Motivational Poster

Motivational Poster

WELCOME TO THE COLLECTIVE THOUGHTS OF THOSE WHO CURSE THE STUPID AND DAMN THE MALEVOLENT


Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Trucks Kill

"A 10-year-old girl has died in hospital after a collision between a car and tanker in the NSW Hunter region on Tuesday night.

The girl, a 44-year-old woman and three other children were rushed to Newcastle's John Hunter Hospital after their Ford Focus sedan collided with the tanker on the New England Hwy at Muswellbrook at 9.20pm (AEDT).

The crash is the second between a car and tanker in the past fortnight, and came just hours after a 19-year-old man and woman, and three-month-old baby, were killed instantly when their car slammed into a semi-trailer on the Newell Highway at Narrandera in the state's south.

Eight days ago, four people were killed in a fiery crash on the NSW south coast involving a petrol tanker and three cars."

(source: bigpondnews.com, January 06, 2010 » 12:40pm)

(image: google images)


I have been saying for years - mostly in private rantings at the suited talking manakins whom deliver the news on TV - that "trucks kill".

I first noticed the extroadinary number of truck-related traffic accidents in Australia way back even before 9/11. I wondered why no-one else ever talked about it, why the threat of trucks on our roads was never debated in the public domain and why this stupid practice wasn't consequently outlawed. Perhaps no-one had noticed?

I thought it my civic duty to alert the Australian public, so I planned to write to the newspapers and spark the debate on trucks. But then I was quite busy that week, so I'd do it the next week... After a while, I decided that I must be imagining things and trucks were not that bad.

In the last couple of years, the scourge of the roads has made a horrific come-back ("an" horrific is wrong, as the "n" is only added to ease the flow of two contiguous vowels in pronunciation, and since the "h" is not silent, there is no need for the "n").

Trucks are appearing the news almost every night and not because of their involvement in people smuggling or terrorism.

Trucks are dangerous with even the safest and most altruistic drivers simply because they are several tonnes of steal moving at high speed: force = mass x acceleration, you hit a Toyota Camry and you have a chance, you hit a truck and you're gone; when a truck driver slams their breaks on, nothing happens - the truck will continue to fly forward, slowing down only when it no longer matters.

This is a truck with a safe driver. The fact is, truck drivers themselves are not paid to drive well-rested and arrive at their destination as late as possible. Truck drivers are paid to get to their destination as quickly as possible - families are driving on a truck race track; they share the roads with a race between trucks whose drivers are drugged up, stressed out and sleepy.

The solution is at least conceptually simple: get trucks off our roads! We already separate cars from each other with traffic islands, concrete barriers and high-tension wire fences.

In 1994, the Swiss public voted to ban foreign trucks using their roads to cut across their country en route to France, Italy etc. Today, almost all Swiss freight is railed. Using trains to freight goods is not a new idea, but its genius lies in the separation of normal cars from stupidly huge vehicles (just as we (try to) separate pedophiles from schools and the poisons cupboard from the toy box).

The Swiss have the only true democractic system in the world, 'direct democracy', not this sham we call 'representational democracy', which is really oligarchy. Citizens of Australia Unite and Ban Trucks from sharing the same roads used by families! The Swiss only had to vote, but we shall have to use other means, such as protesting and getting really upset at the suited manakins that read to us each night.

11 comments:

  1. OK, then where are the facts like how many trucks are involved in accidents (with & without fatalities)per mile travelled, compared with other vehicular accidents with fatalities.

    The science of damage in vehicular accidents I would have thought was related to force, momentum and kinetic energy, and I would have thought the most important is kinetic energy (KE) "lost" in a collision. (the least perhaps is force).

    The KE is related to mass and speed squared, therefore speed is more important than mass if the speed is high enough. A car travelling at a high enough speed can release more energy (cause more damage) than a truck !!

    The strongest argument for me for trains is the more efficient use of energy with less accidents a bonus.

    Also I fear that without the large amount of tax paid by trucks, used in redesigning and repairing, our roads would be considerably less safe than they are now.

    Signed Advocate of the devil

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  2. Unfortunately, science-types consistently over-estimate the value of quantity over quality. As David Hume argued, reason is the slave of the passions and no argument based on evidence and appeals to logical certainty or statistical likelihood will ever explain or predict a kiss, a life-changing decision or society coercing governments to change laws based on raw emotion. The impact of frequently seeing the remains of truck crashes on the news will over-ride any effect of reading about the unlikelihood of being a victim. The people are never interested in the numbers, the chances, but whether the thing is wrong, good or acceptable. Pedophilia is not illegal because of the numbers of victims involved or the chances of becoming one. Trucks sharing roads with cars is just plain wrong and before it does become banned, there will be no interest in whether such a ban is justified by the numbers.

