Second fatality within a month.

[fungus]

Sadly, at arond 10am this morning, the A31 at Corfe Mullen claimed its second fatality within a month. The first was a motorcylist in the early hours of a Sunday morning seemingly loosing control of his bike on the shallow bend at the junction of the A31 Mill Street with the B3074 Blandford Road at Corfe Mullen Church. This mornings crash about 1200yds further East involved a Dorset County Council truck and a camper van, the driver of which was pronounced dead at the scene.

http://www.bournemouthecho.co.uk/news/1 ... ive_hours/

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@50.78520 ... a=!3m1!1e3

[martine]

That's sad.

Any idea of the root causes?

I'll give you 1 guess as to the local council's response.

[fungus]

I'll give you 1 guess as to the local council's response.

That has been mooted many times for the A31 west of here.

This is sheer speculation, but at the point of collision visibility is not condusive to overtaking, and I wonder if the driver of the campervan had a heart attack, as from the pictures, and my local knowledge, the council truck looks as if it was travelling West towards Bere Regis, and the campervan, which looks as if it is on the wrong side or certainly in the centre of the road, travelling towards Wimborne.

We have in the past 15 years had two fatalities near the Botany Bay pub, 2 or 3 miles East of bere Regis near Anderson wheer an elderly driver has suffered a serious health event and veered across the road, one time colliding with an oncoming tractor.

A particularly notorious stretch of the A31 is the stretch about half to three quarters of a mile west of the Roundhouse roundabout where the A31 crosses the A350 near Sturminster Marshall between Lion Gate and Stag Gate. There have been several fatal head ons in a stretch of road about two miles long, mainly due to impatient drivers misjudging oncoming traffic, or just down to sheer recklesness. This particular stretch is safe to overtake, but every time there's a crash we get calls for the speed limit to be lowered to 40 and double white lines on the road.
See link below.

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Stu ... x50eae2da2

[martine]

I can't help but compare road accident investigation with aviation accident investigation (AAIB). The AAIB do an excellent job in thoroughly investigating every serious incident (not just fatal) and then making recommendations to the CAA. I wonder if a national road accident investigation body should do the same rather than the somewhat local and piecemeal approach usually for the purposes of the coroner's report or prosecution?

With 1700 killed per year this would be do-able and many of those might be very quick to investigate. Sometimes speed is the main factor but we know from STATS19 reports the most common causal factor is 'failure to look properly'. This should be triggering moves towards driver education but most local council's response to any fatal RTC seems to be ever lowering speed limits. I guess they haven't got any method of improving driver education in any case.

Perhaps a national body reporting on RTCs to the DfT might change things?

[jont]

Perhaps a national body reporting on RTCs to the DfT might change things?

Only if LAs were compelled to follow DfT guidance.

[martine]

Perhaps a national body reporting on RTCs to the DfT might change things?

Only if LAs were compelled to follow DfT guidance.

Indeed they should...bit like the AAIB and the CAA - I don't think the CAA are actually compelled but I've not known them disregard AAIB recommendations.

It worries me you have elected non-specialist officials (councillors) having the final say on road safety.

[trashbat]

I'm sure I've written this before somewhere.

The AAIB and peers are different from the road safety context in more than just diligence.

The environment of an air crash investigation is one of significantly more openness. It doesn't proceed from an initial aim of finger-pointing, and so its contributors (e.g. pilots, airlines, manufacturers, ground crew) are incentivised or at least not discouraged from telling the truth. Now I'm sure sometimes people still lie, and parties responsible get sued afterwards or go to prison, and whatever else. However in most cases they are 'honest accidents' and thus the broad focus is not on apportionment of blame, but preventing repetition of similar misfortune in future. In fact the exact mission statement of the AAIB is:

"To improve aviation safety by determining the causes of air accidents and serious incidents and making safety recommendations intended to prevent recurrence ...It is not to apportion blame or liability"

In the case of road accidents, it's seemingly mostly concerned with firstly criminal liability and then civil insurance settlement (two different types of blame apportionment). The parties are not conduced to be open about how accidents came about.

Air traffic is also a fairly closely regulated system, and you can make changes. If you find that an aircraft type is unsafe, you can ground them, or mandate changes by a certain date. Globally and universally. Perhaps most importantly, you can also change human practices, such as introducing sterile cockpit rules (basically no non-essential crew chat during takeoff & landing phases) or CRM training. The changes also work. Did you know that between the Buffalo crash in 2009, and the Asiana crash a year ago, there were zero fatalities in US commercial aviation?

Good luck doing that in the road context. Aside from long term scoped rules for manufacturers (e.g. mandatory safety equipment), your only real chance of regulating behaviours is to manipulate the environment, e.g. crash barriers, traffic calming, speed limits etc.

Then at the end of the day there's the bottom line. A fatal plane crash is hundreds of lives in one moment, mostly people who were owed (and paid for) a duty of care, often avoidable with just one correction. There's also a lot of money in it - cost and liability. On the roads, although they quickly add up to many more, each car crash is just a few people in isolation, in varied and complex circumstances, and the apparent cash at stake is low.

[Big Err]

The other large diffeence between the two forms of investigations is that most(?) Air Accidents involve Professionals through out - Pilots, Air Traffic Control, Maintenance Teams etc. Each one has clearly defined roles, rules to adhere to and responsibilities. Meanwhile the roads are full of Amateurs (many of us included).

[MGF]

...It worries me you have elected non-specialist officials (councillors) having the final say on road safety.

That's democracy. Non-elected officials deciding how and when the law should be applied to the public isn't necessarily more desirable.

In my view there is too much democracy in the application of road traffic regulations which is the inevitable consequence of giving too much power to local democracy.

[sussex2]

It is not part of the brief of the AAIB to apportion blame; rather they make recommendations.
With a road collision a great part of the effort expended is to find out who was to blame.

[Horse]

Perhaps a national body reporting on RTCs to the DfT might change things?

http://www.dft.gov.uk/rmd/project.asp?i ... ctID=11702

Been running for years. OK, not National, but . . .

If you want to know more, paste this into Google:
trl loughborough on the spot accident investigation

[fungus]

An update on the Bournemouth Echos website this morning in the comments section, from a contributor who states that their parents were very close to the accident when it happened. It appears that the campervan veered across the carriageway into the path of the truck. They assumed that the driver was taken ill at the wheel.

[trashbat]

I bet others on here are better informed, but I think the roads folk do have 3D scene image capture, and parties such as vehicle manufacturers (at least in some countries) do show an active investigative interest in fatal accidents involving their vehicles.

[sussex2]

It is not part of the brief of the AAIB to apportion blame; rather they make recommendations.
With a road collision a great part of the effort expended is to find out who was to blame.

With the greatest of respect, that's complete rubbish. For the two people on the forum who don't know, I was a forensic scientist specialising in the investigation and reconstruction of road traffic accidents for 10 years in the mid-90s onwards. The only purpose of a proper RTA (that dates me) investigation is to determine speeds, positions, times etc. It's up to the CPS to decide blameworthiness.

Compared with AAIB investigations, your typical AI has far, far more limited data to work on. It's very rare to have the equivalent of black box; there are no radar tracks, CVR and the like.

.

Were you working for the police during the time you mention? By which I mean working for or contracted to them in some manner.

[michael769]

I bet others on here are better informed, but I think the roads folk do have 3D scene image capture, and parties such as vehicle manufacturers (at least in some countries) do show an active investigative interest in fatal accidents involving their vehicles.

I believe Volvo has a team in Sweden that goes out to accidents.