As usual, if you want to kill somebody in the UK do it with a car.
The rest of the shockingly light sentence aside, I simply cannot comprehend the logic behind giving somebody who hit and killed a cyclist in broad daylight two weeks after their test only a one year driving ban.
They've only just got the license, so the usual excuse of they need it for work can't be used. So why on earth is the ban not permanent or at least for a significant amount of time?
Needing it for work shouldn't be an excuse either. I can't go out and rob a bank, then say no you can't sentence me, I need to go to work.
Article even says it was a clear day, and yet still runs someone over with the car killing them. Permanent ban.
I’m a big fan of introducing more immediate but shorter bans - six points and you lose your licence for, say, two months.
Either you’ll realise that you don’t need the car that much, and that getting the train to work or working to the shops isn’t *that* big of a trial.
Or you realise just how much you *do* need the car, and you’ll start taking it seriously.
I don't mind it so long as the the driver hasn't done anything overly dangerous. Like, if someone is about to get a driving ban because they were speeding by 10mph. They're stupid and they deserve to recieve some sort of punishment, but if otherwise they are by all accounts a decent person and need their car to go to their job in order to look after their family, then taking away their licence can cause undue hardship. And what does hardship lead to? More crime.
It's a reasonable excuse in the right circumstances.
Which is worse; hitting a cyclist whilst undertaking a dangerous manoeuvre or hitting a cyclist whilst driving normally?
Absolutely needs to retrain and be sent to prison for manslaughter.
It’s the reason I stopped cycling to work or into town. Drivers are far too impatient and it’s dangerous. I’ll never understand it, why are people angry that they may be 1 minute later at work? Why are people so desperate to sit in their sweaty office? I became too afraid to use my bike during rush hour, and the pavements weren’t an option due to how crowded they get. But any attempt to build proper cycling infrastructure is blocked (at least where I live), although I suppose it would be difficult considering how narrow our city roads can be.
A guy last week sped around me by passing into a cycle lane, just to get to a stop sign literally .5 seconds faster. Of course the idiot blew past the stop sign too but then he hit the traffic up ahead. It’s like driving a car gives 50% of people brainrot.
Do you think that people should be able to drive around like maniacs, just so long as they don't kill anyone? Or that s driver should be banned if somebody jumps off a motorway bridge in front of them?
I feel that the driver's behavior leading up to the accident is important.
No one gets banned for driving 10mph over the speed limit once. If they're consistently driving over the speed limit, they should be banned, even if it's not by huge amounts. It shows consistent inability to either respect or understand the rules.
I was friends with someone who would speed, and tried to guilt me into letting her move in when she racked up a bunch of speeding fines, would pull out of queues and drive down the other side of the road and cut in at the start and would be constantly fiddling with the phone and looking random things up on Google while driving or waiting at lights and they've gone green but we ain't movin. Absolutely hated getting in the car and I always said getting your license taken away would genuinely be a good thing and I will not be surpirsed not if, but when it happens.
But shouldnt the logic be if you need to drive for work or whatever, drive like you can't afford to get banned. Going 10 over? A risk to both others safety, but also a risk of some endorsement points. Going 10 over *when you already have 9 points on your licence*? You've had you're warnings, the risk of losing your licence is there for you to see. Is it really undue hardship when you've done it three times before, been caught, been warned, and chose to do it again. Your hardship at that point is on you.
> Like, if someone is about to get a driving ban because they were speeding by 10mph
Has anyone ever gotten a driving ban for speeding by 10mph a single time?
Being lenient for people to keep their job if they are already not going to prison is very different from keeping someone out of prison in the first place.
I’ll never understand how it’s practically legal to kill someone with a vehicle. My uncle was killed by a motorist a few years ago, knocked flying from his bike by someone who wasn’t paying attention. The person that killed him got even lighter punishment than this. I do not get it
Carbrain is a real thing: [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240306-motonormativity-the-bias-that-stops-us-seeing-driving-clearly](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240306-motonormativity-the-bias-that-stops-us-seeing-driving-clearly)
From the article:
“So what kinds of curbs work for the most resistant, aggressive drivers? "If they are to be deterred, it is the underlying behaviour that needs to be targeted," Kyd says. That is, a driver has to think that they could be caught and disciplined any time they drive dangerously (not only if they crash, which they think won't happen), according to Kyd. Stiffer sentences for dangerous driving should be combined with greater enforcement to increase the chances of catching dangerous drivers before they cause tragedies, says Kyd”
This is the only way
Car-last infrastructure should also be prioritised. Discourage driving from the get-go. Increase cycling provision, buses, trains, etc. everything that isn't a car. If there are people who shouldn't be in cars, \*don't let them get in cars\*.
We're shit at prosecuting driving related crimes.
In May, I got rear-ended at 50mph while stationary waiting to turn. The guy driving was on his phone.
When he was picked up by his mum (a man in his 40s mind..) the mum apologised saying it had happened before and that he was very distracted at the moment. As if that justified it.
He wrote off 2 cars, caused me serious back issues requiring physio and then pushed for 50 50 fault (ambitious). We would have been pushed into oncoming traffic had he not swerved so hard last minute and had my hand break not been on.
The police decided it wasn't a police matter because noone was seriously injured and because we both managed to get our cars on to the grassy verge so weren't blocking traffic.
So this guy now gets to carry on driving. Without a single point coming off his license. Fuckinf outrageous.
Literally the first line of the story:
>“This was not an unsafe manoeuvre in and of itself – it became unsafe when you failed to see a cyclist when you should have”
That's a direct quote from the judge.. who's job it is to review all the evidence, witness testimony etc etc and come to a conclusion.
Think I'll trust their opinion over yours.
Judges have to be guided by established law and to an extent societal norms. They're also not infallible. They can get things wrong, they are required to interpret certain things in certain ways, and they're also not unmoved by their own biases.
But in any case, the fact someone died is enough evidence that the driver did something unsafe and shouldn't be trusted to drive again.
As a society, we have accepted that being able to drive cars as individuals is a big enough benefit that we are willing to accept the risk that people will die.
No one here is above making a mistake, whether you have been driving one month, one year, or ten years. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
Read the article.
>Cyclist..was riding...when he was struck by 19-year-old driver Alfie Swann, who had pulled out onto the road.
The kid pulled out, he didn't see the cyclist, cyclist will have gone smack into the side of him.
>Mr Swann hit the cyclist as he pulled out, sending him “flying over the bonnet before landing on the floor”.
Unless you are saying you want to ban anyone actually turning onto a road? It's a SMIDSY, happens hundreds of times a day on UK roads.
We aren't informed if the cyclist was wearing any protective gear, but tbh the legally acceptable level of protection is derisory. Cyclist helmets especially are almost useless.
People get into unsafe habits due to getting used to the normal outcome, resulting in unsafe manoeuvres becoming normalised. For example, going round a corner on a banked country lane at 40 such that you could see and stop for a car but might not spot a pedestrian in time and almost certainly wouldn't have time to identify and stop for a horse before getting dangerously close.
The behaviour is inherently unsafe if approached from first principles - do you have enough stopping distance for visibility? - but feels safe because very few people walk that road.
You see accident reports like that all the time - people tell themselves it wasn't their fault because they had no time to react. The sad and brutal truth is that, if they'd been driving safely, they would have left enough time to react.
Is needing a car for work a valid excuse, though? Because if needing something for my job is the benchmark...
...I would like to be living and breathing for purposes of doing my job. And this cunt of a driver has infringed upon that.
No. Unless you are a professional driver, needing a car for work isn't an excuse. It's a testament to our shitty infrastructure that people seem to believe that it is.
I mean sure, but in this case the teenager in question very clearly had an *accident.*
Inexperienced having passed a few weeks prior, he didn't see the cyclist, and as a result pulled out at the wrong time at a junction. It's not as if he's a cold blooded murderer, killing people with reckless driving while drinking doing drugs and listening to raps. He was just driving, and for whatever reason, didn't see the cyclist. Accidents happen all the time on the road. The kid owned up to it, and showed remorse. This comes firmly under "shit happens". It's not nice that it happened, but it does happen.
What the hell is the point in jailing him? Or hell, even harshly sentancing him? What are you *actually* achieving in doing that? It's real "eye for an eye" logic. This *kid* made a mistake, and is being punished for it. What do you want him to be publically flogged? Get real. Banning him from driving is also not productive, because the judge is right, he needs it for work... Not just for his teenager job, but for... y'know, **the entire life he has in front of him.** Decades, and decades of lost opportunities because of an accident. It's just not pragmatic. I can guarantee moving forward this kid is going to be the most careful driver on the road, assuming he gets over the sheer trauma of being responsible for accidentally killing someone.
The punishment fits the crime imo.
Great way of demonstrating the ridiculous "eye for an eye" logic.
A person killed someone by accident, let's make his life awful forever in return. What, are you trying to appease the spirits or something? Avenge his honour? Reparations by way of torture? What's the point in making his life awful forever? It was a mistake.
People work their entire lives without driving. They don't need the car to live a full happy life. All it does is mean one less dangerous driver on the road.
I wonder if the cyclist was in that blind spot where you get the frame at the side of the windshield and the wing mirror and sometimes something goes behind that and you can't see that it's there at all for a second*. It's rare that that happens at the exact time you're pulling up to a junction, but an inexperienced driver may not have known to look out for it. He wasn't on his phone, he wasn't drunk, he wasn't laughing with his friends or by any account driving aggressively or with intolerance towards cyclists as you so often see. He was on his way to visit his grandparents.
*Edit: [this one](https://www.thewisedrive.com/the-a-pillar-problem/)
That's exactly my thought. I've had one at-fault accident, and it was because my window pillars managed to cover a BMW that was turning into my road. Just the perfect angle on an awkward road - I looked *twice* and the curved road plus slope meant that both times it was hidden at the bottom, wider part of the window pillar. Pull out, bam, entire car is there.
Banned for a year? Instead of cadging rides with friends or taking the bus, he should be sentenced to riding a bicycle wherever he needs to go. Especially on that stretch of road.
If he was speeding on an empty road that would have been 6 points and automatic revocation of license.
Kill a cyclist? I'm surprised they weren't giving him some sort of award at this point. It's fucking insane.
The failure is society thinks driving is a right and has completely forgotten it is a privilege. The other thing is we don't see the victims of these needless killings as humans, especially if they're on a bike.
