Children among five killed as car crashes into beer garden in regional Victoria
Children among five killed as car crashes into beer garden in regional Victoria
I had to work on a few TAC client reports a few years back. The descriptions of children's bodies after being hit by a car will haunt me to my dying day. My heart breaks for everyone involved.
I was volunteer CFA for a lot of my 20s, and once had to attend a road trauma involving a kid. Indelibly etched on my memory.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Detectives and forensic investigators are piecing together the events that led to a horrific crash in the regional Victorian town of Daylesford, which killed five people.
Emergency crews were called to the Royal Hotel in Daylesford just after 6pm on Sunday after a car drove through the pub's beer garden.
Superintendent John Fitzpatrick said investigations overnight and into the morning would shed more light on the chain of events.
He said police were seeking relevant CCTV and dashcam footage, and urged anyone with information to contact investigators.
Daylesford is a picturesque town less than an hour-and-a-half's drive north-west of Melbourne and is a popular day-trip location.
Ambulance Victoria regional director Trevor Weston says paramedics had been debriefed and would receive support after arriving to a "very confronting and chaotic" scene, including injured children.
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Ban all cars
Banning all cars is impractical because of last mile delivery and rural areas, but car usage must be dramatically decreased especially for commuting
also speed limits should be decreased in town centres and some car types (pickup trucks, etc) should be banned
Drivers need to be held accountable and there needs to be infrastructure in place so that individuals that cannot/ refuse to be held accountable have alternate transportation options.
If you crash your BMW (with dozens of driver assistance features) into a Pub, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle. If you cannot share roads with other road users without getting angry, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle. If you feel entitled to drive a vehicle on the roads, but believe that motorcyclists, trucks, cyclists and pedestrians should not receive those same entitlement, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle. If your attention span is so short that you cannot drive a vehicle without getting distracted by a handheld device, you should not be allowed to drive a vehicle.
Last mile delivery:
Busses shouldn't be profitable anyway, it's meant to be a service
It's unreasonable to live there then. Your choice relies on the rest of the world paying the price of unnecessary car trips and the infrastructure for it. And not just now but people in the future will bear the consequences of your decision to live in a place that requires that.
How far is the train station?
In the short term, it would be time to either relocate to somewhere more practical, or change your lifestyle.
Before cars there were much more extensive public transport and freight systems, especially in regions that weren’t serviced by extant rail corridors.
Just in Western Gippsland;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strzelecki_railway_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonthaggi_railway_line https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noojee_railway_line
Unfortunately, since these Alignments were abandoned by disuse, much of the land has been reclaimed by farmers and developers using colonial-era squatters rights laws. There would need to be extensive Eminent Domain claims raised to reestablish the type of coverage we had before Private vehicles became ubiquitous.
Hope they lock him up and throw away the key.
he was sober and apparently unconscious? afaik he hasn't been interviewed yet while he gets medical treatment.
I mean if he did it on purpose, sure, but dude you have zero idea - it is entirely possible this is a medical event he had no control over, and he now has to live with being the driver in this awful situation.
can't you just care about the people affected without immediately wanting some completely uninformed revenge?
I can’t find anything in the article about his state of consciousness.
Only;
Detectives had not been able to interview the 66-year-old driver from Mount Macedon as he was being treated in hospital for shock and minor injuries
And
He said the driver had been breath-tested and had no alcohol in his system.
We don’t know whether he was disabled due to a medical incident, whether he maliciously targeted the family, whether he was distracted driving, whether the vehicle malfunction or exactly why he crashed.
The thing is, if the X5 was in a roadworthy condition, the driver assistance systems should have been able to either prevent the accident outright or at least mitigate the damage caused by a runaway vehicle.
Judging by their answer, no.
Driving an X5 is a choice though, and having an unnecessarily large vehicle multiplies the damage when something does go wrong.
They won't
What an awful event. It'll kill tourism for a good while, and they'll have to make some changes like the bollards near the green area and pub and Anzac memorial.
Are you suggesting that the real tragedy is the hit to tourism, and not the people who lost their lives?