Delivering the Wrong Message

Now there's a perfect missed opportunity to place blame on the responsible party if I ever saw one.  Someone is not doing his job properly.

I'm wondering if Sgt. Hopkinson has been in the habit of driving a police car while drinking a beverage.

I completely understand that our Police forces have a very tough job to do.  They are concerned with more serious crimes like drug trafficing, and many think that traffic enforcement is just not macho enough for them.  However, when they are already on scene of a completely avoidable accident they have no excuse not to take action to dissuade future violations.

Our ICBC premiums are going up precisely because of this kind of incident.  I don't mind paying for my own stupidity, but I resent having to pay for the stupidity of our Provincial government which had the opportunity to completely ban cell phones and other forms of electronic devices, but chose not to.  I believe eating and drinking (anything) falls under the distracted driving laws.  Perhaps the officer was just trying to give the driver a break, but in this case he went way too far.

If an event precipitates a series of mistakes,
the event is not the blame for the mistakes.
Lack of training, skill and experience is.

Was it really the coffee that forced this driver to enter into an over-correction cascade?

Would banning coffee while driving have prevented a similar crash by the same young driver if the triggering factor was somebody not doing a shoulder check? The video of the Langely-Lexus crash is a perfect example of what an over-correction cascade is, and what it can lead to, without the involvement of coffee.

In this case, coffee was a factor that exposed the driver's inability, not the cause of the crash.

So in essence, banning distractions and other trigger factors only obfuscates the undertrained ticking-time-bombs driving on the roads, waiting to explode at the first sight of an out-of-the-ordinary event.

P.S. Mandatory race driver training for all!

Around 1999, when I was working as an ICBC Driver Examiner, I was conducting a Class 5 Road Test; the applicant was an experienced driver from South Africa, one of many who immigrated to Canada around that time.

As we were southbound on Lonsdale approaching the intersection of 15th Street, the light was red but I could see that the east/west light was amber.  A westbound driver - who should have stopped, and could have easily enough - instead gunned it to get through the intersection rather than wait for the next green.  Meanwhile, there was a 9-year-old boy, eager to cross the street at the west crosswalk; at the moment that the southbound light went green, the pedestrian light went to 'Walk' (or the visual equivalent) and he was off like a rocket without a sideways glance.

The westbound driver nailed him so violently that he was thrown through the air and richocheted off the front end of an eastbound van that was stopped on the other side of the road, and then just dropped in the road, inert.  In all my years of driving I've never seen anything so sickening and shocking.  I can still see it in my mind; I thought he might have been killed outright, he was hit so hard.

There were many people around to call 911 and already rendering assistance, and my applicant was terribly distressed by what we had seen, so we continued through the last couple of blocks of her Road Test; remarkably, she kept it together and passed.  But as soon as I was back in the office, I was on the phone to the RCMP to offer my eyewitness account of what had just transpired.  I was upset by the driver's stupidity and irresponsibility, and determined to do whatever I could to see him held to account.

The officer who took on the accident investigation and case file followed up on my call, and I was able to provide a statement as to what had occurred.  But I remained concerned, and wanted to know how things had transpired from there; did the kid survive, how badly was he injured - and what was the driver charged with?  That guy deserved to pay, in my opinion.

About three weeks after the occurrence, in response to my nagging, the officer let me know what had eventually happened, and what they had done about it.

Miraculously, the boy was on the way to recovery in hospital, and it was expected that he wouldn't actually suffer any long term physical effects thanks to the resilience of youth.  But what quite surprised me was the decision by the RCMP that they had elected not to charge the driver.  Why?  Because the guy was so emotionally overwraught and upset by what he had done that they simply didn't see any point.  It had become obvious that he was going to be living with that horrendous moment for the rest of his life; and he sure as hell wasn't going to be speeding up to try and make it through any more traffic lights.  Further penalties on top of this seemed redundant.

The comments by Sgt. Hopkinson were stupid, no doubt about it.  I'm guessing that he felt somewhat defensive because he had made the determination not to charge that young woman, and perhaps rationalized this poorly.  But maybe he also realized that after inflicting serious injury on herself and her friends, not to mention destroying her car, further penalty wasn't going to make any difference to anything.  Her life has been turned upside down, and she can never have those moments back, she can't rewind the film.  She won't ever do this again, even if there comes a time when she can afford another car and the insurance payments, (and assuming she has the guts to get back behind the wheel); after this crash, I would rather have her on the road than many of the self-righteous morons who are out there, quite frankly.