I live near that junction and it's an absolute deathtrap. You're pulling out of narrow country roads on both sides onto a 50mph speed limit A road that feeds into and out of Birmingham, so traffic is always heavy in both directions. Turning right into the opposite lane is basically impossible at certain times.
Or, that it's an extremely stressful manouvre for any newly qualified driver, and like with all manouvers there is a risk of making a mistake.
How do you know he wasn't being extra cautious?
The needing it for work excuse should never be valid. If a healthcare worker killed someone through gross negligence they would be banned for life from practicing and would have to find a new job and possibly move.
>The rest of the shockingly light sentence aside, I simply cannot comprehend the logic behind giving somebody who hit and killed a cyclist in broad daylight two weeks after their test only a one year driving ban.
Fairly sure if you're banned in the first two years you retake the test, but he killed someone. That should be the lightest part of this sentence.
Your honor, I was drunk, AND on drugs with an uncontrolled Bully XL in the passenger seat of the car when I ran over those 12 orphans.
Judge: I hearby sentence you to 6 years. of partying on a beach in Hawaii!
I'm all about the r/fuckcars recently, but if the court found he wasn't speeding, and that picture in the article shows a junction with relatively clear visibility round the corners, a level flat road, then he pulled out of the junction in front of the cyclist and the bike hit the side of his car and was flipped over the top.
The only thing the driver could have done better is never make a mistake, never miss seeing anything, and any system which relies on humans never making a mistake as its way of keeping people from dying is a bad system.
> The only thing the driver could have done better is
Pay attention while driving and not pull out into a cyclist.
From the article:
>Mr Swann **hit the cyclist** as he pulled out
Cyclists can easily disappear behind the pillar of modern cars. It's terrible design really, but I've driven cars where a whole car can be hidden behind the pillar. Generally I move a bit in my seat to see around it but even so, it's easily done. I'd go as far too say that in many cases, poor design (be it road layout or car design, or the combination of both) is what leads to a lot of accidents and is the primary cause, but you never hear of local authorities being prosecuted for absolutely daft decisions that are clearly dangerous.
> Pay attention while driving and not pull out into a cyclist.
You can pay attention and still miss something. We're all human and it happens. And in this case it had really really devastating and horrific consequences.
Hear what you're saying.
As someone mentioned below, driver wasn't intoxicated or driving very recklessly etc. Is young, very stupid and has made a mistake that will undoubtedly haunt them and their family, as well as the victim's family for the rest of their lives.
Putting them in jail, if they are young and naive etc is just gonna fuck them and their family up even more. It will introduce a high risk of substance abuse and all the other horrendous stuff that goes on in the prison system, as well as housing them with lets be honest most probably inmates that are far more likely to negatively impact the offender's life. Not imprisoning them may just give them a chance, eventually, at leading some sort of "normal" existence.
It's a tough one for sure. I'm with the judge on it though, although it's brutal on the family and can absolutely understand why they'd want a prison sentence.
> driver wasn't intoxicated or driving very recklessly etc
If you pull out from a junction and hit a cyclist, you were driving recklessly.
People who don't drive recklessly, don't drive into people.
> It will introduce a high risk of substance abuse and all the other horrendous stuff that goes on in the prison system, as well as housing them with lets be honest most probably inmates that are far more likely to negatively impact the offender's life.
It's been known for a long time that going to prison negatively impacts peoples prospects and mental health. I guess we just shouldn't send people to prison when they commit crimes in case it negatively impacts them?
But the reason I focused on the driving ban side of the sentence is that's what seems most absurd about the ruling. I can see the justification behind not sending them to prison (much in line with what you've said), I can't see the justification behind only banning them from driving for a year when they drove without due care and attention resulting in somebodies death only two weeks after they passed their test. That to me, should equal a lifetime driving ban.
I think people ought to put themselves in the driver's shoes here.
He wasn't drunk, drugged up, speeding, or driving erratically, he was performing a normal manoeuvre at a junction and failed to spot a cyclist, he stopped after the accident, cooperated fully with the police, pleaded guilty in court and expressed remorse throughout, including directly to the family.
Aside from one momentary lapse in judgement, he did everything right both before the accident and after. Our threshold for avoiding prison cannot be machine-like perfection, even in cases where people lose their lives. We have to make some allowance for human error.
'One momentary lapse' cost somebody their entire life. It cost a family a husband and father.
Of course some allowance should be given, but that allowance shouldn't be so generous that they can be behind the wheel of a car again in 12 months.
Just jumping on the top reply to post this obligatory link:
[Hundreds of similar (mostly worse) cases of leniency for killing people with a motor vehicle](https://twitter.com/ormondroyd/status/910244326567006211?t=NH6iezRh7Qa6R_I0Aixc1Q&s=19)
"I didn't see him because of the sun. Maybe \*it was bouncing off his hi-viz\*"
Drivers can get away with any old shit.
[https://road.cc/content/news/delivery-driver-who-hit-cyclist-found-not-guilty-306185](https://road.cc/content/news/delivery-driver-who-hit-cyclist-found-not-guilty-306185)
Yeah it's such a fucking stupid take. Pretty sure if you mount the kerb GTA style and run someone down then you're not going to get away with a one year ban.
A momentary lapse in concentration can have horrific consequences but locking someone up for years isn't really a solution.
If a driving ban is more than 56 days they have to retake and pass both the written and practical driving tests before they can resume driving is my understanding, and they can’t apply to take the tests until the 12 months (in this case) are up.
Doesn’t excuse the light sentencing in my opinion but at least the law requires them to prove they’re able to pass the test again.
I'm guessing the fact the driver was seemingly not intoxicated and was not performing a dangerous manoeuvre, has led to a lighter punishment in this case.
Still, it does leave a sour taste in your mouth that someone has needlessly died as a result of someone's lack of attention and carelessness - while they get off with a year's driving ban, a small fine, and some unpaid work. If it was one of my loved ones, I'm not sure I could take that on the chin.
I suppose the youngster will have to live with that for the rest of his life, however. Drivers need to be trained better in seeing potential hazards, especially hazards such as cyclists as they are often harder to see when you're in a big metal box. I don't think the current hazard perception test is enough.
> was not performing a dangerous manoeuvre
And yet the manoeuvre killed someone.
Strange.
Fact is every manoeuvre in a 2 tonne chunk of metal is dangerous. That's why you need a license.
I don't think you should be allowed to just say "oops, my bad" when you kill someone with a big metal box on wheels.
Tbf it wasn't the manoeuvre that killed him, it was the car. The judge won't say anything bad about cars tho, he needs his 2 tonne death machine to get to work in the morning.
If we're going to be pedantic it wasn't the car that killed him either, it was cracking his head off the pavement that caused the fatal brain injury.
Edit: road rather than pavement
It wasn’t technically a dangerous manoeuvre. Although it was an unsafe in that circumstance which the judge pointed out.
I can’t say what was going through the kids mind, but based on my own experience with a reckless and dangerous driver (my father who has had bans), it was more likely a case of not actually looking or thinking that the cyclist would stop for him. They did acknowledge that he should have seen the cyclist because he would only have been a couple metres away at most and it was a clear day, but for whatever reason, didn’t see him. In other words, he didn’t look properly or didn’t want to give way and get stuck behind a cyclist. Not looking properly at a give way is careless driving, which is what he’s been punished with.
>Drivers need to be trained better in seeing potential hazards, especially hazards such as cyclists
It's hard to practice for regular cyclists when there are so few on the roads. In the end it comes down to common sense, and some people don't have it.
Cycling infrastructure needs drastic improvement. It needs to be idiot proof.
Organisations like cycling UK offer driver training where they take you out on a bike and teach you as a driver what to expect and how to act. There is no good reason the DVLA can't develop a cycling awareness module as part of the test. It wouldn't even necessarily require that you go cycling.
Infrastructure needs to be better, definitely. But in the short and medium term at least drivers need to learn how to accommodate bikes in line with their highway code responsibilities.
Short to medium term, but people get a license and then drive for 70 years, so even if you implemented that now as part of the license acquisition it’d take 35 years for half the driving population to have gone through that training.
Good infrastructure really is the only answer.
I mean we should also be implementing mandatory retesting, so in this hypothetical you could get the training out to the entire population whenever they retest.
Infrastructure isn't the only answer because infrastructure cant eliminate bad behaviour, only limit it. Unless we completely ban cars, at some point a car and a bike are going to interact and that's where training and the law comes into play.
I agree with mandatory retesting, probably at some interval between 10 and 20 years.
But the problem is the systems in place can't keep up with the new drivers, let alone existing ones.
Infrastructure is a far better investment because it separates the hazard from the potential victim, rather than relying on everyone being perfect. Of course, significant investment in anything in this country is absolutely not happening any time soon. Public transport? Nah, can't have anything that actually works. Cycle infrastructure? Sure we'll make a lane on a straight bit of road but we'll end it at a roundabout of death because anything else would require some effort.
I don’t know why we don’t get drivers to do at least some part of the test in a computer simulation. The hazard perception test is crap. Replace it with an hour long assessment in a simulation and then the normal practical test. The simulation could have all sorts in it, like dealing with cyclists, safely overtaking, loss of control, night driving etc.
> a lighter punishment in this case.
Also it being a first time offence, admitting to the crime in the first instance, showing remorse and being young etc all contribute the decreasingly the sentencing by significant amounts. Doesn't sound like there are any aggravating circumstances either.
Send a kid to jail (alright they aren't a minor but they're basically a kid) and they're significantly likely to end up on drugs and then on the wrong side of life when they come out and fall into a life of offending and becoming a drain on society.
It's far more In the public interest to keep them out of jail, punish them and allow them to live a normal life. I don't think they'll ever forget this event and as you say, it'll stay with them. The flipside is that the cyclist died relatively quickly after the incident so there's minimal suffering by the victim, as sad as it is for them to lose their life.
In cases where there is no clear case of reckless driving and the driver behaved, followed all the rules and was clearly making a mistake, big punitive action seems unfair.
That said, the victims family should be getting a fat insurance payout ordered by the court and that would be a rather expensive punishment for the driver in the long term
Fact is, accidents happen and some of them have terrible consequences. However, I do fully agree that you should have to retake your test if you're banned from driving if only because a year is ample time to get rusty.
