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Police seek to identify cyclist involved in pedestrian collision (www.policenews.act.gov.au)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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ACT Policing is seeking assistance from the public to identify a cyclist involved in a collision at Casey Market Town on Saturday, 20 January 2024.

About 8pm, a young child was struck by a cyclist who was riding on the footpath outside the Casey Jones pub.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (2 children)

Smh my head it should have been this thing then the child would be fine.

I find the focus on a cyclist doing a hit and run on a pedestrian to be funny. Like sure, it sucks and you could be injured but at the same time, bicycles are lightweight and fairly slow compared to cars (p=mv etc ). Heck even those fast >30km/h scooters are unlikely to kill you.

Aus Fatalities (2020) and serious injury (2018) by road user type:

https://www.roadsafety.gov.au/nrss/fact-sheets/vulnerable-road-users

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

test (because my reply on my main account didn't seem to be federating properly to your instance)

edit: yup. For some reason your instance isn't federating my earlier comment properly. Here's a direct link that should work as long as you click on it on a client that doesn't attempt to convert it automatically to your instance.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Personally I was gonna keep quiet in this thread since it is about a child being hit, which is not cool no matter who did it.

But since you've brought it up, I'll add my thoughts. My views are very much the same as yours. It's obscene how much effort the police put in to finding the culprit when a cyclist is the one at fault, and how little they can bother doing to protect cyclists from dangerous drivers.

When a cyclist killed by someone who wasn't even driving a roadworthy vehicle, the police can't be bothered doing a proper investigation. The guy gets off scott-free.

In a more recent case closer to where I live (and thus from a different police force) when a cyclist starts keying the cars parked on the side of the road in a location where it is illegal to be parking during commuting hours, and where the frequent illegal parking has long been a known issue, the police used every resource they possibly could to track down the cyclist, and do nothing to keep cyclists safe by ensuring drivers know they cannot park illegally.

p=mv etc

As a side note, damage is proportional to kinetic energy, not momentum. In both cases it increases linearly with mass, but it increases with the square of velocity. So doubling the speed (e.g., from the 30 km/h of a confident cyclist, to the 60 km/h of a law-abiding driver on most roads) doesn't double the damage, it quadruples it.

I'm not sure the figures you show in that diagram have any real value at all. Not for your case, or against it. These are fatalities and injuries caused to users of each vehicle type, as far as I can tell. Are cyclists being injured by cars, or other cyclists? Are pedestrians being killed by cars, or by bikes? The answers may be intuitively obvious, but if we're relying on intuition, what's the point of the figures?

Additionally, comparing the number of deaths/injuries of different types of transport without any discussion of the number of users of that mode, the number of kilometres travelled, or the time spent travelling, is not especially helpful.