Vehicles should be banned from driving on beaches. Change my mind.
Actually, one of the key touristic things of K’gari is that you can actually drive a car on the beach, except for three set and marked zones (See here). As the article did not state where the incident happened, the car might or might not be legal there.
Keep in mind that the article states that the parents drove he daughter to the helicopter pickup point. So they might have been on a car-legal beach.
Regardless if allowing cars on a beach is a good thing or not, it is allowed in places, and letting a small child play unsupervised in such an area might not be the best parenting idea for a start. They could have gone to a “no cars allowed” beach instead. Apart from that - it is a beach. Not supervising young kids on a beach, especially one where large areas are marked as to dangerous to go into the water, is not a good idea from the word GO, anyway.
hot take: the only way to kill someone who’s not trying to get killed while driving a car is intentionally or disgusting negligence
the only way to kill someone who’s not trying to get killed while driving a car is intentionally or disgusting negligence
Nah, that’s definitely not true. It’s an incredibly motornormative claim to make, actually (though this might be counter-intuitive). It’s actually frighteningly easy to kill someone with a car, and while the driver will almost always bear a strong degree of responsibility, it’s very often also the design of the road that is to blame. Road design that encourages drivers to go too fast, or which does not provide adequate separation (including safe angles and waiting areas at intersections to give drivers good sight lines and a way to wait out of the way of continuing traffic) for pedestrians and cyclists, or complex environments with large numbers of driveways and side streets on higher speed roads (i.e., “stroads”) are all examples of design that we see all the time on Australian roads (and Canadian, and American, for any people from those countries who might blow in to this thread), which play a huge role in the high death toll on our roads.
We can’t get to a zero road toll by changing drivers. Driver education is important, but it’s one of the smallest things we can do in terms of the size of its impact.
N.B. I wrote this talking about driving on roads in cities, because the parent comment seemed to be talking in the general sense, and not specifically talking about driving on beaches like is in the article. So this is only tangentially related to the OP.
That must have been some large German lady!
Reads like a child supervision issue to me; why are you mixing seperate issues?
You could argue that, if you replaced soft sand with carpark or paddock, the kid would likely be dead.
Not really. Driver arguably deserves more blame than the victim. Normal people don’t expect to be run over on a beach, its generally considered a vehicle free zone.
You could argue that, if you replaced soft sand with carpark or paddock, the kid would likely be dead.
Except one expects cars in a carpark. /s
The article is very lacking in details, but I will say I’m not taking blame away from the driver, it’s not even clear if the driver was family.
I’m responding to the fact OP decided to add an opinion to the article, I don’t agree cars on beaches is the issue here, especially on an island that’s world famous for driving on the beach.
Yes, because drivers shouldn’t be held responsible for killing/ harming people with their vehicles on a fucking beach.
Who said anything remotely like that?
I’m saying the incident could happen anywhere with lack of supervision.
It could, but beaches aren’t roads. What if someone was sunbaking or laying on the sand in an area they thought was safe? Are they allowed to be.run over because they weren’t keeping a close eye on every vehicle movement in the vicinity?
In my experience, vehicles don’t stick to any one particular “lane” on a beach so allowing them to use it as a road means the beach is now entirely unusable for anyone who is not in a vehicle.
You shouldn’t have to post a guard to ensure a member of your family is able to enjoy a beach without fear of someone in a vehicle killing them.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A young girl is in hospital after she was driven over by a ute on Queensland’s heritage-listed island, K’gari.
A LifeFlight spokesperson said a toddler was reportedly left unresponsive when the rear and front wheels of the ute rolled over her at a low speed about 10am Thursday.
Air rescue crews said she was pushed face first into the sand before her father performed CPR on her.
Her parents drove her to a nearby area on the eastern side of the island as they waited for paramedics to arrive.
Rescue crews reported extensive bruising on her leg, back, and ear.
Police said Forensic Crash Unit officer were travelling to K’Gari to investigate the incident.
The original article contains 136 words, the summary contains 114 words. Saved 16%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
