Following on from the thread about rising bollards a few weeks ago, which mentioned the video of a car with a child on board crashing into one, here's an article from the Auto Express website, dated 21 November:
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--------------- The future of rising bollards - the UK's most aggressive traffic-calming measure - is in doubt following new Government guidelines suggesting they breach official safety rules.
The poles, which allow through some vehicles - for example buses - but not others, have caused hundreds of write-offs and injuries since they were introduced into UK city centres 14 years ago.
Last May, a 63-year-old motorist in Nuneaton, Warks, died of "natural causes" after crashing into a metal rising bollard in Cambridge, and in Manchester last month similar devices tore through a woman's car, narrowly missing her nine-month-old daughter.
That incident has caused officials in the city to consider scrapping the poles, after a Department for Transport (DfT) leaflet was issued to councils. It said the units should not be capable of rising underneath a passing vehicle, and that driver safety should take priority over traffic calming.
Some experts are now consulting makers to see whether their systems need to be modified. Cambridgeshire County Council has posted a warning on its website that motorists risk car damage by passing rising bollards illegally, but drivers have complained that in-situ warning signs do not spell out the dangers clearly enough.
And so it should be, if we accept that the state can automatically dish out violence against us for breaching a trivial law then god knows where we're going to end up.
It was always blatantly obvious the makers of these things were twisting words when they claimed they couldn't rise up under vehicles, the only think that stops them is resistance from some object above by which time they've already risen up underneath and made contact.
In this health and safety concious world the whole idea of these things was always flawed, the councils shouldn't have needed to be reminded by government that safety is the priority, and it's no defence that they weren't reminded earlier.
As soon as the first council implicitely accepts they're breaching their duty of care by removing them the flood gates will open for legal action, everyone who'se car has been damaged will sue for the damage to the car, personal injury and the money the councils extorted for repairing the bollards.
This is going to cost us, the tax payers, very dearly, but the incompetent idiots who installed them won't suffer, they never do.
It can't be done, at least not without making it trivial for drivers to 'convoy' through behind busses, which defeats the object.
Only the sort of rising barriers used in car parks would work, and as these are designed to snap off easily they'll probably be vandalised. We have a solid steel barrier across an emergency access in this village but the local yobs just nicked a car and rammed it underneath thus bending it high enough for their lowered cars to rat run-underneath, no point in fixing it as they would just do the same.
As if a warning on a web site is of any use!, incompetent idiots, nor were a street full of no entry signs. Only signs clearly stating the true risks to vehicles, occupants and pedestrians could have any possible meaning, and even that's doubtful as nobody can absolve their duty of care.
It's very hard to work out which side of the fence you stand, obviously mainly on the council's but sympathising with the taxpayer. As for all this bullshit about 'duty of care' any responsible person knows without being told.
No not at all on the council's side, they should have known better, and have virtually ignored the government's original advice on the subject, which it's going to cost us dearly.
Yes the world has gone OTT on this but people forget what it was like before, you only have to think asbestos to remember what happens if people are not forced to consider health and safety. Unchecked market forces kill people.
Similar situation with organo-phosphates and farmers coming down with certain conditions, although in that situation it seems that the health and safety people are doing their best to stare in the other direction as compensation payments will cost the taxpayer loads!
If you look into it you find they were anything but ignorant of the risks, they just ignored them in pursuance of profit because no one stopped them. Without H&S that's what happens, there are numerous headline examples of it and untold millions of lesser cases.
Yes it's gone to daft extremes but that's the result of the no-win-no-fee parasites making thousands of speculative claims and people trying to cover their back sides against them. But the 'good old days' were anything but if you were one of those killed or disabled by people doing things they knew were ridiculously dangerous, but profitable, so in my book we're better off now.
I think the ballance will swing back towards a happy medium in the next few years, only this morning there's a story about the government actively trying to get more kids on school trips because the numbers are plummeting as a result of excessive H&S paperwork.
That's partly true, but the biggest problem is people with job titles like "Health & Safety Officer" (a job created simply to deflect the blame from managers as yet another ploy to avoild taking responsibility for their actions when they report to the MD) who have rather empty days to fill, and so invent problems. H&S should just be part of a project managers/line managers role, without someone picking holes all the time. While profit may sometimes be an cause, the biggest cause of accidents are people themselves taking risks to make their own lives/jobs easier, which is personal thing and nothing to do with government, or the employer if they've made the effort to provide equipment etc.
Not while there's a lawyer still breathing - the government can say what it likes, but until the legal profession can get it's head round the concept that quite often no one is to blame without a full court hearing (thus gaining a large cheque) then we're stuffed. All the activities I did at school, Cubs/Scouts, Columbus Fellowship, canoe making, etc etc would now not be possible as we made our own mistakes and learned from them while still young enough to bounce. I'm not surprised kids are glued to their computers to get adventure - Scouts etc can't even eat the food they cook these days, never mind building rope bridges, death slides etc etc. It's getting to be a very dull, sanitised world......
On or around Mon, 27 Nov 2006 21:51:53 +0000, Ian Rawlings enlightened us thusly:
yeah. hide your head under the sand for long enough and the people affected will all have died anyway... same has applied to a variety of things and will again, I don't doubt.
