Man charged in Durham hit-and-run that killed Seth Vidal
wral.comI'm glad that he had the courage to turn himself in.
I want to think it is courage but I suspect it could be a phone call to friend or family from a police investigator or the description of a car on a public news or social channel, or seeing a neighbor notice the dent in the car. At that point he might have realized his only 2 options: get arrested or turn himself in.
Yeah I'm a bit cynical about that too. Since he already has a revoked license (what a surprise: a bad driver, driving badly), he also already has an attorney. I suspect that's who decided he would be turning himself in.
Wow, there's an impressive chain of leaps to conclusions. You can have your license suspended for failing to answer a summons for a revenu^H^H^H^H^H^Hspeeding ticket. At no point is a lawyer necessarily involved.
Yeah that's possible. For everyone I know who has had his license revoked, the actual reason has been DWI. (I neither know nor particularly care what the relative averages are between DWI and "innocently" not paying speeding tickets. If you ask me DWI is every bit as much an overstated sin as speeding, only it's been inflated by the outrage industry rather than the police.) Involving a lawyer in those cases can be the difference between a 6-month suspension and a 5-year revocation. Not hiring an attorney would be an even more questionable decision than the original DWI.
I've had my driver's license suspended on more than one occasion, and either couldn't pay the fines or forgot about it until I got the letter saying that my license had been suspended.
For what it's worth, I would recommend that everybody have their license suspended at one point or another. I never really knew how to drive safely before I had to drive knowing that any mistake I made might send me to jail.
I can't speak for the man in question, but if he's anything like me, 1) his suspended license may not speak at all as a reflection of his driving ability, and 2) if he was aware of the suspension, would likely have been on his best behavior.
> I never really knew how to drive safely before I had to drive knowing that any mistake I made might send me to jail.
Huh? You drove after you knew you had a suspended license? You had to drive?
If I understand what it means to not have a license, the thing to do in that situation is to have someone else drive your car to a long-term parking spot if it isn't in one already, and just leave it there until you have it reinstated.
At the risk of submitting myself to further judgment, and going far offtopic, yes, I did. I had gotten into an accident, wherein I was wrongly ticketed for hitting another car who had turned in front of me despite my right of way. I went to court and spoke my piece, and the judge overturned my ticket, leaving my only liable for court costs (I think it was $50).
At the time, I was working a part time, $7 an hour night-shift job across town, and had just had to expend the paltry savings I had accrued to replace the aforementioned car that I wrecked. In short, I couldn't afford to pay the $50 fine when it was due, and couldn't afford to miss work.
Before I could pay the $50, somebody had broken the window of my new car, broken in, and stolen all my books for class (which were extremely expensive to replace, along with the window. Before I got around to paying the court, they had suspended my driving privileges. Cost to reinstate was $236.74 (I remember it distinctly, even 16 years later as being so reasonable, yet so painfully high at the same time.)
It took me a few months to save that money up, and in the interim, I made a somewhat ill-advised judgement call. It wasn't as though my license had been suspended for any reasons to do with my driving ability, and I needed the job. It was at night, so mass transit wasn't an option, and at the time, none of my friends worked nights, so getting rides wasn't really an option either. My options, as I saw them, was to drive illegally and hope to not get caught, or to relinquish the job I had and dig further into certain financial ruin. I chose the former.
Ah. It sounds a lot better to me now that I've heard more of the story. They really shouldn't have used their ability to cancel your license to collect that $50.
Thanks for telling this story and yes, I would have done the same.
I hope the smirking picture was an old one though (not from after he ran a bicyclist over).
Also, I wonder what the chances are that he waited till he sobered up to turn himself in.
Hit and run is a felony, especially failure to stop and render aid, while DWI is often still a misdemeanor. Not saying the dude was necessarily knowledgeable about that or weighing those options if he was intoxicated at the time.
One of the posters also claims to have met the suspect and attributes the "smirk" to some sort of skeleto-muscular deformity, though it's hard to determine validity with anonymous internet posters.
In most places in the US, a DUI is a felony if someone is injured.
He'd be charged with manslaughter probably.
The NTSB wants to make forward collision avoidance systems in cars standard. I wonder if it would be possible to spoof radar and/or IR return signals so as to trip the autonomous braking in a car that gets too close to a bike?
Try thinking more than one step at a time.
What will be the very next thing that happens if you actually succeed in doing this?
It would be made illegal immediately due to the potential for abuse.
Similar to how the emergency red-light-to-green traffic signal preemption devices were summarily banned in a lot of places after people figured out the very simple mechanism they use.
http://www.10news.com/news/driver-cited-for-using-traffic-li...
Hiding, as always, the original problem (cars not detecting bikes) would be unaddressed while a fake problem (people causing accidents) gets people's attentions via the msm.
Don't do this.
Cars would stop hitting bikes?
No, cars would disable this device because it is causing false positives.
And now a useful safety feature is no longer available.
Perhaps something as simple as having a little video camera on bikes would discourage drivers from getting too close. If lots of cyclists had them drivers might start to move over a little more. Just knowing that you might be recorded could be enough incentive to a avoid cyclists.
