There have been two terrible road smashes in the last week, one in Tasmania yesterday, killing 5 women, and one in Mildura, Victoria last weekend, killing 6 teenagers. All road deaths are a senseless waste of life, these ones particularly so as the dead were all young people with most of their lives still in front of them. As you would have read from these posts, I was away attending a funeral during the last week of a relative killed in a car smash, so I am particularly sensitive to road deaths at the moment.

You might note I generally refer to road smashes not as accidents, as most of the time they are not accidents but the foreseeable result of inappropriate driving, negligence and often sheer stupidity. To a degree, if you drive like a dickhead and wrap yourself around a tree, you got what you deserved. However the tragedy is that much of the time the dickhead can take innocent people out with him/her self, and the consequences of their actions can affect very large numbers of people.

Yesterday’s accident near Burnie, Tasmania, involved the car with the dead women crossing the median strip and running into the path of an oncoming car. The 5, 3 teenagers, one of their mothers and another young woman, were all from Smithton and surrounds, a small town in north west Tasmania. The impact in such a town will be huge, scarcely anyone will not have known one or more of the dead.

Nothing has yet come out about the cause of the crash, but it certainly looks like the driver of the car in which the women were killed was going too fast for the conditions.

The terrible crash near Mildura last weekend also looks to have been caused by speed, although there are also suspicions that the driver may have been affected by drugs and/or alcohol. While the family of the driver, Thomas Towle, has been very apologetic to the families of the dead teenagers, and his own family has been subject to some pretty nasty stuff (why do some idiots amongst us invariably deal with their anger in such hateful and destructive ways?), I can’t help but feel this guy being allowed to drive at all, given his past record, was a tragedy waiting to happen, which is exactly what did occur. He clearly was a liability when it came to driving - 8 court appearances since 1992 for driving while disqualified (what for?) says much about his lack of respect for the rules of the road, plus he has several other criminal convictions.

Yet, he was still driving despite this. Why? I think we take our license to drive a car for granted, and its treated as a right, rather than a privilege to be earned and worked on to retain. Serial offenders, like Towle, should be put through the most stringent training and testing before getting their licenses back after a disqualification, not just given it back once the fine is paid and the suspension served.




Technorati Tags: road smash, speeding, Mildura, Tasmania, road deaths