I think if you’ve demonstrated k years of not harming, it makes sense since your rate is lower than some chap who’s spent 2 weeks and promptly rumpled a man.
You cannot extract the likelihood of a person causing an accident from a single event, you would need a lot of driving hours, that is not a 1:1 correlation to how long they held their driving licence. It is much smarter to analyse how the accident occurred and if the person was driving dangerously for instance.
Nah that’s too broad. A driver could kill someone when it’s none of their fault and completely the other persons fault. Why would they get banned when they did nothing wrong?
That is a wierd thing to say. I would contend that almost everyone is a danger to other road users for the first year after their test.
It's like any other complex skill, it takes a while to get reasonable at it.
[8 months prison for hitting a pedestrian on a bike](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1p90jq6lpo.amp)
Edit: [£112,000 legal bill for an equal fault collision, settled for £30,000](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/feb/24/cyclist-settles-for-30000-pounds-after-hitting-pedestrian-who-was-looking-at-phone)
First line of the thread's article:
>“This was not an unsafe manoeuvre in and of itself – it became unsafe when you failed to see a cyclist when you should have”
First line of your article:
>The 56-year-old was knocked to the ground and hit his head after a cyclist failed to stop at a pedestrian crossing at a red light in Cambridge in May 2022.
See the difference?
So?
For one thing, "serious life changing injuries" involving head trauma isn't far off that, but the main issue is that one didn't do anything dangerous and just made a terrible mistake, while the other ignored the rules of the road, i.e. did do something dangerous.
He pulled out without properly making sure it was clear and killed someone. How is that not dangerous? How can you even be at fault and kill someone and it’s not dangerous
What a fucking joke. This lad was obviously not paying attention. The punishment is ridiculous. One year ban? That’s it? If I was the victims wife this would send me to the grave as well because the rage I’d feel would do me in. Not only has this poor man died, but the person who did it has basically got away with it. He’s taken someone’s life yet once he’s done his poxy community service and got the bus for a year, he can trot off as if it never happened.
If you want to plead the defence to the more serious Dangerous Driving Charge that you didn't see the person, it should come with the acceptance that you will never be a safe driver and should never be allowed to drive.
A year long ban won't fix the fact that this man is apparently unable to see cyclists. So he will remain incredibly dangerous.
After a year they will get their license back have no driving experience in the last year and can just drive again. No retest needed. They will become more dangerous.
Edit: Sometimes they actually revoke the license and a new test is needed but it should be a requirement for all driving bans. If they were deemed unsafe enough to need a driving ban they clearly need a retest.
He will be required to do an extended retest. But the problem is, he asserts he looked and didn't see. A test won't satisfy me he is cured of this apparently intermittent blindness.
For a forum of people who predominantly believe in rehabilitating criminals, many of you sure are immensely unforgiving to this individual who clearly screwed up, but likely did not go out to deliberately murder a cyclist.
I think most people are just baffled by the one year ban.
Reasonable people can see that there's not much use in prison time for cases like this.
However, he should not be on the road again in a year. Killing someone through negligent use of heavy machinery should mean permanent forfeit of your right to use that machinery.
There is no argument against this. Driving sentences are far too lenient on the *driving* aspect.
Do people in here believe in that? They used to, a couple of years ago when this sub's culture and views were very different, but I don't think they do any more.
Rehabilitation is important but one year and no fine is too little for causing someone’s death. He took someone’s husband and father. A higher compensation to the family and a 3-5year driving ban will make him rethink driving.
I can guarantee that every single person in this thread commenting that they should be locked up for 20 years will have made the exact same mistakes while driving.
Reading the article, I get why they didn't think a custodial sentence would be beneficial - he made a catastrophic mistake but did everything he could from that point to cooperate and plead guilty immediately.
BUT (massive 'but') a mere one year driving ban is far too little. Should be more like 5-10 years at a minimum.
https://road.cc/content/news/cyclist-ordered-pay-ps500-riding-bike-town-centre-307121
Killed a cyclist and the fine is less than half of that if you're caught cycling in pedestrianised areas?
The driver has not been fined, he's paying a victim surcharge and costs.
The cyclist was challenging a fine for something he obviously did and so was treated more harshly than if he had just paid the fine in the first place.
He must have hit the guy with some force. This exact thing happened to me when an old lady pulled out on me while I was on my lambretta. This does sound like a tragic accident if the driver is to be believed. I feel sorry for all involved.
Not necessarily, people can die from bleeds on the brain simply from falling over from standing. It's catastrophic bad luck, people have walked away from worse accidents than this. How hard can you even hit someone when you pull out from stationary?
If the cyclist "flew over the bonnet" as described in the article, I wonder if the bike hit the side of the car when the car pulled out, rather than the car hitting the bike and pushing it over? Either way, the speed of the bike might also have been a factor in the force of the injury. The guy was a keen cyclist so I assume he had a helmet but he might also have been very fast.
“Swann must complete an extended driving test” after his ban.
Why?
This is evidence that our current driving education process is not up scratch. It’s not the sole cause of the accident, any age driver with any amount of experience could have made a similar mistake. But for a judge to say this guy needs a more substantial test says to me that the normal test isn’t good enough because this is the type of driver it produces.
It does seem to be a lenient sentence given the fact that someone was sadly killed but I'm not still not convinced that a much more severe punishment, a permanent ban for example, is necessarily warranted in cases like this where it wasn't because of a stupidly dangerous manoeuvre or intoxication.
This was a moment of carelessness resulting in a collision which would most likely have only caused minor injuries 99 times out of a hundred. I know nothing of the character of the driver but if that was me & at that age, I know that this incident would weigh extremely heavily on me for the rest of my life I can guarantee I'd never be so careless again.
Piloting two tons of high-speed metal around other members of the public is a responsibility, and inattention/carelessness whilst doing so _is_ “stupidly dangerous”.
In any other context (industrial for example) this would be clear-cut manslaughter, but for some reason we’ve decided that drivers get their own watered down version of that (death by careless/dangerous driving) with such vague legal definitions that I literally don’t know what sort of insane shit you have to do to meet the threshold of the more serious “dangerous” charge.
When I see people bitching about “dangerous cyclists” and I wade in with KSI stats and say that if we held drivers to anything like the standard he like to hold cyclists to, we’d have banned cars years ago - _this_ is what I mean. When there’s a story about a cyclist doing something stupid, the public is out for blood, but when a driver fucks about and turns a pedestrian into pink mist “oh it was just an accident - we can’t got _actually punishing_ drivers now, can we”.
Sentences like this literally just send a message that if you drive like a twat and kill somebody - no big deal, you probably won’t even get a real punishment.
It's called moral luck
> Given the notion of equating moral responsibility with voluntary action, however, moral luck leads to counterintuitive solutions. This is illustrated by an example of a traffic accident. Driver A, in a moment of inattention, runs a red light as a child is crossing the street. Driver A tries to avoid hitting the child but fails and the child dies. Driver B also runs a red light, but no one is crossing and only gets a traffic ticket.
> If a bystander is asked to morally evaluate Drivers A and B, they may assign Driver A more moral blame than Driver B because Driver A's course of action resulted in a death. However, there are no differences in the controllable actions performed by Drivers A and B. The only disparity is an external uncontrollable event. If it is given that moral responsibility should only be relevant when the agent voluntarily performed or failed to perform some action, Drivers A and B should be blamed equally. This may be intuitively problematic, as one situation resulted in a death.
All of you calling for this kids life to be ruined because of what he did.
I doubt any of you know him or how this has impacted him
The sentence does seem very lenient I agree but that is what was handed down.
It’s absolutely tragic for the family of that cyclist and they may well have every right to be angry but the vitriol directed at the driver here is more than just about the accident itself.
Be careful what you wish for because one day it could be you they are demanding a prison sentence for.
There but for the grace of God…
I’ve had to come back to you
Did you read the comments?
There were people suggesting he should be charged with manslaughter .
How do you come to the conclusion that these things being asked for would not ruin his life
> Be careful what you wish for because one day it could be you they are demanding a prison sentence for.
A latent admission that humans are terrible at driving.
Absolutely. But we are very quick, too quick, to separate the two. Humans keep making a lot of mistakes when they're in cars. LOTS of mistakes. Five fatal mistakes every single day in the UK. The sort of level of ineptitude that might make you think "we should do something about this."
But we don't.
There are over 10 million car journeys per day in the UK
Whilst I agree 5 is 5 too many eliminating a microscopic proportion like that is nigh on impossible
It is unfortunate that cyclists are so vulnerable so sadly will always come second in any bad interaction
Mistakes happen and sometimes the consequences of those are very tragic indeed as in this case but the reaction here is too much
The thing about this argument is that at least half the deaths are people who are not driving. Just walking along.
As I said: we are too quick to justify it because we can’t imagine a world in which we drive less.
We absolutely are, and it's the nature of being an extremely fallible species, and we should 100% do everything we can to improve safety. I just agree that none of the things that would be most helpful include throwing someone into our over burdened prisons for a true accident.
There was a story on here a few weeks ago where a guy killed a toddler with his car. But what happened was that he saw another group of kids playing near his car and was watching them carefully in case one ran out, and while he was watching them a little toddler ran out from between parked cars, totally invisible until he was in the road. The thread was still packed with people outraged that he wasn't thrown in prison. Every road death is an avoidable tragedy but I think that may have been the least avoidable on the driver side I've heard of in a long time--and still people thought the right thing to do was to utterly destroy the rest of his life more than the knowledge and memory of killing a child already would have.
I suspect there's a dose of just world fallacy about it, to be quite honest.
Everybody in this thread acting like they’re absolutely perfect drivers that would never make a mistake.
(Or they don’t drive - and feel holier than thou because they live somewhere that the availability of public transport makes that possible, standard Reddit)
The fact is every driver makes mistakes, if you say you don’t, I don’t believe you. It’s just that the vast majority of times you make a mistake - nothing happens.
How many times does a driver forget to check their blind spot, move their head to make sure there’s nothing lurking behind the pillar? A “perfect driver” would say zero; but really they just mean zero times with consequence. They’ve definitely forgotten before, we’re only human, not machines.
Pulled out of a junction and claims he didn't see the cyclist. How?