I thought about having a small flag on a really sharp antenna-style post sticking on the left side of the bike. About a foot or two, laying parallel to the ground should do. That would encourage drivers to give a bit more room, as they are probably more afraid of getting their car scratched up then they are of hitting someone.
That still does nothing about the distracted driver. They aren't going to see the flag if they're looking down at their phone laughing and writing a text.
I think there is a range of tools that would making biking safer. I saw a lighting system that outlined a "box" around the cyclist. Some kind of automatic horn/led-flasher that would activate if a car got too close might be of some value.
I half suspect that might be construed as some sort of terrorist activity/behaviour.
Perhaps cities should build bike lanes.
Mercedes have done a lot of work around this (more for pedestrians than cyclists I believe) for their S-Class: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7m9qI70L2yQ
I remember seeing on Top Gear a review of a car with a collision detection system that could detect pedestrians. (I think it was a Volvo.) I wouldn't be surprised if it also detects bicycles without active cooperation from the cyclist.
The company Autoliv has a bunch of such products, they're used by major car manufacturers.
See for instance http://www.autoliv.com/ProductsAndInnovations/ActiveSafetySy... which describes their "vision systems", the features of which include pedestrian-detection.
It's possible that Volvo has its own in-house tech for this, but Autoliv are huge.
Ah, of course I should have mentioned that Autoliv are not by any means alone in the market. :) Thanks.
This is utterly tragic. I lived near Hillandale rd in Durham and drove there almost every day. Not sure if it had any part in this accident, but the road is really poorly lit like most roads there.
When I moved it actually struck me how poorly lit the roads in Durham were, compared to where we come from in Europe. I'm guessing it's a mixture of being much more expensive (wider roads and much longer) and the city organizers not giving pedestrian/cyclists much thought (sidewalks seem to be scattered randomly around the town).
This stretch of Hillandale is really lousy, as it narrows from a multilane interchange to a two-lane road in about a block. But it should be fairly well lit (at least around the interchange) and I imagine that Seth was as visible as possible.
But mediocre roads in Durham are the norm, unfortunately. My least favorite was always University heading South/Southwest through Forest Hills. In a hundred feet, your bike lane disappears and you are suddenly on a narrow two-lane with little shoulder, in a right-hand curve with an uphill elevation. There's precious little visibility in either direction thanks to the trees and curves, and the oncoming traffic (northbound) traffic has an awkward intersection that tends to cause people to creep into the middle of the lane. (I may be misremembering the exact details, but that intersection has really stuck with me.)
The drivers in the Triangle are also pretty awful. I've never been yelled more or had more things thrown at me. The cup of ice landing on you is not so bad (it can even be a little refreshing on a hot day) but the handful of change is pretty frightening.
Durham is a great town in many ways, but its bicycling infrastructure is not one of them. Such a shame that it claimed another life.
Welcome to most of America. Really no sense of municipality, for the government is expected to strive to spend $0 lest they be accused of hoarding tax dollars.
Is cycling that dangerous in the US compared to Europe?
Many (most?) US cities lack provisions for bicycles like dedicated lanes, etc., though I don't know about Durham specifically. The situation is worse outside major cities, too.
Another thing I've noticed is that many US drivers don't know how to, or are uncomfortable dealing with, driving near cyclists. Sometimes they're just careless and hostile toward cyclists - in one instance, I saw a driver attempt to drive a person on bike off the road with his car in an apparent fit of rage.
Where I live, there are some bicycle-friendly roads, but if you need to commute by bicycle you are probably going to get some road segments with absolutely no paved shoulder. So the smart thing to do then is to have a mirror, and if a car is coming up behind you and another one is oncoming (two-lane road), your best bet is to hit the gravel.
Also, there are some stretches of road where bicycle clubs seem to frequent. What they do is get a large pack of people, and end up blocking traffic on a 5-mile stretch (they purposely take up the whole lane, probably safer that way I guess, and when there is a bottleneck instead of moving right they take up both lanes). This ends up instilling a large amount of hostility in drivers, so when they see a loan bicycle they tend to be very aggressive (I've had water balloons, even beer bottles thrown at me before, even though I was far right of the white line).
yum update reflective-clothing
sorry, couldn't resist.
Crass.
On a serious note, it's not likely more/better reflective clothing would have helped. It sounds like the driver was deliberately and abruptly deviating from the normal lane to bypass traffic. It was not a decision made with the safety of others in mind.
Incredibly inappropriate. You do understand that a member of the community died, right?
I think HN has long passed the point where the passing of a community member has any effect on trolls. It's Eternal September.
http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/commenting-communit...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3468102
This was a pretty good example of something similar that happened an year back, and I'm sure there are more examples (I just never bothered to pay attention to them).
wow, pretty terrible.
Hey, don't ignore those security updates
You're kind of dick. Get over yourself, you're not funny.
Please put a dollar in the douchebag jar.
This account looks like a repeat offender. :( Flag and downvote the comment and move on. Don't feed the troll.
Please stop.
Fuck HN has gone downhill.
too soon.