ferret fur
Well-Known Member
- Location
- Roseburn
Glad Gaz is ok:
I work in aviation. We have an ethos we work with known as a 'just safety culture' When things go wrong the idea is that we don't go around blaming everyone else & looking for scapegoats. If there is an incident then learn from it, without trying to apportion blame. Quite frankly I think this is something the forum could do with.
What you can say from this incident is that one person did something wrong: By turning across a bus lane without being able to see properly. Fine. People do that & if what the driver has done is deemed sufficiently negligent they will get charged. The question is what Gaz & the rest of us learn from it? To me this is not a completely unavoidable accident. This does not mean that Gaz is in any way to blame. He was entitled to be doing what he was doing, but what I learn from this is:
1: If there is any sort of a gap in the traffic there is a risk that someone will turn through it.
2: If there are multiple risks ahead you have to treat each one on its merits. A technique we use at work is once you have identified a hazard be aware of it but then look for the next one. Ok there are cars looking to pull out, but what else is a potential threat?
I don't think it is enough to say that Gaz couldn't see past the van & had other things to think about therefore it was impossible to anticipate that a car might appear from the right. I suspect that 99% of us might have got caught out by what happened.. even some of the riding gods on this forum could have been distracted by the particular circumstances shown in the video. Quite frankly it doesn't really matter & it is hard to tell from a video how you might react . However we can all use Gaz's experience to better inform us what can happen out there - and it might just make us better riders.
I work in aviation. We have an ethos we work with known as a 'just safety culture' When things go wrong the idea is that we don't go around blaming everyone else & looking for scapegoats. If there is an incident then learn from it, without trying to apportion blame. Quite frankly I think this is something the forum could do with.
What you can say from this incident is that one person did something wrong: By turning across a bus lane without being able to see properly. Fine. People do that & if what the driver has done is deemed sufficiently negligent they will get charged. The question is what Gaz & the rest of us learn from it? To me this is not a completely unavoidable accident. This does not mean that Gaz is in any way to blame. He was entitled to be doing what he was doing, but what I learn from this is:
1: If there is any sort of a gap in the traffic there is a risk that someone will turn through it.
2: If there are multiple risks ahead you have to treat each one on its merits. A technique we use at work is once you have identified a hazard be aware of it but then look for the next one. Ok there are cars looking to pull out, but what else is a potential threat?
I don't think it is enough to say that Gaz couldn't see past the van & had other things to think about therefore it was impossible to anticipate that a car might appear from the right. I suspect that 99% of us might have got caught out by what happened.. even some of the riding gods on this forum could have been distracted by the particular circumstances shown in the video. Quite frankly it doesn't really matter & it is hard to tell from a video how you might react . However we can all use Gaz's experience to better inform us what can happen out there - and it might just make us better riders.