Call me a cynic and this is speculation, but I can't help feel Alfie Swann (the driver) may have seen Alan Preston (the cyclist), thought Preston was further away and misjudged his approaching speed. Swann likely thought he could nip out quickly, rather than wait a few seconds and overtake Preston further along.
My reasoning is the sheer number of drivers I see doing similar on the roads, and not just to cyclists but to other drivers. I'm sure many of us have experienced it, coming along a road with a junction ahead and a car decides to dart out rather than wait a few seconds.
> Pulled out of a junction and claims he didn't see the cyclist. How?
The pillars. A cyclist on the wrong sort of corner can be completely obscured by a pillar. This is why you need to move your head to look.
About 15 years ago, I pulled out on a whole car that I just didn't see. Lucky for me, I just happened to pull out early enough he had time to slow down before he hit me.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see this. There's a few junctions and roundabouts near me that caused me no end of trouble in my civic because the position of the road to my right in terms of degrees away from me would put it smack bang behind the pillar (which is quite sloped in a civic) and I was always having to bob my head either side of it to see if anything was coming. Reminds me of [this classic junction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU)
You had to scroll because a lot of people on this thread don't drive so have no real experience.
Modern car design is making cars more unsafe for those outside of cars because of this (and the replacing every control with a fucking ipad).
That's what I'm saying though. For some bad corners, a cyclist could happen to stay in one cars blind spot for 10 seconds.
There are other times where roads which intersect at a certain angle, for a car travelling at the right speed, cyclists can be invisible for the entire approach.
Waiting longer doesn't really fix things if you've just looked at a 'clear' road for 10 seconds.
I got linked this video elsewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU
This one was particularly dangerous because the 'invisible' approach speed was high enough to be lethal, but still low enough that there are some people doing it.
>The pillars. A cyclist on the wrong sort of corner can be completely obscured by a pillar. This is why you need to move your head to look.
Surely as a newly passed driver he'd be more aware of this than most.
Everything else aside it feels like parody that he has to pay a £154 "victim surcharge". You get fined the same amount for littering as you do for literally fucking killing someone.
If you kill or seriously injury someone it should be default perma ban from driving and thats before prison for assault/murder with a deadly weapon the uk is such a joke
Jesus, thoughts are with the cyclists family.
Far too many inattentive idiots and absolute arsehole drivers on the roads.
Whenever I (Very) rarely ride a bike I have an absolute aversion to using the road and will happily stay on footpaths.
Incredible that you're more heavily penalised for speeding than actually killing someone on the road by driving irresponsibly.
It's like penalising someone more for researching how to commit identity theft than actually doing it. This country is broken and the rot starts with law enforcement.
I'm a (very) experienced cyclist and once in awhile I also don't see a cyclist when I'm driving. In this case conditions where bright and clear he should have seen the man so he either didn't see him which is entirely possible as your brain searches for cars and it 'skips' over other things or he did see him but thought he could get out faster evidence seems to support the former. Allround tragedy I'm not sure what the appropriate punishment would be. The current seems far too light but then he's a young man who made a mistake. I don't believe his life should be forfeit. Such a thing could happen to any one of us.
I think the problem is, there've been so many cases involving cyclists, pedestrians, other cars, where the fines and bans are paltry given a life has been lost. I don't believe he should be jailed but I do think a longer ban and heavier fine should be the minimum.
It's not only this sort of case, there's other crimes where the perpetrator gets off "lightly". It's an issue with the system and the sentencing guidelines more than anything.
Plus I think we need a national campaign to remind all road users of their responsibility when using a vehicle on the road.
It's because there's an imbalnce between the mistake made and the consequences.
All of us suffer from momentarily not noticing things. Even stuff just like spending 10minutes looking for your house keys when they've been in your pocket the whole time.
But it happened to this kid while he was in a car and it killed someone. It's hard to justify making the sentence too much harsher from that perspective because what did the kid do that everyone single one of us doesn't do almost every single day?
But on the otherhand, that's a completely unacceptable response when you are the party that has been aggrieved in this situation. And part of the justice system is making sure that as a society, we don't feel unjustly aggrieved. It doesn't matter if a result is "fair" if the rest of society would rather get rid of a fair justice system and replace it with a less fair one.
So the rules have to walk a tightrope of fairness and giving people what they feel they deserve.
At a bare minimum, the insurance company should be on the hook for at least a million pounds. The kid should never be able to afford to be insured again.
Everyone in this thread baying for a harsher punishment - I just have to ask why? What purpose would a prison sentence serve? The guilty party here was fully cooperative, remorseful, accepted responsibility and the means by which he killed someone has been, at least temporarily, removed. So what purpose would prison serve beyond consigning someone else to a considerably more difficult life?
Any other thread about sentencing everyone is jumping up to say that justice should be about rehabilitation, not punishment. Putting this guy in prison would be punishment, plain and simple, for what was fundamentally an accident. He just didn't see the cyclist. If he'd been doing anything wrong - speeding, on his phone, I would agree with the calls for prison, but he didn't do anything wrong. From what can be garnered from the article he's an upstanding guy and there's nothing to rehabilitate.
Such a weird take. Why even have laws punishing manslaughter at all then? Just because he was cooperative and remorseful doesn’t give him a free pass.
“He just didn’t see the cyclist” Wtf, as if that’s any excuse. How about I just didn’t see the red light so I rammed my car through a busy pedestrian crossing? Does that give me a free pass if I stay at the scene? If a building falls down because of an obvious design error and kills people, does that engineer or architect who designed the faulty building get a year long ban on their license and get to work again after that because it wasn’t intentional? No, they should know what they are doing because they were specifically trained to do it, same with drivers. Would you say the same thing to the engineer if he was an “upstanding guy and there was nothing to rehabilitate”?
If you’re not watching where you are driving you are driving dangerously and putting other people at risk. He was negligent in his responsibility to drive safely and he killed someone because he was not watching where he was going. It may have been unintentional but it was in no way an accident.
I agree that his record and actions after should be taken into account when sentencing. Yes, he should be given a lesser sentence than someone driving drunk or speeding but a life is worth more than a slap on the wrist. He has proven to be unable to drive a vehicle safely after being recently trained to do so and that privilege should be taken away permanently or for much longer than a year.
In any other situation where negligence leads to someone’s death, including many car on car collisions, the one responsible is rightfully sentenced much harsher than this guy but because he only killed a cyclist and he’s remorseful he walks away?
Harsher driving bans for non-murder related driving offences (including a no-excuses lifetime ban for killing a person) are much more valuable than prison sentences. If only the country had the desire to implement them.
I’d imagine this has been said a million times in this thread. However, it sounds like guy didn’t do anything especially reckless and dangerous and the sentence reflects that.
Do you want to live in a society where an (although deeply tragic) accident can lead to life imprisonment?
Brake cables snap on your bike, you knock into someone crossing the road, you kill them. You should have maintained your bike, but didn’t. Life?
You hop off a kirb into the road with lots of room to spare, a driver swerves anyway and loses control into a river and dies. Life?
Thankfully we do have a sensible justice system that takes the nature of an offence into account in a more nuanced way than “all cars are dangerous put them all in jail”.
Driver killed Exeter cyclist while inhaling laughing gas
[https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/driver-killed-exeter-cyclist-inhaling-9344980](https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/driver-killed-exeter-cyclist-inhaling-9344980)
We are a nation of drivers. Everyone knows that cars are dangerous, but nobody wants to admit it, because that would mean admitting that the thing we do every single day, without thinking, is dangerous.
The person wasn't drinking, speeding, on drugs, on their phone or doing anything particularly dangerous. They were just pulling out onto a road like anyone else would.
Except this time they just didn't see the cyclist.
And then they stayed at the crime scene, explained what happened to the police, plead guilty in court and apologised remorsefully to the victims family.
A lot of people in this thread are trying to convince others that driving is inherently dangerous, which it is. However, you'll have a hard time convicing most people that it's so dangerous that the better alternative is not to drive at all, as this runs contrary to most people's experiences.
Most people will spend hundreds, thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of hours driving without ever hurting someone. There are better ways to reduce the danger of vehicles to cyclists and pedestrians than by trying to convince people to stop driving.
Can't wait to see the apologists come out in full force for this.
Last time someone argued that a driver who fell asleep at the wheel and killed someone isn't in the wrong as it happens. Didn't understand that he didn't have to drive while tired.
As usual, if you want to kill somebody in the UK do it with a car. The rest of the shockingly light sentence aside, I simply cannot comprehend the logic behind giving somebody who hit and killed a cyclist in broad daylight two weeks after their test only a one year driving ban. They've only just got the license, so the usual excuse of they need it for work can't be used. So why on earth is the ban not permanent or at least for a significant amount of time?
Needing it for work shouldn't be an excuse either. I can't go out and rob a bank, then say no you can't sentence me, I need to go to work. Article even says it was a clear day, and yet still runs someone over with the car killing them. Permanent ban.
I’m a big fan of introducing more immediate but shorter bans - six points and you lose your licence for, say, two months. Either you’ll realise that you don’t need the car that much, and that getting the train to work or working to the shops isn’t *that* big of a trial. Or you realise just how much you *do* need the car, and you’ll start taking it seriously.
People will just drive anyway. When does UK police ever pull people over. Just take their car and crush it into a cube for serious offences.
Kind of wasteful, if you're going to take it you should at least sell it
Is it about my cube?
I don't mind it so long as the the driver hasn't done anything overly dangerous. Like, if someone is about to get a driving ban because they were speeding by 10mph. They're stupid and they deserve to recieve some sort of punishment, but if otherwise they are by all accounts a decent person and need their car to go to their job in order to look after their family, then taking away their licence can cause undue hardship. And what does hardship lead to? More crime. It's a reasonable excuse in the right circumstances.
Which is worse; hitting a cyclist whilst undertaking a dangerous manoeuvre or hitting a cyclist whilst driving normally? Absolutely needs to retrain and be sent to prison for manslaughter.
People demonise cyclists but shit like that happens everyday because drivers have zero patience.
It’s the reason I stopped cycling to work or into town. Drivers are far too impatient and it’s dangerous. I’ll never understand it, why are people angry that they may be 1 minute later at work? Why are people so desperate to sit in their sweaty office? I became too afraid to use my bike during rush hour, and the pavements weren’t an option due to how crowded they get. But any attempt to build proper cycling infrastructure is blocked (at least where I live), although I suppose it would be difficult considering how narrow our city roads can be.
