Close call in my neighborhood....

[monsterkitty]

My thought process…the kid on the scooter could just as easily have been a pedestrian or young child on a bike. The vehicle driver always needs to be aware & anticipate someone else’s actions. If he was looking for a vehicle approaching that intersection, as he should have been, he should have seen the kid coming. If that was a pedestrian stepping out into the road, the vehicle driver would be expected to react & held responsible. You’re driving a thousand pound vehicle, you need to be in control.

In my state a bike is a vehicle when it is on the road. Even if it's a young child.

Several years ago, I had a student crossing from corner to corner on a residential street. A car turned the corner and hit my student. The driver did not receive a ticket because the student was not in a crosswalk.

I was teasing my student about the incident (he was fine and we both have the same sense of humor) and he told me that the officer told him he could have actually given the student a ticket for not crossing in a crosswalk. His parents along with others, petitioned the county to have cross walks painted on every residential street corner.

 

[LuvOrlando]

OMG that child is lucky to be alive. What is the speed limit in your community because I think that van was doing 50 mph easy? Most residential areas like that have a 15mph speed limit, tops 20 and not one of those vehicles was going at a safe speed for such an area.

Would you consider sharing this with families in the area and the local municipal building, maybe requesting speed bumps and multiple stop signs and all. No sane person watching that video could soundly argue that things are safe as they stand.

From what I just saw a tragedy is inevitable. Yes, the kid was going too fast but kids are kids and they do stupid things, a kid could be going just as fast on a bike IMO.

I say 100% van because there is an adult in the van who should be smart enough to recognize where they are and if that adult is too stupid to gather kids might be there doing dumb stuff they should not be driving.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

We just had a kid killed a few months ago by riding his electric scooter just like the video. In this case he crossed from one side of the street to the other and was hit and killed, not instantly either, it took 8 days for him to die. The kid was 10. He was wearing a helmet (an e-scooter or e-bike should have tougher helmets being used than just normal bicycle ones but no indication that was the case). And for more than a year prior it was extremely common to see people worried about this on Nextdoor saying "it's only a matter of time".

The driver was never considered at fault for that particular incident, there was no way the driver could have anticipated nor could have seen the kid and never had any time stop (this is part of the issue with the speeds that e-scooters and e-bikes can get up to).

Electric scooters and bikes are a huge problem in my county at the moment, far too many young kids who do not pay attention, who ride them in busy roads, in busy parking lots like strip malls with no awareness of the cars around them, through busy crosswalks when they do not have the signal to go). There are ordinances but it is hard to patrol these situations.

A nearby city to where the child died tightened theirs by making more rules for minors requiring them to use sidewalks and wear a helmet. Many people expressed thoughts that to ride them you should have a driver's license, considering the speed of some of them I get the sentiment although in practicality parents won't go for that.

In my neighborhood we've had kids ride them in the streets with no care to cars behind them. One time it was two kids and one kid noticed and got immediately onto the sidewalk, the other took a long time to do so. Both were on their cell phones, both looked no older than 7.

I dislike how people often talk about driver's without realizing, at least in my area, it's increasingly youths who are reckless. People talk about "drivers need to be off their phones and pay attention" which of course is true but when you see kids 6 and 7 zipping down roads with one hand on the handle and the other on the cell phone it needs to be part of the conversation more than it often is. And these kids are increasingly not even using a smidgen of safety, no pause, no look, nothing. It was always drilled in my head to look both ways, at the very least that would help in some of these incidents.

 

[kdonnel]

OMG that child is lucky to be alive. What is the speed limit in your community because I think that van was doing 50 mph easy? Most residential areas like that have a 15mph speed limit, tops 20 and not one of those vehicles was going at a safe speed for such an area.

Would you consider sharing this with families in the area and the local municipal building, maybe requesting speed bumps and multiple stop signs and all. No sane person watching that video could soundly argue that things are safe as they stand.