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  3. To answer the question on numbers, as of yesterday afternoon, there have been nine truck-related fatalities in the last eleven days, in NSW alone.

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  4. At 5.30pm yesterday, near Dorrigo NSW, a 21 year old woman was killed in a head-on collision with a truck.

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  5. Insight into why they keep killing people?

    A TRUCK driver who broke his mobile phone's bluetooth headset repaired it with superglue - but his boss called before it dried and it stuck to his ear... (NT Courier Mail, 25 Jan 10)

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  6. Last weekend, driving to Sydney on the Hume Highway, we passed a crash scene with police and ambos. Guess what we saw? A family sedan, upside down in the verge and an 18-wheeler truck flipped onto its side, rig and all, on the middle of the road. There were no skid marks. All this on a two lane, dead straight, one-way highway, on a sunny afternoon with perfect visibility and minimal traffic.

    The week before that, I passed the scene of a fatal head-on collision between a small 4WD and a truck. This was on a suburban link road.

    GET TRUCKS OFF OUR ROADS!!!

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  7. On the weekend, six people died on VIC roads. Two involved trucks.

    "The carnage began on Friday morning, when a male truck driver was killed near Trafalgar, in the state's southeast.

    On Saturday morning, a male cyclist was killed after he hit a truck near Mt Eliza, in Melbourne's southeast."

    source (ABC Online News)

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  8. Truck driver who ran red light and killed two children avoids jail.

    - Kate Jones, Herald Sun, June 23, 2010 12:15PM

    Brett Janson, 40, was given a three-year suspended jail term and ordered to perform 250 hours of unpaid community work as his sentence for killing Jeton Kulafovski, 6, and Lyton Mustafovski, 9.

    The court heard Janson entered the intersection between nine and 10 seconds after the lights had turned red before his prime mover smashed into a sedan driven by Lyton's mother Nejmie Mustafovski.

    Janson, who was not speeding, drunk, fatigued or drug-affected, was looking for the entrance to a nursery and had paid no attention to the traffic lights, the court was told.

    Ms Mustafovski, her daughter Lerita, 11 at the time, and another passenger Lyron, 8 at the time, were seriously injured.

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  9. Truck driver charged over bus crash

    RONAN O'CONNELL and LEE RONDGANGER, The West Australian May 7, 2010, 7:00 am

    A truck driver has been charged over yesterday’s school bus roll over in Wattle Grove in which one student was seriously injured and 15 others hurt.

    A police spokesman said detectives from the major crash squad had charged the 38-year-old from Beechboro overnight with failing to stop and failing to report over the incident.

    One girl is in a critical condition and 15 other children were injured when their school bus rolled yesterday while trying to avoid a truck at the intersection of Crystal Brook Road and Kelvin Road about 4pm.

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  10. Man, boy die in horror crash in Qld

    - The Age.com June 27, 2010 - 3:29PM

    A man and a boy are dead and three others are in a critical condition after a two-vehicle crash in central Queensland.

    Police say a man in his 30s and a boy, believed to be aged eight, were killed when a 4WD and a truck collided head-on on the Bruce Highway near Gladstone early on Sunday.

    Three others are in a critical condition, including a girl believed to be four years old and a woman in her 20s. Both were passengers in the car.

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  11. Pair die in another Pacific Highway crash
    Stephanie Gardiner
    January 9, 2012 - 11:03AM

    Police are investigating whether fatigue was a factor in a crash that killed two people on a straight stretch of the Pacific Highway, just a day after two others died in a horrific truck crash.

    A northbound Toyota Rav4 left the road and crashed into a tree north of the intersection with Hannam Vale Road, near Kew, about 6am this morning.

    Yesterday an 11-year-old boy was killed instantly when a double-trailer truck smashed into the bedroom of his family's holiday house, where he was sleeping about 5am yesterday.

    Police said the truck swerved off the Pacific Highway at Urunga after it collided with a ute, killing the 38-year-old ute driver from Nambucca Heads.

    The truck then slammed into the house, destroying much of it.

    The boy's parents, his 14-year-old brother and two people from the neighbouring house, which was also hit, were taken to Coffs Harbour Base Hospital with shock and injuries.

    The family, from Penrith, had recently bought the house to use as a holiday home.

    It was not known if speed had played a role in the crash but similar accidents had occurred when vehicles travelled onto the wrong side of the road, either through speeding, alcohol or fatigue, said the Bellingen Shire mayor, Mark Troy.

    Other residents said the ute had been travelling on the wrong side of the road before it and the truck collided.

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