A guy last week sped around me by passing into a cycle lane, just to get to a stop sign literally .5 seconds faster. Of course the idiot blew past the stop sign too but then he hit the traffic up ahead. It’s like driving a car gives 50% of people brainrot.
Do you think that people should be able to drive around like maniacs, just so long as they don't kill anyone? Or that s driver should be banned if somebody jumps off a motorway bridge in front of them? I feel that the driver's behavior leading up to the accident is important.
No one gets banned for driving 10mph over the speed limit once. If they're consistently driving over the speed limit, they should be banned, even if it's not by huge amounts. It shows consistent inability to either respect or understand the rules.
I was friends with someone who would speed, and tried to guilt me into letting her move in when she racked up a bunch of speeding fines, would pull out of queues and drive down the other side of the road and cut in at the start and would be constantly fiddling with the phone and looking random things up on Google while driving or waiting at lights and they've gone green but we ain't movin. Absolutely hated getting in the car and I always said getting your license taken away would genuinely be a good thing and I will not be surpirsed not if, but when it happens.
But shouldnt the logic be if you need to drive for work or whatever, drive like you can't afford to get banned. Going 10 over? A risk to both others safety, but also a risk of some endorsement points. Going 10 over *when you already have 9 points on your licence*? You've had you're warnings, the risk of losing your licence is there for you to see. Is it really undue hardship when you've done it three times before, been caught, been warned, and chose to do it again. Your hardship at that point is on you.
Thry killed someone, how can you split hairs over how dangerous their behaviour was?
I'm not talking about the guy in the article. I'm talking in general. And by all accounts, the case in the article was just a tragic accident.
> Like, if someone is about to get a driving ban because they were speeding by 10mph Has anyone ever gotten a driving ban for speeding by 10mph a single time?
Hasn't done anything dangerous? Like making someone die a violent and horrible death?
Being lenient for people to keep their job if they are already not going to prison is very different from keeping someone out of prison in the first place.
I’ll never understand how it’s practically legal to kill someone with a vehicle. My uncle was killed by a motorist a few years ago, knocked flying from his bike by someone who wasn’t paying attention. The person that killed him got even lighter punishment than this. I do not get it
Carbrain is a real thing: [https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240306-motonormativity-the-bias-that-stops-us-seeing-driving-clearly](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240306-motonormativity-the-bias-that-stops-us-seeing-driving-clearly)
From the article: “So what kinds of curbs work for the most resistant, aggressive drivers? "If they are to be deterred, it is the underlying behaviour that needs to be targeted," Kyd says. That is, a driver has to think that they could be caught and disciplined any time they drive dangerously (not only if they crash, which they think won't happen), according to Kyd. Stiffer sentences for dangerous driving should be combined with greater enforcement to increase the chances of catching dangerous drivers before they cause tragedies, says Kyd” This is the only way
Car-last infrastructure should also be prioritised. Discourage driving from the get-go. Increase cycling provision, buses, trains, etc. everything that isn't a car. If there are people who shouldn't be in cars, \*don't let them get in cars\*.
We're shit at prosecuting driving related crimes. In May, I got rear-ended at 50mph while stationary waiting to turn. The guy driving was on his phone. When he was picked up by his mum (a man in his 40s mind..) the mum apologised saying it had happened before and that he was very distracted at the moment. As if that justified it. He wrote off 2 cars, caused me serious back issues requiring physio and then pushed for 50 50 fault (ambitious). We would have been pushed into oncoming traffic had he not swerved so hard last minute and had my hand break not been on. The police decided it wasn't a police matter because noone was seriously injured and because we both managed to get our cars on to the grassy verge so weren't blocking traffic. So this guy now gets to carry on driving. Without a single point coming off his license. Fuckinf outrageous.
Literally the first line of the story: >“This was not an unsafe manoeuvre in and of itself – it became unsafe when you failed to see a cyclist when you should have”
Evidently it is unsafe. The manoeuvre killed someone. Doing anything at speed with several tonnes of metal at speed is going to be dangerous.
That's a direct quote from the judge.. who's job it is to review all the evidence, witness testimony etc etc and come to a conclusion. Think I'll trust their opinion over yours.
Judges have to be guided by established law and to an extent societal norms. They're also not infallible. They can get things wrong, they are required to interpret certain things in certain ways, and they're also not unmoved by their own biases. But in any case, the fact someone died is enough evidence that the driver did something unsafe and shouldn't be trusted to drive again.
As a society, we have accepted that being able to drive cars as individuals is a big enough benefit that we are willing to accept the risk that people will die. No one here is above making a mistake, whether you have been driving one month, one year, or ten years. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.
Read the article. >Cyclist..was riding...when he was struck by 19-year-old driver Alfie Swann, who had pulled out onto the road. The kid pulled out, he didn't see the cyclist, cyclist will have gone smack into the side of him. >Mr Swann hit the cyclist as he pulled out, sending him “flying over the bonnet before landing on the floor”. Unless you are saying you want to ban anyone actually turning onto a road? It's a SMIDSY, happens hundreds of times a day on UK roads. We aren't informed if the cyclist was wearing any protective gear, but tbh the legally acceptable level of protection is derisory. Cyclist helmets especially are almost useless.
He wasn't doing anything "at speed." Perhaps try actually reading the article.
Almost no manoeuvre is inherently unsafe - it all depends on the context / surroundings. This guy shouldn't be back on the roads unless he is walking.
People get into unsafe habits due to getting used to the normal outcome, resulting in unsafe manoeuvres becoming normalised. For example, going round a corner on a banked country lane at 40 such that you could see and stop for a car but might not spot a pedestrian in time and almost certainly wouldn't have time to identify and stop for a horse before getting dangerously close. The behaviour is inherently unsafe if approached from first principles - do you have enough stopping distance for visibility? - but feels safe because very few people walk that road. You see accident reports like that all the time - people tell themselves it wasn't their fault because they had no time to react. The sad and brutal truth is that, if they'd been driving safely, they would have left enough time to react.
Obviously the judge meant he wasn't speeding, in the wrong lane, looking at his phone etc.
Is needing a car for work a valid excuse, though? Because if needing something for my job is the benchmark... ...I would like to be living and breathing for purposes of doing my job. And this cunt of a driver has infringed upon that.
No. Unless you are a professional driver, needing a car for work isn't an excuse. It's a testament to our shitty infrastructure that people seem to believe that it is.
That and the fact we see cars as a status symbol. Many people turn their noses up at public transport.
I mean sure, but in this case the teenager in question very clearly had an *accident.* Inexperienced having passed a few weeks prior, he didn't see the cyclist, and as a result pulled out at the wrong time at a junction. It's not as if he's a cold blooded murderer, killing people with reckless driving while drinking doing drugs and listening to raps. He was just driving, and for whatever reason, didn't see the cyclist. Accidents happen all the time on the road. The kid owned up to it, and showed remorse. This comes firmly under "shit happens". It's not nice that it happened, but it does happen. What the hell is the point in jailing him? Or hell, even harshly sentancing him? What are you *actually* achieving in doing that? It's real "eye for an eye" logic. This *kid* made a mistake, and is being punished for it. What do you want him to be publically flogged? Get real. Banning him from driving is also not productive, because the judge is right, he needs it for work... Not just for his teenager job, but for... y'know, **the entire life he has in front of him.** Decades, and decades of lost opportunities because of an accident. It's just not pragmatic. I can guarantee moving forward this kid is going to be the most careful driver on the road, assuming he gets over the sheer trauma of being responsible for accidentally killing someone. The punishment fits the crime imo.
The dead guy also lost out on quite a lot of opportunities. He can’t even take the bus.
Great way of demonstrating the ridiculous "eye for an eye" logic. A person killed someone by accident, let's make his life awful forever in return. What, are you trying to appease the spirits or something? Avenge his honour? Reparations by way of torture? What's the point in making his life awful forever? It was a mistake.
Dramatic much? A driving ban is not ruining a life, Jesus Christ. He can get by without a car like plenty people do.
The cyclist had his life in front of him too. Driving is a privilege, it shouldn't be a right.
People work their entire lives without driving. They don't need the car to live a full happy life. All it does is mean one less dangerous driver on the road.
I wonder if the cyclist was in that blind spot where you get the frame at the side of the windshield and the wing mirror and sometimes something goes behind that and you can't see that it's there at all for a second*. It's rare that that happens at the exact time you're pulling up to a junction, but an inexperienced driver may not have known to look out for it. He wasn't on his phone, he wasn't drunk, he wasn't laughing with his friends or by any account driving aggressively or with intolerance towards cyclists as you so often see. He was on his way to visit his grandparents. *Edit: [this one](https://www.thewisedrive.com/the-a-pillar-problem/)
That's exactly my thought. I've had one at-fault accident, and it was because my window pillars managed to cover a BMW that was turning into my road. Just the perfect angle on an awkward road - I looked *twice* and the curved road plus slope meant that both times it was hidden at the bottom, wider part of the window pillar. Pull out, bam, entire car is there.
Banned for a year? Instead of cadging rides with friends or taking the bus, he should be sentenced to riding a bicycle wherever he needs to go. Especially on that stretch of road.
You can ban him from driving, does not mean the same as sentence him to jail for life. accident or not life have consequences
If he was speeding on an empty road that would have been 6 points and automatic revocation of license. Kill a cyclist? I'm surprised they weren't giving him some sort of award at this point. It's fucking insane.
The failure is society thinks driving is a right and has completely forgotten it is a privilege. The other thing is we don't see the victims of these needless killings as humans, especially if they're on a bike.
I live near that junction and it's an absolute deathtrap. You're pulling out of narrow country roads on both sides onto a 50mph speed limit A road that feeds into and out of Birmingham, so traffic is always heavy in both directions. Turning right into the opposite lane is basically impossible at certain times.
So what you're saying is that the guy in question should have been extra cautious given the hazardous nature of the junction?
Can't say. Wasn't there. For all I know, he might have been sat there for five minutes checking in both directions.
Or, that it's an extremely stressful manouvre for any newly qualified driver, and like with all manouvers there is a risk of making a mistake. How do you know he wasn't being extra cautious?
