On Aug 23, 6:13Â pm, allan tracy
hotmail.com> wrote:> A major air disaster then suddenly every minor aircraft technical
> difficulty starts making the headlines.
>
> This is very much non-news.
>
>
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/7578428.stm
>
> Remember, the most dangerous part of your flight is the drive to and
> from the airport.
Well, yes--for civilians. Reading aircraft maintenance
logs purporting to be from genuine serving forces may
leave you less confident.
> On a train or aircraft you're statistically about 15 times safer then
> when you're in a car.
>
> Road safety is an oxymoron there's hardly any safety culture on the
> roads compared to the airline or rail industries.
>
> It is no lie and safe to say, that if the rail or aviation industry
> ran our roads you would never see a single transgression of the
> highway code.
But this would mean we would all be paid a
sum of money every time we drove anywhere.
The most fun example I've had myself, first-hand,
recently was when it chucked it down one afternoon
after a fair week or so of unbroken hot weather.
There I was, riding into the supermarket parking
area, and whether it was the water lifting rubber
and oil off the tarmac or the rainbow of oil in water
I'd ridden through on my way in past the filling
station, I took a metal grate wide to find myself
in the path of an oncoming taxi (private hire) car.
Just a dab on the brakes and I was on the floor
with the bike on top of my right foot.
The guy came out at me, with a mind to limit
liabilities, asking what the hell I thought I was
doing--as though one of my hobbies is sliding
under cars in order to get an insurance payout
and it was only his honed, razor-sharp reflexes
that preserved his No Claims bonus.
I managed to get the engine turned off and lever
the back of the bike up enough to free my foot,
at which point I explained that, yes, road surfaces
get like ice-rinks under the weather conditions
we've just had, and this was just one of those
times. I certainly may soon have to start using
the fingers of my right hand to extend the count
of my tally of incidents in 21 years of continuous
licensed entitlement.
So, after having stood and watched me render
the vehicle safe from any explosion risk, whilst
remaining effectively trapped beneath it, and
observed the way I single handedly freed myself
after - after effectively having laid machinery for
legal proceedings in which he could claim not
to know anything at all about bikes - he then
suddenly decides it may be expedient to play
the Good Samaritan and "help me up" with the
bike (it's only a half-litre; that's the easy bit).
So, on the one hand, whilst your original assertion
is cloud-cuckoo land silly in terms of the practicability
of extending it out to all drivers - who would run
the Road Traffic Control Rooms? for example -
I can certainly see that for people who spend
their working lives out in traffic, taxi drivers are
a remarkably inconsistent bunch for understanding
the realities of road traffic and the perspectives
of other road users.
> For the most part, road safety isn't even enforced.
I don't understand this sentence.
G DAEB
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