why is alcohol legal: the george best/opening hours thread

Agreed, we should test people before they get a licence. This kind of incident is very common, in a massive majority of cases it is a one off event, implying a mistake (imperfection) rather than incompetence. I think a better idea would be to allow the police discretionary powers to charge a driver with driving without due care and attention in cases which they feel are the exception to this majority, and then give the courts discretionary powers to give a minor punishment (endorsing a licence (if you have such a thing in the States I do not know), fines, suspension of licence, etc). No. It is simply a fact, and coupled with the idea that in most cases it is a one off event, it seems to indicate that these things are a result of simple one time mistakes. You seem to be implying that hitting a parked vehicle has automatically condemned you as being an incompetent and irresponsible driver rather than a imperfect one. A responsible driver stops after an incident, exchanges insurance details and admits liability to their insurer. A person who has a record of hitting parked vehicles?? This is a different thing than we have been discussing so far. A person with a 'record' implies an incompetent driver (who is probably paying an obscene amount of insurance with an unbelievable excess (or deductable as you might call it), so would (on average) fair worse whilst impaired.

I work in insurance, so its weird to be on EvC as an 'expert'. The funny thing is that basically both schraf and you seem to be right here.Basically certain factors increase your risk. Driving the vehicle to work every day, driving a high powered vehicle, living in a dodgy area, being a construction worker or footballer, being a young driver, being an inexperienced driver, being male, having driving convictions, etc etc etc.Some of these factors don't increase your risk of having an accident, but the risk is that any accident you do have will cost more (eg being a footballer means injury claims from passengers will be more likely higher). Some are a combination of the two.Having any accident increases your premiums, but this is basically regardless of the cost of the claim (YMMV, different insurers might do this differently), and generally involves losing things such as 'no claims discount'...this represents you being a higher risk for being involved in a further accident.As far as citations and tickets, not all of them will increase everyone's insurance. Many minor convictions are ignored for the first offense (eg speeding, minor traffic violations, parking illegally etc).

Heh - this is getting off topic Still this confuses me. Why is it suprising that a group which has extra driving experience has fewer accidents? Surely the figure is surprising, but not because men drive more.

Heh - its that kind of thing that leads people to believe that black people are stupid, or left handed people prone to domestic violence or other silly things. You can't accept a small sample just because it is the sample you happened to look at unfortunately, the chances are that you do not have a representative sample. Then you know that small sample sizes interpreted subjectively are a great way to twist statistics.

Your rates go up if your insurance pays money out for any damages and cannot recover them. If an incident was not your fault, ideally your insurance company will be able to recover the costs, but this is not always the case.The best advice is to try and claim from the third party's (the person at fault) insurance company first, if you have time. That way your own insurance company should hopefully not pay any money out. You can also reimburse your own insurance company if it turns out cheaper to do that than shoulder the premium rise.

Yes RAZD, that was exactly my point, well done for picking up on it, I'm trying to sneak spousal abuse through as socially acceptable. Oh wait, spousal abuse is a deliberate act and not called an accident. I think you'll find my actual point was something about mistakes. It was about incompetence versus imperfection. As I said it depends. It could have been a simple error, your maths is all very nice, all it concludes is that whatever error was made occurred within braking distance, or the error involved increasing the breaking distance (for example if he took 2.5s to look in the mirror and back (including focusing times), he's travelled almost 75 feet, that leaves him with 25feet within which to brake, which can be reduced as appropriate depending on how long he had been on the road when he checked his mirrors).It could be that he was incompetent. The numbers we'll need are how many miles this driver has driven, how many fault accidents he's been involved in, how many fault accidents he has succesfully avoided? How many parked vehicles as he not hit?Once we have those kinds of figures, we'll need to discuss what figures would be defined as incompetent. The study reported earlier seems to believe that the average is about 1 accident every 200,000 miles, at an average of 30mph that's an error that leads to an accident once every 6,600 hours. If you drive 4 hours a day (quite a lot) then we are looking at an accident every 4 and a half years.We could get all six sigma about this and try to estimate how many opportunities to be involved in an accident there were in those 4 and a half years. Six sigma 'perfection' requires no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. If the average driver has about 5 accidents per million miles (and there are plenty of opportunities to have an accident per mile, surely) I think we can tentatively conclude that if six sigma is the standard, then the average driver is not incompetent at all. Well the equation is fairly self-apparant. Driving in an unsafe manner is obviously irresponsible. So the standards for good driving and road design are perfect? What are the expected imperfections? You condemn somebody for hitting your parked vehicle of being incompetent despite the fact that almost everybody is involved in a fault accident at some time in their life, and given this person was driving to work, their mileage may well be high. The 'norm of average behaviour' is to be involved in several fault accidents over the course of your life.With that in mind, how can you call somebody incompetent without considering his accident history?