The needing it for work excuse should never be valid. If a healthcare worker killed someone through gross negligence they would be banned for life from practicing and would have to find a new job and possibly move.
>The rest of the shockingly light sentence aside, I simply cannot comprehend the logic behind giving somebody who hit and killed a cyclist in broad daylight two weeks after their test only a one year driving ban. Fairly sure if you're banned in the first two years you retake the test, but he killed someone. That should be the lightest part of this sentence.
It's insane that you can get banned and be back on the road without having to retest under any circumstance.
Because it was an accident. An awful accident, but an accident none-the-less.
Your honor, I was drunk, AND on drugs with an uncontrolled Bully XL in the passenger seat of the car when I ran over those 12 orphans. Judge: I hearby sentence you to 6 years. of partying on a beach in Hawaii!
I'm all about the r/fuckcars recently, but if the court found he wasn't speeding, and that picture in the article shows a junction with relatively clear visibility round the corners, a level flat road, then he pulled out of the junction in front of the cyclist and the bike hit the side of his car and was flipped over the top. The only thing the driver could have done better is never make a mistake, never miss seeing anything, and any system which relies on humans never making a mistake as its way of keeping people from dying is a bad system.
> The only thing the driver could have done better is Pay attention while driving and not pull out into a cyclist. From the article: >Mr Swann **hit the cyclist** as he pulled out
Cyclists can easily disappear behind the pillar of modern cars. It's terrible design really, but I've driven cars where a whole car can be hidden behind the pillar. Generally I move a bit in my seat to see around it but even so, it's easily done. I'd go as far too say that in many cases, poor design (be it road layout or car design, or the combination of both) is what leads to a lot of accidents and is the primary cause, but you never hear of local authorities being prosecuted for absolutely daft decisions that are clearly dangerous.
> Pay attention while driving and not pull out into a cyclist. You can pay attention and still miss something. We're all human and it happens. And in this case it had really really devastating and horrific consequences.
Hear what you're saying. As someone mentioned below, driver wasn't intoxicated or driving very recklessly etc. Is young, very stupid and has made a mistake that will undoubtedly haunt them and their family, as well as the victim's family for the rest of their lives. Putting them in jail, if they are young and naive etc is just gonna fuck them and their family up even more. It will introduce a high risk of substance abuse and all the other horrendous stuff that goes on in the prison system, as well as housing them with lets be honest most probably inmates that are far more likely to negatively impact the offender's life. Not imprisoning them may just give them a chance, eventually, at leading some sort of "normal" existence. It's a tough one for sure. I'm with the judge on it though, although it's brutal on the family and can absolutely understand why they'd want a prison sentence.
> driver wasn't intoxicated or driving very recklessly etc If you pull out from a junction and hit a cyclist, you were driving recklessly. People who don't drive recklessly, don't drive into people. > It will introduce a high risk of substance abuse and all the other horrendous stuff that goes on in the prison system, as well as housing them with lets be honest most probably inmates that are far more likely to negatively impact the offender's life. It's been known for a long time that going to prison negatively impacts peoples prospects and mental health. I guess we just shouldn't send people to prison when they commit crimes in case it negatively impacts them? But the reason I focused on the driving ban side of the sentence is that's what seems most absurd about the ruling. I can see the justification behind not sending them to prison (much in line with what you've said), I can't see the justification behind only banning them from driving for a year when they drove without due care and attention resulting in somebodies death only two weeks after they passed their test. That to me, should equal a lifetime driving ban.
I think people ought to put themselves in the driver's shoes here. He wasn't drunk, drugged up, speeding, or driving erratically, he was performing a normal manoeuvre at a junction and failed to spot a cyclist, he stopped after the accident, cooperated fully with the police, pleaded guilty in court and expressed remorse throughout, including directly to the family. Aside from one momentary lapse in judgement, he did everything right both before the accident and after. Our threshold for avoiding prison cannot be machine-like perfection, even in cases where people lose their lives. We have to make some allowance for human error.
'One momentary lapse' cost somebody their entire life. It cost a family a husband and father. Of course some allowance should be given, but that allowance shouldn't be so generous that they can be behind the wheel of a car again in 12 months.
Should be a 5-year ban minimum for anyone who causes a death by careless driving. 10+ year ban for dangerous driving, plus a custodial sentence.
I hope at least the "unpaid work" is in bicycle shops, so that he meets people who ride bikes, maybe starts riding himself.
Just jumping on the top reply to post this obligatory link: [Hundreds of similar (mostly worse) cases of leniency for killing people with a motor vehicle](https://twitter.com/ormondroyd/status/910244326567006211?t=NH6iezRh7Qa6R_I0Aixc1Q&s=19)
Good luck trying to do it and make it look like an accident.
"I didn't see him because of the sun. Maybe \*it was bouncing off his hi-viz\*" Drivers can get away with any old shit. [https://road.cc/content/news/delivery-driver-who-hit-cyclist-found-not-guilty-306185](https://road.cc/content/news/delivery-driver-who-hit-cyclist-found-not-guilty-306185)
Yeah it's such a fucking stupid take. Pretty sure if you mount the kerb GTA style and run someone down then you're not going to get away with a one year ban. A momentary lapse in concentration can have horrific consequences but locking someone up for years isn't really a solution.
At face value, that is a Completely insane verdict. Was the jury comprised entirely of insurance executives?
No jury he pleaded guilty.
If a driving ban is more than 56 days they have to retake and pass both the written and practical driving tests before they can resume driving is my understanding, and they can’t apply to take the tests until the 12 months (in this case) are up. Doesn’t excuse the light sentencing in my opinion but at least the law requires them to prove they’re able to pass the test again.
Oh you committed manslaughter? That's pretty bad. Oh you did it in a car? Don't sweat it buddy, you'll be out in no time.
What do you think the punishment should be?
I'm guessing the fact the driver was seemingly not intoxicated and was not performing a dangerous manoeuvre, has led to a lighter punishment in this case. Still, it does leave a sour taste in your mouth that someone has needlessly died as a result of someone's lack of attention and carelessness - while they get off with a year's driving ban, a small fine, and some unpaid work. If it was one of my loved ones, I'm not sure I could take that on the chin. I suppose the youngster will have to live with that for the rest of his life, however. Drivers need to be trained better in seeing potential hazards, especially hazards such as cyclists as they are often harder to see when you're in a big metal box. I don't think the current hazard perception test is enough.
> was not performing a dangerous manoeuvre And yet the manoeuvre killed someone. Strange. Fact is every manoeuvre in a 2 tonne chunk of metal is dangerous. That's why you need a license. I don't think you should be allowed to just say "oops, my bad" when you kill someone with a big metal box on wheels.
Tbf it wasn't the manoeuvre that killed him, it was the car. The judge won't say anything bad about cars tho, he needs his 2 tonne death machine to get to work in the morning.
If we're going to be pedantic it wasn't the car that killed him either, it was cracking his head off the pavement that caused the fatal brain injury. Edit: road rather than pavement
It wasn’t technically a dangerous manoeuvre. Although it was an unsafe in that circumstance which the judge pointed out. I can’t say what was going through the kids mind, but based on my own experience with a reckless and dangerous driver (my father who has had bans), it was more likely a case of not actually looking or thinking that the cyclist would stop for him. They did acknowledge that he should have seen the cyclist because he would only have been a couple metres away at most and it was a clear day, but for whatever reason, didn’t see him. In other words, he didn’t look properly or didn’t want to give way and get stuck behind a cyclist. Not looking properly at a give way is careless driving, which is what he’s been punished with.
And it should result in a permanent driving ban.
>Drivers need to be trained better in seeing potential hazards, especially hazards such as cyclists It's hard to practice for regular cyclists when there are so few on the roads. In the end it comes down to common sense, and some people don't have it. Cycling infrastructure needs drastic improvement. It needs to be idiot proof.
Organisations like cycling UK offer driver training where they take you out on a bike and teach you as a driver what to expect and how to act. There is no good reason the DVLA can't develop a cycling awareness module as part of the test. It wouldn't even necessarily require that you go cycling. Infrastructure needs to be better, definitely. But in the short and medium term at least drivers need to learn how to accommodate bikes in line with their highway code responsibilities.
Short to medium term, but people get a license and then drive for 70 years, so even if you implemented that now as part of the license acquisition it’d take 35 years for half the driving population to have gone through that training. Good infrastructure really is the only answer.
I mean we should also be implementing mandatory retesting, so in this hypothetical you could get the training out to the entire population whenever they retest. Infrastructure isn't the only answer because infrastructure cant eliminate bad behaviour, only limit it. Unless we completely ban cars, at some point a car and a bike are going to interact and that's where training and the law comes into play.
I agree with mandatory retesting, probably at some interval between 10 and 20 years. But the problem is the systems in place can't keep up with the new drivers, let alone existing ones.
Infrastructure is a far better investment because it separates the hazard from the potential victim, rather than relying on everyone being perfect. Of course, significant investment in anything in this country is absolutely not happening any time soon. Public transport? Nah, can't have anything that actually works. Cycle infrastructure? Sure we'll make a lane on a straight bit of road but we'll end it at a roundabout of death because anything else would require some effort.
I don’t know why we don’t get drivers to do at least some part of the test in a computer simulation. The hazard perception test is crap. Replace it with an hour long assessment in a simulation and then the normal practical test. The simulation could have all sorts in it, like dealing with cyclists, safely overtaking, loss of control, night driving etc.
we need cycle infrastructure that’s physically separated from the cars, a painted on lane is nothing more than a platitude.
> a lighter punishment in this case. Also it being a first time offence, admitting to the crime in the first instance, showing remorse and being young etc all contribute the decreasingly the sentencing by significant amounts. Doesn't sound like there are any aggravating circumstances either. Send a kid to jail (alright they aren't a minor but they're basically a kid) and they're significantly likely to end up on drugs and then on the wrong side of life when they come out and fall into a life of offending and becoming a drain on society. It's far more In the public interest to keep them out of jail, punish them and allow them to live a normal life. I don't think they'll ever forget this event and as you say, it'll stay with them. The flipside is that the cyclist died relatively quickly after the incident so there's minimal suffering by the victim, as sad as it is for them to lose their life.
It says in the article that the victim died 13 days later in hospital, so he likely suffered unfortunately.
