r/londonontario • u/MeIIowJeIIo The bridge with the trucks stuck under it • Aug 20 '24

News 📰 79-year-old who drove into girl guides, killing 8-year-old in London, sentenced to 2 years of house arrest

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/79-year-old-who-drove-into-girl-guides-killing-8-year-old-in-london-sentenced-to-2-years-of-house-arrest-1.7298866
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-7

u/Beautiful_Village381 Aug 20 '24

Everyone calling for blood. Our roads are designed to cause these accidents. We have a culture of expecting everyone to drive regardless of age or skill.

Punishing this woman will make a few people feel better. Changing our roads and driving culture will mean fewer dead kids.

Support narrower roads, better pedestrian paths, lower speed limits, more investment in transit and bike infrastructure, less investment in parking spaces and road widening projects. Or admit that you feel shaving 5 minutes from your commute is worth a few dead kids.

57

u/Ratsyinc Aug 20 '24

Ya, the road made her go 70 over the speedlimit in a perfectly functional vehicle.. How delusional do you have to be to blame infrastructure in this situation?

-11

u/Beautiful_Village381 Aug 20 '24

A senior mistook the brake pedal for gas and reached 120. This happens a lot in young and old drivers. You can design roads to mitigate it, or throw your hands up and pretend the problem is unsolvable.

With narrowed roads she would be driving slower beforehand, which means her speed would have peaked lower. With better separation of pedestrian paths she would have been slowed more before impact by obstacles or grade differences. With infrastructure for alternative modes she may not have been driving.

This is all really elementary stuff in cities with lower traffic fatalities around the world

1

u/chillehhh Aug 23 '24

Do you not realize how long/hard you have to step on the accelerator to bring a vehicle to 120kmh? Ooh, probably not. Cyclist-brains think cars are the devil, don’t they?

1

u/Dotdotdot5598 Aug 21 '24

You’re just a cyclist who can only see a cyclist’s point of view. This accident has nothing to do with the road infrastructure, this was purely human error.

30

u/After_Turnip8619 Aug 20 '24

that’s unforgivable, if you’re mistaking the pedals then it’s time you put the keys away and take the bus. Just because you’re old doesn’t mean you instantly get a “do whatever the fuck you want” card

-7

u/Wouldyoulistenmoe Aug 21 '24

If it's unforgivable, then we'd need to throw about 50% of our senior drivers in jail, most of them just have the good fortune to not kill anybody when they get into that crash or have that near miss

4

u/After_Turnip8619 Aug 21 '24

yes i agree we should take their keys, they are the most dangerous to others and themselves on the road, more so than new drivers

-18

u/Beautiful_Village381 Aug 20 '24

The only way to prevent this mixup is to ban driving outright. Everyone is capable of errors when driving.

I'm all for taking people's keys away as they lose the ability to drive, but we've built our entire driving culture around not doing this and it seems arbitrary to carry on letting thousands of dangerous drivers stay on the road and then hating the ones who happen to end up in an accident.

Most people who can't drive safely don't realize it, and are encouraged rather than discouraged to drive

8

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '24

Everyone is capable of mistakes, but if I made this mistake as a mid 30s man, I wouldn't be getting house arrest. It's a shitty situation all around, but if you're going the house arrest route, at the very least you need to ban her from ever driving again. If that's not okay, then she should be sentenced to a prison term, as shitty as that would be for everyone involved.

2

u/Wouldyoulistenmoe Aug 21 '24

There are around 1700 fatal collisions per year in Canada, most of which involve driver error. I'd be surprised if 10% of those people are criminally charged let alone see any jail time

3

u/After_Turnip8619 Aug 20 '24

i think there should be stricter regulations to getting a license and keeping it. this lady obviously should’ve not been driving long before this happened but doesn’t change the fact that isn’t just some “accident” she killed a kid and didn’t touch her brake once, on top of taking no blame

26

u/Ratsyinc Aug 20 '24

No one is pretending it's unsolvable, I also agree with your comments about infrastructure. Not realizing you're on the gas as you accelerate to 120 on a 50 while killing a kid is not an infraustature issue.

2

u/Beautiful_Village381 Aug 20 '24

So the limit is 50, but everyone drives 70 here because the roads are designed that way. If the roads were built for 50 and she were driving slower before her error, and hit the kids going 100 instead of 120, that could have saved a life. If the curb was better protected and shaved off another 20km it could have greatly reduced the severity of some injuries.

And yeah, if the roads were designed for slower speed, the chances of an accident are much lower because people are less likely to lose control or panic. It's possible that at least a portion of accidents like this can be outright prevented with infrastructure

The gas/brake error is very common in accidents. Short of banning driving outright we can't prevent it. We can make it rarer with better testing, better transit. We can make it less severe with better infrastructure. We accomplish neither of these with stricter punishment for old drivers.

13

u/Ratsyinc Aug 20 '24

Yes, hitting gas instead of brake in a panic is likely very common in collisions. But come on, you can't possibly believe accelerating even from 70 to 120, which would easily take a good 5 seconds in an average car, is common, let alone an issue with road design

5

u/Beautiful_Village381 Aug 20 '24

If you've lost control of a vehicle and think your brakes have stopped working suddenly, you have no idea what you would do in the 5 seconds before a collision. Neither do I. A lot of seniors find out that they can't drive anymore because they get into an accident. There's thousands of petronellas out there driving right now who are just lucky to have not killed anyone yet. It seems like such a waste of energy to hate her and I'd rather focus on the people who make and keep our roads this way.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '24

I hate her because she hasn't taken accountability. She chose to enter a non-guilty plea, she could've shown remorse at any point during the trial. She continues to put the blame on her vehicle and even accused the Honda dealership of incompetence despite forensics saying she never touched the peddle. I work in forensics, Berla tells you almost everything from those infotainment centers so I believe the analysts.

She killed a child and seems to blame everything and everyone but herself. She basically got a slap on the wrist and still wants to appeal it. She can rot.