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To: P-40
Great in theory...but not in practice. I've been on two many accident scenes in which speed was not a factor, nor was inattention. If we all had the reflexes of a race car driver it would be different but your average Joe is nowhere close to that.

You obviously can't account for everything that might happen in a dynamic environment.

A dog might jump out on the road. Someone might make a turn in front of you.

This accident wasn't the result of something jumping out in front of them or the environment changing at the last moment.

The decoy was placed on the road before they got there, and drivers are supposed to operate their vehicles in such a way that they can handle that situation.

There are times when everyone doesn't pay as good of attention as they should, or they drive a bit too fast for the road and visibility.

However, this isn't a case where they were outside the bounds of being in proper control by a little bit. The driver wasn't only unable to stop by a little bit. They didn't just slide off the road as they were coming to a stop.

They swerved off the road at a high speed and rolled the car.

I'm not talking about the perfect reflexes of a race car driver, or about doing everything right.

If the driver was traveling at a reasonable rate of speed, and was paying reasonable attention to the road, they shouldn't have ended going off the road at a high rate of speed and rolling the car in response to an object or critter on the road that was there before they approached rather than jumping out at them when they were only a short distance away.

90 posted on 08/17/2006 9:51:01 AM PDT by untrained skeptic
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To: untrained skeptic
You obviously can't account for everything that might happen in a dynamic environment.

No, that is why you will seldom have a case where fault is cited as 100% for either party. In this case though, you would apply "but for" logic and say "but for" the guilty party placing an object in the roadway, the injured would not have had an accident. They may have been talking on the phone, speeding, etc but it still remains that the object was the chief cause of the accident.
92 posted on 08/17/2006 9:56:18 AM PDT by P-40 (Al Qaeda was working in Iraq. They were just undocumented.)
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