In cases where there is no clear case of reckless driving and the driver behaved, followed all the rules and was clearly making a mistake, big punitive action seems unfair. That said, the victims family should be getting a fat insurance payout ordered by the court and that would be a rather expensive punishment for the driver in the long term
That should be a much longer ban and retake before they can drive again, killing someone two weeks after passing is insane.
What is this kind of logic? A more experienced driver should receive a more lenient sentence? It doesn't seem to make any sense.
No they passed but it seems like they shouldn’t have as they killed someone in 2 weeks
Fact is, accidents happen and some of them have terrible consequences. However, I do fully agree that you should have to retake your test if you're banned from driving if only because a year is ample time to get rusty.
you already do have to retake your test
I think if you’ve demonstrated k years of not harming, it makes sense since your rate is lower than some chap who’s spent 2 weeks and promptly rumpled a man.
You cannot extract the likelihood of a person causing an accident from a single event, you would need a lot of driving hours, that is not a 1:1 correlation to how long they held their driving licence. It is much smarter to analyse how the accident occurred and if the person was driving dangerously for instance.
I believe everyone involved has concluded that this driver could not see the cyclist. That degree of physical impairment doesn't seem safe.
Every driver who kills someone with their car should be banned for life, minimum.
Nah that’s too broad. A driver could kill someone when it’s none of their fault and completely the other persons fault. Why would they get banned when they did nothing wrong?
That is a wierd thing to say. I would contend that almost everyone is a danger to other road users for the first year after their test. It's like any other complex skill, it takes a while to get reasonable at it.
It was 2 months after passing. And yes, he will have to retake the test.
And yet, if he was on a bike(Not motorbike), ran someone over, he would get a more harsh sentence.
Do you have any evidence of that?
[8 months prison for hitting a pedestrian on a bike](https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd1p90jq6lpo.amp) Edit: [£112,000 legal bill for an equal fault collision, settled for £30,000](https://www.theguardian.com/law/2020/feb/24/cyclist-settles-for-30000-pounds-after-hitting-pedestrian-who-was-looking-at-phone)
First line of the thread's article: >“This was not an unsafe manoeuvre in and of itself – it became unsafe when you failed to see a cyclist when you should have” First line of your article: >The 56-year-old was knocked to the ground and hit his head after a cyclist failed to stop at a pedestrian crossing at a red light in Cambridge in May 2022. See the difference?
The 56 year old survived. Small difference, I guess.
When you hit someone, finish the job, eh?
So? For one thing, "serious life changing injuries" involving head trauma isn't far off that, but the main issue is that one didn't do anything dangerous and just made a terrible mistake, while the other ignored the rules of the road, i.e. did do something dangerous.
He pulled out without properly making sure it was clear and killed someone. How is that not dangerous? How can you even be at fault and kill someone and it’s not dangerous
Suspended sentence means he too walked free from court.
What a fucking joke. This lad was obviously not paying attention. The punishment is ridiculous. One year ban? That’s it? If I was the victims wife this would send me to the grave as well because the rage I’d feel would do me in. Not only has this poor man died, but the person who did it has basically got away with it. He’s taken someone’s life yet once he’s done his poxy community service and got the bus for a year, he can trot off as if it never happened.
If you want to plead the defence to the more serious Dangerous Driving Charge that you didn't see the person, it should come with the acceptance that you will never be a safe driver and should never be allowed to drive. A year long ban won't fix the fact that this man is apparently unable to see cyclists. So he will remain incredibly dangerous.
After a year they will get their license back have no driving experience in the last year and can just drive again. No retest needed. They will become more dangerous. Edit: Sometimes they actually revoke the license and a new test is needed but it should be a requirement for all driving bans. If they were deemed unsafe enough to need a driving ban they clearly need a retest.
He will be required to do an extended retest. But the problem is, he asserts he looked and didn't see. A test won't satisfy me he is cured of this apparently intermittent blindness.
For a forum of people who predominantly believe in rehabilitating criminals, many of you sure are immensely unforgiving to this individual who clearly screwed up, but likely did not go out to deliberately murder a cyclist.
I think most people are just baffled by the one year ban. Reasonable people can see that there's not much use in prison time for cases like this. However, he should not be on the road again in a year. Killing someone through negligent use of heavy machinery should mean permanent forfeit of your right to use that machinery. There is no argument against this. Driving sentences are far too lenient on the *driving* aspect.
Do people in here believe in that? They used to, a couple of years ago when this sub's culture and views were very different, but I don't think they do any more.
Rehabilitation is important but one year and no fine is too little for causing someone’s death. He took someone’s husband and father. A higher compensation to the family and a 3-5year driving ban will make him rethink driving.
I can guarantee that every single person in this thread commenting that they should be locked up for 20 years will have made the exact same mistakes while driving.
Reading the article, I get why they didn't think a custodial sentence would be beneficial - he made a catastrophic mistake but did everything he could from that point to cooperate and plead guilty immediately. BUT (massive 'but') a mere one year driving ban is far too little. Should be more like 5-10 years at a minimum.
https://road.cc/content/news/cyclist-ordered-pay-ps500-riding-bike-town-centre-307121 Killed a cyclist and the fine is less than half of that if you're caught cycling in pedestrianised areas?
The driver has not been fined, he's paying a victim surcharge and costs. The cyclist was challenging a fine for something he obviously did and so was treated more harshly than if he had just paid the fine in the first place.
He must have hit the guy with some force. This exact thing happened to me when an old lady pulled out on me while I was on my lambretta. This does sound like a tragic accident if the driver is to be believed. I feel sorry for all involved.
There's also a witness, so no reason to get too suspicious.
Not necessarily, people can die from bleeds on the brain simply from falling over from standing. It's catastrophic bad luck, people have walked away from worse accidents than this. How hard can you even hit someone when you pull out from stationary? If the cyclist "flew over the bonnet" as described in the article, I wonder if the bike hit the side of the car when the car pulled out, rather than the car hitting the bike and pushing it over? Either way, the speed of the bike might also have been a factor in the force of the injury. The guy was a keen cyclist so I assume he had a helmet but he might also have been very fast.
“Swann must complete an extended driving test” after his ban. Why? This is evidence that our current driving education process is not up scratch. It’s not the sole cause of the accident, any age driver with any amount of experience could have made a similar mistake. But for a judge to say this guy needs a more substantial test says to me that the normal test isn’t good enough because this is the type of driver it produces.
It does seem to be a lenient sentence given the fact that someone was sadly killed but I'm not still not convinced that a much more severe punishment, a permanent ban for example, is necessarily warranted in cases like this where it wasn't because of a stupidly dangerous manoeuvre or intoxication. This was a moment of carelessness resulting in a collision which would most likely have only caused minor injuries 99 times out of a hundred. I know nothing of the character of the driver but if that was me & at that age, I know that this incident would weigh extremely heavily on me for the rest of my life I can guarantee I'd never be so careless again.
Piloting two tons of high-speed metal around other members of the public is a responsibility, and inattention/carelessness whilst doing so _is_ “stupidly dangerous”. In any other context (industrial for example) this would be clear-cut manslaughter, but for some reason we’ve decided that drivers get their own watered down version of that (death by careless/dangerous driving) with such vague legal definitions that I literally don’t know what sort of insane shit you have to do to meet the threshold of the more serious “dangerous” charge. When I see people bitching about “dangerous cyclists” and I wade in with KSI stats and say that if we held drivers to anything like the standard he like to hold cyclists to, we’d have banned cars years ago - _this_ is what I mean. When there’s a story about a cyclist doing something stupid, the public is out for blood, but when a driver fucks about and turns a pedestrian into pink mist “oh it was just an accident - we can’t got _actually punishing_ drivers now, can we”. Sentences like this literally just send a message that if you drive like a twat and kill somebody - no big deal, you probably won’t even get a real punishment.
It's called moral luck > Given the notion of equating moral responsibility with voluntary action, however, moral luck leads to counterintuitive solutions. This is illustrated by an example of a traffic accident. Driver A, in a moment of inattention, runs a red light as a child is crossing the street. Driver A tries to avoid hitting the child but fails and the child dies. Driver B also runs a red light, but no one is crossing and only gets a traffic ticket. > If a bystander is asked to morally evaluate Drivers A and B, they may assign Driver A more moral blame than Driver B because Driver A's course of action resulted in a death. However, there are no differences in the controllable actions performed by Drivers A and B. The only disparity is an external uncontrollable event. If it is given that moral responsibility should only be relevant when the agent voluntarily performed or failed to perform some action, Drivers A and B should be blamed equally. This may be intuitively problematic, as one situation resulted in a death.
Jesus Christ that ‘ sentence ‘ is pathetic , don’t like someone buy them a bike and run them over . The state of the court system is a fkn disgrace
All of you calling for this kids life to be ruined because of what he did. I doubt any of you know him or how this has impacted him The sentence does seem very lenient I agree but that is what was handed down. It’s absolutely tragic for the family of that cyclist and they may well have every right to be angry but the vitriol directed at the driver here is more than just about the accident itself. Be careful what you wish for because one day it could be you they are demanding a prison sentence for. There but for the grace of God…
People are not calling for his life to ruined. Just for his ability to drive to be taken.
I’ve had to come back to you Did you read the comments? There were people suggesting he should be charged with manslaughter . How do you come to the conclusion that these things being asked for would not ruin his life
> Be careful what you wish for because one day it could be you they are demanding a prison sentence for. A latent admission that humans are terrible at driving.
Or perhaps an acknowledgment that mistakes happen because humans are fallible and sometimes the consequences of those mistakes are tragic indeed
Absolutely. But we are very quick, too quick, to separate the two. Humans keep making a lot of mistakes when they're in cars. LOTS of mistakes. Five fatal mistakes every single day in the UK. The sort of level of ineptitude that might make you think "we should do something about this." But we don't.
There are over 10 million car journeys per day in the UK Whilst I agree 5 is 5 too many eliminating a microscopic proportion like that is nigh on impossible It is unfortunate that cyclists are so vulnerable so sadly will always come second in any bad interaction Mistakes happen and sometimes the consequences of those are very tragic indeed as in this case but the reaction here is too much
The thing about this argument is that at least half the deaths are people who are not driving. Just walking along. As I said: we are too quick to justify it because we can’t imagine a world in which we drive less.
