I’ve always been concerned that the rail industry is being strangled by excessive HSE ‘safely’ rules, dramatically increasing costs while trying to eliminate the lasty .0001% risk of an accident. At the same time we accept the carnage of 3000 deaths a year on the roads without a murmur.
One suggestion I came up with to ‘level the playing field’ was to fit all cars with black box recorders (just like trains and planes), which will record exactly your speed (and state of inebriation) when you had that prang.
Now it seems it’s already happening. One US driver is now starting a 20 year jail sentence after killing two girls while driving at 114 mph in a 30mph zone while drunk. And the black box installed as part of his airbag helped nail him.
Data recorders in air bags can record a car’s speed and deceleration and other data such as the pressure on a brake pedal at the time of a crash.
An estimated 10 million vehicles in the US are fitted with such recorders, which vehicle manufacturers began putting in vehicles in the 1990s to test air bag performance.
In recent year court prosecutors have begun using information from these data recorders, the existence of which most drivers will be unaware of, in criminal prosecutions.
What next? Absolute block working? Fronts of all cars to be painted yellow? (Thanks to Henry Cobb for the link)