From what I just saw a tragedy is inevitable. Yes, the kid was going too fast but kids are kids and they do stupid things, a kid could be going just as fast on a bike IMO.

I say 100% van because there is an adult in the van who should be smart enough to recognize where they are and if that adult is too stupid to gather kids might be there doing dumb stuff they should not be driving.

The speed limit is 25.

I think at most they might have been doing 30-35 but could have possibly been going 25 or very close.

Electric scooters likely go 10-40 MPH. So it is entirely possible that the scooter was speeding. Even if both were going 25 the gap between them closes very quickly.

Using Google maps, I measure the distance from the left of the camera view to the point of impact as only 50 feet.

It was about a second between the kid making the turn and the collision.

Then it becomes a 4th grade word problem.

A van traveling at 25 mph is headed towards a scooter traveling 25 mph. How long before they collide if 50 feet apart?

Letting ChatGPT do the math:

Step 1: Closing speed​

• 25 mph + 25 mph = 50 mph

Step 2: Convert to feet per second​

50 mph X 5280/3600 is about 73.3 ft/s

Step 3: Time to collision​

50 ft / 73.3 ft/s is about 0.68 seconds

It appears to be right at a second between the van first appearing and the collision making it entirely possible the van was going 25 and the kid was going 10-15.



There are already multiple traffic calming techniques used in the neighborhood.

1. The streets are narrow to encourage people going slower
2. There are 4 sets of speed bumps in the neighborhood strategically placed at straight aways.
3. There are several places where the lanes split and there is a median in the middle forcing drivers to slow as they go around the median. These are again on straight aways and also going down hills.
4. And then largely ignored stop signs.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Most residential areas like that have a 15mph speed limit, tops 20

25mph is considered the norm unless otherwise posted. The main road into my neighborhood is 35mph up and down a hill. The rest of the roads like countless roads in suburbs around here is 25mph. 15mph is what you'd have going through a roundabout.

 

[Living42Day]

Holy smokes, I was almost going to ask if that video was sped up but saw the time stamp in the bottom corner. People appear to be driving much faster than I am comfortable with in a neighborhood.

I would say it is 90% the kid, 10% the van. The kid should not be out in the street taking the corner like that without looking, but the van also needs to be paying attention for situations like this. It could have been an animal running out that wouldn't have stopped like the kid did and the response needed to be a bit quicker.

I always cringe when I see kids like this unsupervised outside riding in the street like that.

 

[MillauFr]

Your street is pretty wide. Narrowing up the street would cause people to drive slower.

 

[kdonnel]

Your street is pretty wide. Narrowing up the street would cause people to drive slower.

The street is narrow by GA neighborhood standards, built that way as a traffic calming feature.

They are 17 to 17.5 feet wide. Nearby neighborhoods are 22 feet wide.

 

[gottalovepluto]

The van should be more aware of what is in front of it.

Remember the speed is like double what you think it is as you combine the dumb kid’s speed with the van’s. It’s blatantly obvious the van slammed the breaks as soon as the driver registered the kid after maneuvering around the suv which also would have taken driver attention as you’re looking for things to dart out from in from of it.

Kid shoulda stopped. Here’s hoping they take their traffic 101 lesson to heart.

 

[sam_gordon]

Your street is pretty wide. Narrowing up the street would cause people to drive slower.

How narrow should it be? It must only be two lanes as it is.

 

[sam_gordon]

Remember the speed is like double what you think it is as you combine the dumb kid’s speed with the van’s. It’s blatantly obvious the van slammed the breaks as soon as the driver registered the kid after maneuvering around the suv which also would have taken driver attention as you’re looking for things to dart out from in from of it.

Kid shoulda stopped. Here’s hoping they take their traffic 101 lesson to heart.

Right. My question is shouldn't the van driver have been paying better attention and register the kid earlier?

 

[kdonnel]

Right. My question is shouldn't the van driver have been paying better attention and register the kid earlier?