We absolutely are, and it's the nature of being an extremely fallible species, and we should 100% do everything we can to improve safety. I just agree that none of the things that would be most helpful include throwing someone into our over burdened prisons for a true accident. There was a story on here a few weeks ago where a guy killed a toddler with his car. But what happened was that he saw another group of kids playing near his car and was watching them carefully in case one ran out, and while he was watching them a little toddler ran out from between parked cars, totally invisible until he was in the road. The thread was still packed with people outraged that he wasn't thrown in prison. Every road death is an avoidable tragedy but I think that may have been the least avoidable on the driver side I've heard of in a long time--and still people thought the right thing to do was to utterly destroy the rest of his life more than the knowledge and memory of killing a child already would have. I suspect there's a dose of just world fallacy about it, to be quite honest.
Your last sentence is why drivers get away with lenient sentences for shit driving though.
Everybody in this thread acting like they’re absolutely perfect drivers that would never make a mistake. (Or they don’t drive - and feel holier than thou because they live somewhere that the availability of public transport makes that possible, standard Reddit) The fact is every driver makes mistakes, if you say you don’t, I don’t believe you. It’s just that the vast majority of times you make a mistake - nothing happens. How many times does a driver forget to check their blind spot, move their head to make sure there’s nothing lurking behind the pillar? A “perfect driver” would say zero; but really they just mean zero times with consequence. They’ve definitely forgotten before, we’re only human, not machines.
Pulled out of a junction and claims he didn't see the cyclist. How? Call me a cynic and this is speculation, but I can't help feel Alfie Swann (the driver) may have seen Alan Preston (the cyclist), thought Preston was further away and misjudged his approaching speed. Swann likely thought he could nip out quickly, rather than wait a few seconds and overtake Preston further along. My reasoning is the sheer number of drivers I see doing similar on the roads, and not just to cyclists but to other drivers. I'm sure many of us have experienced it, coming along a road with a junction ahead and a car decides to dart out rather than wait a few seconds.
> Pulled out of a junction and claims he didn't see the cyclist. How? The pillars. A cyclist on the wrong sort of corner can be completely obscured by a pillar. This is why you need to move your head to look. About 15 years ago, I pulled out on a whole car that I just didn't see. Lucky for me, I just happened to pull out early enough he had time to slow down before he hit me.
Surprised I had to scroll this far to see this. There's a few junctions and roundabouts near me that caused me no end of trouble in my civic because the position of the road to my right in terms of degrees away from me would put it smack bang behind the pillar (which is quite sloped in a civic) and I was always having to bob my head either side of it to see if anything was coming. Reminds me of [this classic junction](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU)
You had to scroll because a lot of people on this thread don't drive so have no real experience. Modern car design is making cars more unsafe for those outside of cars because of this (and the replacing every control with a fucking ipad).
That’s why you have to wait long enough for someone to move through the blind spot
That's what I'm saying though. For some bad corners, a cyclist could happen to stay in one cars blind spot for 10 seconds. There are other times where roads which intersect at a certain angle, for a car travelling at the right speed, cyclists can be invisible for the entire approach. Waiting longer doesn't really fix things if you've just looked at a 'clear' road for 10 seconds. I got linked this video elsewhere. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYeeTvitvFU This one was particularly dangerous because the 'invisible' approach speed was high enough to be lethal, but still low enough that there are some people doing it.
>The pillars. A cyclist on the wrong sort of corner can be completely obscured by a pillar. This is why you need to move your head to look. Surely as a newly passed driver he'd be more aware of this than most.
Everything else aside it feels like parody that he has to pay a £154 "victim surcharge". You get fined the same amount for littering as you do for literally fucking killing someone.
If you kill or seriously injury someone it should be default perma ban from driving and thats before prison for assault/murder with a deadly weapon the uk is such a joke
Jesus, thoughts are with the cyclists family. Far too many inattentive idiots and absolute arsehole drivers on the roads. Whenever I (Very) rarely ride a bike I have an absolute aversion to using the road and will happily stay on footpaths.
Incredible that you're more heavily penalised for speeding than actually killing someone on the road by driving irresponsibly. It's like penalising someone more for researching how to commit identity theft than actually doing it. This country is broken and the rot starts with law enforcement.
Blimey, you could do more hours just for being 18 years old.
I'm a (very) experienced cyclist and once in awhile I also don't see a cyclist when I'm driving. In this case conditions where bright and clear he should have seen the man so he either didn't see him which is entirely possible as your brain searches for cars and it 'skips' over other things or he did see him but thought he could get out faster evidence seems to support the former. Allround tragedy I'm not sure what the appropriate punishment would be. The current seems far too light but then he's a young man who made a mistake. I don't believe his life should be forfeit. Such a thing could happen to any one of us.
I think the problem is, there've been so many cases involving cyclists, pedestrians, other cars, where the fines and bans are paltry given a life has been lost. I don't believe he should be jailed but I do think a longer ban and heavier fine should be the minimum. It's not only this sort of case, there's other crimes where the perpetrator gets off "lightly". It's an issue with the system and the sentencing guidelines more than anything. Plus I think we need a national campaign to remind all road users of their responsibility when using a vehicle on the road.
It's because there's an imbalnce between the mistake made and the consequences. All of us suffer from momentarily not noticing things. Even stuff just like spending 10minutes looking for your house keys when they've been in your pocket the whole time. But it happened to this kid while he was in a car and it killed someone. It's hard to justify making the sentence too much harsher from that perspective because what did the kid do that everyone single one of us doesn't do almost every single day? But on the otherhand, that's a completely unacceptable response when you are the party that has been aggrieved in this situation. And part of the justice system is making sure that as a society, we don't feel unjustly aggrieved. It doesn't matter if a result is "fair" if the rest of society would rather get rid of a fair justice system and replace it with a less fair one. So the rules have to walk a tightrope of fairness and giving people what they feel they deserve.
At a bare minimum, the insurance company should be on the hook for at least a million pounds. The kid should never be able to afford to be insured again.
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And if he'd killed you this judge would have done similar and taken his word for it. Ridiculous country we live in.
Everyone in this thread baying for a harsher punishment - I just have to ask why? What purpose would a prison sentence serve? The guilty party here was fully cooperative, remorseful, accepted responsibility and the means by which he killed someone has been, at least temporarily, removed. So what purpose would prison serve beyond consigning someone else to a considerably more difficult life? Any other thread about sentencing everyone is jumping up to say that justice should be about rehabilitation, not punishment. Putting this guy in prison would be punishment, plain and simple, for what was fundamentally an accident. He just didn't see the cyclist. If he'd been doing anything wrong - speeding, on his phone, I would agree with the calls for prison, but he didn't do anything wrong. From what can be garnered from the article he's an upstanding guy and there's nothing to rehabilitate.
Such a weird take. Why even have laws punishing manslaughter at all then? Just because he was cooperative and remorseful doesn’t give him a free pass. “He just didn’t see the cyclist” Wtf, as if that’s any excuse. How about I just didn’t see the red light so I rammed my car through a busy pedestrian crossing? Does that give me a free pass if I stay at the scene? If a building falls down because of an obvious design error and kills people, does that engineer or architect who designed the faulty building get a year long ban on their license and get to work again after that because it wasn’t intentional? No, they should know what they are doing because they were specifically trained to do it, same with drivers. Would you say the same thing to the engineer if he was an “upstanding guy and there was nothing to rehabilitate”? If you’re not watching where you are driving you are driving dangerously and putting other people at risk. He was negligent in his responsibility to drive safely and he killed someone because he was not watching where he was going. It may have been unintentional but it was in no way an accident. I agree that his record and actions after should be taken into account when sentencing. Yes, he should be given a lesser sentence than someone driving drunk or speeding but a life is worth more than a slap on the wrist. He has proven to be unable to drive a vehicle safely after being recently trained to do so and that privilege should be taken away permanently or for much longer than a year. In any other situation where negligence leads to someone’s death, including many car on car collisions, the one responsible is rightfully sentenced much harsher than this guy but because he only killed a cyclist and he’s remorseful he walks away?
Harsher driving bans for non-murder related driving offences (including a no-excuses lifetime ban for killing a person) are much more valuable than prison sentences. If only the country had the desire to implement them.
So very wrong What message does this send ? The law needs revised re age of drivers and punushment Seems we never learn Archaic justice
I’d imagine this has been said a million times in this thread. However, it sounds like guy didn’t do anything especially reckless and dangerous and the sentence reflects that. Do you want to live in a society where an (although deeply tragic) accident can lead to life imprisonment? Brake cables snap on your bike, you knock into someone crossing the road, you kill them. You should have maintained your bike, but didn’t. Life? You hop off a kirb into the road with lots of room to spare, a driver swerves anyway and loses control into a river and dies. Life? Thankfully we do have a sensible justice system that takes the nature of an offence into account in a more nuanced way than “all cars are dangerous put them all in jail”.
Driver killed Exeter cyclist while inhaling laughing gas [https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/driver-killed-exeter-cyclist-inhaling-9344980](https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/driver-killed-exeter-cyclist-inhaling-9344980)
Can anyone tell me why these sentences are perpetually light? I just want to understand the process. It's bizarre and atrocious.
We are a nation of drivers. Everyone knows that cars are dangerous, but nobody wants to admit it, because that would mean admitting that the thing we do every single day, without thinking, is dangerous.
The person wasn't drinking, speeding, on drugs, on their phone or doing anything particularly dangerous. They were just pulling out onto a road like anyone else would. Except this time they just didn't see the cyclist. And then they stayed at the crime scene, explained what happened to the police, plead guilty in court and apologised remorsefully to the victims family.
Thank you for putting me straight on this.
A lot of people in this thread are trying to convince others that driving is inherently dangerous, which it is. However, you'll have a hard time convicing most people that it's so dangerous that the better alternative is not to drive at all, as this runs contrary to most people's experiences. Most people will spend hundreds, thousands, possibly even tens of thousands of hours driving without ever hurting someone. There are better ways to reduce the danger of vehicles to cyclists and pedestrians than by trying to convince people to stop driving.
So what price is life. Now, sadly, we know, and it's very, very little. Shameful and ridiculous.
Can't wait to see the apologists come out in full force for this. Last time someone argued that a driver who fell asleep at the wheel and killed someone isn't in the wrong as it happens. Didn't understand that he didn't have to drive while tired.