Someone drove into a family this evening. Two boys are severely injured. I’m shaking because it happened super close and it could have been anyone I know, or me.
There’s a big proportion of absurdly dangerous drivers here in Mayotte. Most people drive okay, and there’s a few fine & courteous drivers too. But this small demographic endangers everybody else.
On an island without curbs, where the rainy season makes every road muddy and slippery, where entire families routinely go to the mosque and back on foot twice a day, there’s also dicks in audis, cunts in huge jeeps, and neither get the hint. It’s small villages throughout, a few extended families, everybody knows everybody. The fucker is still being deincarcerated from his 2 ton metal box. You can be sure he will be shunned for the rest of his life. But that’s a meager consolation. It could have been me, it could have been my wife, it could have been any of the kids I know from the neighbourhood,…
I needed to get this off my chest. God, really, genuinely fuck cars.
Be safe,
Hadri
I don’t know if it’s negligence though, if many car accidents are caused by drivers looking on their phones (that to me seems quite damn intentional stupidity) and crashing into pedestrians and bicyclists because the first named ones didn’t stop.
Driver inattention is negligence. Road design that allows a lapse in concentration to cause injuries or fatalities is negligent design. Drivers failing to follow the rules of the roads is a sign of negligent training. Unsafe drivers continuing to maintain a license is also negligence.
There is no way for an automobile to collide with something without there being negligence or malice on the part of some involved party.
All collisions are avoidable. Calling them accidents implies otherwise.
Here in my part of the US road design is usually decent for protecting pedestrians, and my family has been doing a lot of walking since pandemic.
But now my youngest is in college, and he’s continued the “long walk” tradition. But the town he’s in has no sidewalks outside of campus, has roads without even a shoulder. Now he’s at much higher risk of a moment of inattentiveness by some drunk or texting college kid
I don’t know if willfully calling while operating a tonne-heavy armoured vehicle, counts as mere negligence, malice maybe.
malice is an evil intent. That isn’t the case when someone texts and drives. They are choosing to impair themselves, but with the intent of continuing to drive normally.
Negligence is a failure to exercise a duty of care. Malice is an evil intent or extreme recklessness, which I don’t think texting reaches.
But it is extremely reckless to text while driving. You’re then not taking attention to the road, and it contributes greatly to collisions.
carbrain notwithstanding, the standard for reckless disregard in law is much greater than texting while driving.
And both can be negligence, the legal term for failing to take proper care. You also have “gross negligence” when you have gone above and beyond in failing to prevent an accident. Like if you ignored signs and barricades and drove onto a closed road, which led to an unintentional collision with a cyclist in a road race.
Malice is when you wanted to caus some kind of harm – like “let’s scare that pedestrian by driving close to him… Oops I hit him.” Even though you didn’t want to hit him, wanting to scare him is intent, and malice.
Replying for the benefit of the commenter above you.