fires occur very seldom; in fact, the testers had tried to produce a fire in an earlier test run without an igniter but had failed. Hence their use of the incendiary device (which they clearly and fully described in their write-up) in the only test run that produced a fire. [source: ]walterolson.com/articles/crashtests.html]
For what it's worth I've seen a lot of Bobcats and Mustangs after they had been in rear end collisions, and they certainly weren't fire victims. Actually Pinto rear axels and suspensions gave junk yards a huge chunk of their business for years and years. Those components along with Mustang II rear end parts (which shared the same suspension pieces with the Pinto) are still finding their way into hotrod and muscle car rebuilds -- and not just on Ford-based rebuilds.
At the time all of the big three offered vehicles with gastanks located in almost exactly the same place. It was standard industry practice.
"On the Ford Pinto case, the best resource is unfortunately not online, but is well worth a trip to the local law library: the late Gary Schwartz's 1991 Rutgers Law Review article "The Myth of the Ford Pinto Case" (43 Rutgers L. Rev. 1013-1068). Schwartz, a law professor at UCLA and prominent expert on product liability, showed that (as our editor summed up his findings in 1993): "everyone's received ideas about the fabled 'smoking gun' memo are false. The actual memo did not pertain to Pintos, or even Ford products, but to American cars in general; it dealt with rollovers, not rear-end collisions; it did not contemplate the matter of tort liability at all, let alone accept it as cheaper than a design change; it assigned a value to human life because federal regulators, for whose eyes it was meant, themselves employed that concept in their deliberations; and the value it used was one that they, the regulators, had set forth in documents. In retrospect, Schwartz writes, the Pinto's safety record appears to have been very typical of its time and class." [source: overlawyered.com]
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There are two stated cases on this. The principle being in one that a Local Authority could not be expected to clear rubbish from a road when they couldn't reasonably be expected to know about it. The other surrounded a Duty of Care on the Police over a patch of diesel on a road. The outcome was (IIRC - it is some years ago) that there wasn't - this was overturned (excuse pun) and then re-instated. Consequently the area is still unclear and requires clearing up by new case law or new law. (excuse terrble puns not delibrate)
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I spotted a dead muntjack lying in the road yesterday morning. Now, I'm very partial to a bit of venison but as I'd no idea how long it had been lying there I decided against stopping to pick it up.
Terry
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I had a 4 inch nail through my tyre on the newly re-surfaced stretch of the M4 last friday, i suspect left from the works.
Also my boss had a 6 inch one through his brand new £250 motorbike tyre on the same piece of road 3 weeks ago.
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Friend of mine had his new Merc written off by hitting a deer last year.
I have narrowly missed deer in the wooded back lanes round me a number of times - its really is scary when one suddenly jumps out into the road in front of you cos they're usually bounding along and come into vision about 10 ft up in the air exactly where you are not expecting to see anything.
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Did you know that if you hit and kill a deer it's illegal for you to take it? Someone else can have it but not the killer, unless licenced to take game. Same with other game - pheasant, partridge etc.
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Try hitting a Kudu at around 80mph. That really makes a mess.
Kevin...
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Deer need to be gutted within 40 minutes of the animal being killed otherwise the meat spoils.
--
I read often, only post occasionally
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I think after 40 minutes I'd be more gutted than the deer - especially if my pride and joy was a write-off!
Graeme
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...but of course if you have a bull-bar fitted etc (ducks for cover)
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A long time ago I had "crash bars" fitted to my 'bike which, if I remember correctly, were supposed to protect your legs, but usually bent the frame of the 'bike. Do bull bars do the same to cars when hitting something more solid than a deer?
Tim{P}
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I think if I'd hit it hard enough to write off my Merc then the guy behind me is welcome to it..
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Anyone for venison pancake?
Can't say I've ever hit a deer, but there are a few bunny-coloured skid marks out in the New Forest with my tyreprints on them. Something surreal about coming round a corner in the early hours of the morning to find the entire cast of Watership Down having a production meeting in the middle of the road. Even more surreal is to see, in your rearview mirror, a selection of bunnies sailing through the air illuminated by your brake lights.
Personally I think the Badger I saw ambling off in the distance had coralled them there for that very purpose. Sick sense of humour, your New Forest badger.
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What a horrible image! I'm going to have nightmares now and all those unfortunate bunnies will probably have the voice of Richard Briers.... I are you sure it was a badger doing the herding and not a chicken?
I have hit a pheasant at about 60 mph. I couldn't be bothered to swerve as the stupid thing went onto the verge then turned round at the last second to go back across the road. It made a mighty thump. I also got a pigeon just after taking my triumph out for the first time this year. I couldn't be bothered to swerve out of the way for that either. Luckily most of the bits had dropped of by the time I got home :-)
A friend of mine managed to get a pigeon in his mga. Dratted thing oozed blood all the way down the screen and if you know anything about 1950s wipers they aren't that good for removing road kill!
teabelly
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I once dated a policewoman who was on a pursuit driving course. Besides the excellent advice to look at the vehicle at the front of a queue of traffic, which is the cornerstone of anticipation, she also said she was taught to swerve for nothing at high speed.
And by nothing she meant nothing and no-one. This seemed really callous to me until I swerved violently to avoid a hedgehog one late night in Spain.
The 3 girls in the car screamed because I nearly rolled it. I'd endangered the lives of 4 people under 25 for a hedgehog. I felt like a right (insert your own hedgehog pun) and there was much soul searching and apologies afterwards.
I try to swerve for nothing at high speed now - where does the IAM stand on this I wonder.
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>Any odd bits of rubbish been spotted by the back room?
Yes. The one that always mystifies me! Discarded shoes, normally just one. How they get there I'll never know.
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Anyone remember Flanders and Swann? I'm too young but still do.
From Bedstead Men
The society for butting broken bedsteads into ponds
Has another solemn purpose to fulfil.
For our coastal sands and beaches,
All where waving willow wands,
Mark the borders of a river, stream or rill.
You will always find a single laceless, left-hand leather boot.
A bootless British river bank's a shock.
We leave them there at midnight, you can track a member's route,
By the alternating prints of boot and sock.
Full text at timothyplatypus.tripod.com/FaS/anotherhat_bed.html
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What an apt post for someone named welliesorter! So your sorting expertise extends to other types of footwear?
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