It’s about a second and 70 feet between when the van appears on the left and the kid makes the right without stopping.

Even if the driver saw the kid before the kid turned, he should have expected the kid to stop at the stop sign.

I’m not sure the van driver could have reacted any quicker.

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

Your street is pretty wide. Narrowing up the street would cause people to drive slower.

This is what we have by the elementary school in our neighborhood, that's the elementary school to the left.

I think the technical term is "calming" something or rather and they take on various forms from speed bumps to dips in the road to what is pictured below. I'm not sure that the intersection that the OP's video is from is a good candidate for it but it's used around my area to slow drivers down in specified spots without having to alter much and can be removed as needed. Technically in the picture the road right next to the elementary school is full 2 car widths but 1 lane designed that way so if people are parked there or a line forms cars can still pass on the one side. The calming device temporarily narrows the lane to one cars width on the one lane right there to slow drivers down right where the crosswalk is.

 

[MillauFr]

How narrow should it be? It must only be two lanes as it is.

Why two lanes? The streets in our neighborhood are 24 feet wide but there are cars parked on both sides of the street. The single through lane is only about 10 feet wide. People are forced to go slow. If two cars are going opposite directions you have to pull over by someone's driveway to pass.

 

[kdonnel]

This is what we have by the elementary school in our neighborhood, that's the elementary school to the left.

I think the technical term is "calming" something or rather and they take on various forms from speed bumps to dips in the road to what is pictured below. I'm not sure that the intersection that the OP's video is from is a good candidate for it but it's used around my area to slow drivers down in specified spots without having to alter much and can be removed as needed. Technically in the picture the road right next to the elementary school is full 2 car widths but 1 lane designed that way so if people are parked there or a line forms cars can still pass on the one side. The calming device temporarily narrows the lane to one cars width on the one lane right there to slow drivers down right where the crosswalk is.

View attachment 1035990

One of the selling points of the neighborhood was the traffic calming features. I think it’s really a way for the developer to spend less on asphalt.

There are three or four middle medians like what you showed in the neighborhood where the road splits for 3-4 car lengths and there is a concrete median in the middle.

I watched one day as the car in front of me didn’t navigate around the median well and their passenger front tire popped off their car as they caught the curb just wrong.

Our roads are narrower than what you pictured. Here is a street view of one of them. Also shows the typical street width.

 

[kdonnel]

Why two lanes? The streets in our neighborhood are 24 feet wide but there are cars parked on both sides of the street. The single through lane is only about 10 feet wide. People are forced to go slow. If two cars are going opposite directions you have to pull over by someone's driveway to pass.

Everyone has a two or three car garage and a drive way that can fit 4 plus cars.

Parking on the street is an exception and generally only temporary visitors of some sort.

 

[Brian rhymes with dyin]

Regardless of who is at fault I feel bad for the kid whose parents gave him a vehicular suicide machine and let him drive around in such a car-centered subdivision. I'm 41 and feel like an old man yelling at clouds every time I see perfectly healthy kids putting around on motors.

 

[John VN]

Looking at the time frame, at 44:31 the kid is passed the stop sign and has entered the cross-traffic lane. The Van is not yet in the frame BUT the driver should have seen the kid and should have begun to apply the brakes.

 

[sam_gordon]

Why two lanes? The streets in our neighborhood are 24 feet wide but there are cars parked on both sides of the street. The single through lane is only about 10 feet wide. People are forced to go slow. If two cars are going opposite directions you have to pull over by someone's driveway to pass.

If a street isn't two lanes, then if any car is parked on the street, no other cars could get by.

 

[MICKIMINI]

The kid should have been paying attention, but the van is more at fault for driving too fast at the very least. We've noticed in NH anyway, it seems that yield means nothing and stop is optional. We blame it on the out of state people who have moved into NH (we started to notice in the 1970's). They bring their bad driving habits with them and don't seem to every "get it".