First an erroneous comparison to spousal abuse now an erroneous comparison to disaster management. He did fail to miss a parked car...as far as we know he failed to miss one parked car out of 10 million parked cars, that's a pretty good record for not hitting parked cars. If I was looking at the data of parked car related incidents, I would regard this gentleman's car hitting incident to be an outlier, and judge it to be a mistake. An error. Every human on this planet makes errors (except maybe bren), some mistakes make you look dumb, some mistakes end up damaging things (am I an incompetent walker if I lose balance for a moment and knock over a glass, after 15 years of incident free walking?), if you make lots of mistakes it shows you are incompetent. Are you doing this deliberately? Yes, RAZD, of course, I believe that consistently causing damage to other vehicles is a mark of competence because I believe that occasionally making a mistake whilst driving that leads to damage is an expected risk due to human error.No RAZD. My position is clear.People make mistakes.
Those mistakes can result in absolutely no damage.
Those mistakes can result in damage to third parties
Making a mistake does not make you incompetent.You have not been able differentiate between this man having made a mistake and him being an incompetent driver. My previous posts set up possible ways we can start to make this distinction.

Not suggesting that a common event should be considered acceptable. Very common accidents are not comparable to less common (but still too common) deliberate acts of violence. What makes it 'acceptable' is that it is a mistake.Most people will have a fault accident in their vehicle (it is common); you are suggesting that most people are incompetent drivers. A position I have tried to show as erroneous, by discussing accident frequency and opportunities for fault, which you haven't addressed. RAZD, if you read what I actually said, you'll find the answer to that question. I'm trying to work out why you seem to have devolved your debating style ten years. The full quote, Mr Quote Miner, is:

quote:

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Yes, RAZD, of course, I believe that consistently causing damage to other vehicles is a mark of competence because I believe that occasionally making a mistake whilst driving that leads to damage is an expected risk due to human error.

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No RAZD.

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The first half of the sentence is the conclusion you somehow reached given my position outlined in the second half. The final sentence is my respsonse to your rather bizarre false dichotomy in Message 110This message has been edited by Modulous, Wed, 30-November-2005 07:52 AM

Isn't an error in judgment a mistake? Its certainly an error, and an error I thought was fairly synonymous with mistake. So the speed at which an error occurs or the distance from another car a person is when they make a mistake transforms it from an error into incompetence? I only know of one failing that this person has made, I tried to discuss other failings this person made, but it appears you didn't know about them either. As I have said, if they were travelling at 20mph and looking in their mirror for 2.5 seconds, whilst drifting off course they can do a significant amount of damage. Wet feet slipping on pedals, a sneezing fit, glaring sunlight, concentrating on one thing to the detriment of another, being in too much of a hurry or driving too close to other vehicles, all these things are driving errors that just about everyone is guilty of from time to time. In the majority of cases no damage is done, or the error is rectified quick enough to avoid an accident. Its actually nothing like it, patting cheeks and slapping are both deliberate acts. Its more like saying everybody makes mistakes, we are all liable for any damage caused by those mistakes. What you are trying to say is that everybody drops merchandise in shops, so dropping a vase is not a sign of incompetence. Did I say that at any point? Or have I said the opposite? I believe Message 78 should clear this up for us:

quote:

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This kind of incident is very common, in a massive majority of cases it is a one off event, implying a mistake (imperfection) rather than incompetence. I think a better idea would be to allow the police discretionary powers to charge a driver with driving without due care and attention in cases which they feel are the exception to this majority, and then give the courts discretionary powers to give a minor punishment (endorsing a licence (if you have such a thing in the States I do not know), fines, suspension of licence, etc).

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An interesting criteria, but I feel it is flawed. Hitting a parked car at 20mph or near to it is very very very rarely going to cause death, though minor injuries are a possibility. If it had been oncoming the chances are higher, but would this person had made the error if traffic conditions were changed to this extent? We don't know, it is absolute conjecture. And likewise, you have not done a thing to convince me that your tiny tiny sample size of 30 seconds of this person's driving experience is indicative of his driving skill. I have tried to put forward criteria such as parked cars missed vs parked cars hit. I have tried to compare this man's driving to the average of other drivers. It could be that he has had five times less accidents than your neighbour, or Joe Average. You have not provided any actual evidence that the accident was caused by incompetence rather than as the result of a one off error.You'll have to trust me when I tell you that I deal with a dozen accidents a day; I hear about this kind of incident and the plethora of reasons behind them, some bullshit, some sincere. On the grand majority of incidents like this it is a one off event, for which they are embarassed and upset about. Sometimes someone will tell me that the person was 'parked wrong' or some crap like that. That's the first indication of an incompetent driver, someone who won't accept that it was their fault, accept responsibility and move on. And it is these kinds of people that more frequently have mulitple claims on their files.If your man had this kind of attitude then perhaps he was incompetent, thought more data would be needed than your obviously biased opinion. No worries, if you want to discuss it any further and want to be on topic, feel free to start a coffee house topic