I still reckon that compensation claims from people who have trashed their motors should be thrown out. There's no credible reason fro hitting the things, IMHO.
Claims for third party injury or damage resulting would be an entirely different matter.
None of this absolves the council or its agents from complying with any regulations or guidelines pertaining to the devices themselves - if the bollards come up under a vehicle then that's wrong. The ones we had video footage of didn't seem to. One of the video clips you can find on the web has a car travelling at high speed hitting the bollards when they're pretty much at full height.
With the amount of H&S legislation to comply with it would be ridiculously inefficient to train every manager in a medium or large company sufficiently to ensure compliance, a specialist is the only practical way to do it. Obviously all employees have a part to play but they still need someone supervising to keep them the right side of the law.
That's the very simplistic view that prevailed in the past and suited employers down to the ground, "we told him not to overload the forklift, the fact we would have sacked him for being too slow if hadn't is irrelevant!". This is exactly why they introduced legislation to make employers explicitely responsible so they couldn't play such games.
There have always been lawyers, that's not what's changed, it's the government changing laws that's made things different.
Court hearings are very rare, the vast majority of claims are settled by insurers without involving the legal profession because, as you say, it would be very expensive if it went that far.
Of course there are headline cases, but these are typically test cases where the insurance industry needs to get a firm ruling that it can then use to settle cases out of court. The industry literally gets together and decides that one company or the other needs to take a case all the way so they all know where they stand. After that they follow the precedent and the no-win-no-fee paracites don't force a hearing because they know a precedent has been set and they would loose money.
I completely agree with you, but having been to several insurance seminars I can tell you exactly why this has happened: The government introduced the small claims system without considering the consequences. A whole industry of paracites sprang up overnight, they make small claims which are very often fraudulent but the cost of contesting them even in the small claims court would be more than the claim, so the insurers pay out and this feeds the paracites.
Just look at some of the adverts for these paracites, there's one which shows someone tripping over a bit of binding tape, it's an unbelievably blatant incitement for people to throw a bit on the floor, 'trip' over it and phone them that it's hard to believe the advert is legal!.
The insurers have even tried ganging up on a particular paracite and contesting every one of their cases regardless in order to bankrupt them. Unfortunately new ones are springiing up faster than they can tackle them so they have given up.
The insurers have had to increase premiums to cover the claims (they're not charities!) and also turn the screws on their customers who now have no choice but to be squeeky clean on H&S because otherwise their insurance won't pay out.
Schools daren't do many of the things you mention because they know parents are educating their kids to look for claims, give them a sharp tool and one or two of the little darlings will 'accidently' hurt themselves to get a few grand!.
If you want someone to blame look firstly at the government for their half baked laws, but mostly look at the blind greed of the great British public. Greg
So, like Personnel departments, they've invented their own jobs! The H&S industry is a self-perpetuating myth. You've only got to look at the railways to see the huge rafts of legislation and pointless jobs that have been created since the railway was privatised to see the massive, pointless, waste.
Well, having worked in a large number of different insutrial/ wharehouse/construction jobs over the years (I have an "interesting" career to date) I've yet to see anyone disciplined for refusing to do something because it's dangerous. What I have seen is the job made so unnecesserily complex that the risk of injury is increased as staff become frustrated and take short cuts.
Lawyers, or the legal trade if you prefer, have changed markedly over the last 20 years. Taking the railway as an example again, when a crash occured the railway, overseen by the Railway Inspectorate, used to do the investigation, find the cause, re-open the line in a few days. Then, if necessary, the legal system creaked into action. Now, since the H&SE took over and let the lawyers in, days, if not weeks go by before the line is re-opened. Huge sums of money are spent and vast amounts of time wasted to reach exactly the same conclusion as would have been reached before, but with the solution costed in millions instead of everyone just noting not to do it again. To paraphrase Terry Pratchet, there is a tribe on the Discworld that inveted H&S officers before discovering fire and hunting with spears. They hunt by waiting for animals to drop down dead and eat raw meat. Never a truer word spoken jest!
The goverment only creates laws if there is a percieved need. That need, far too often these days, is generated by the very poeple who are to police it - which leads back to my assertion that they are creating their own jobs.
Which is wrong. We have to pay that through our premiums.
I'd actually argue that the root problem is insurance companies trying to lay-off parts, or the whole, claim against any third party who happened to be in the area at the time. An example would be when someone jumps a red light an causes an accident. Simple isn't it? The person jumping the red light is wrong! But that's not the case, the lawyers (acting for the insuerers) will cast about for any mitigation at all, and will always find something (by picking through a not-very-literate wintesses statement and twisting their words etc). The upshot is that blame is never awared 100%, so we have the ridiculous situation where someone jumps the lights and you, who was totaly innocent, lose your no claims bonus (they give in the nice cuddly title knock-for-knock). When the lawywers turn round and say "So you jumped a red light, what's that got to do with me" then we'll be getting there.
As you're probably going to guess I hold the view that while the government doesn't help (as it listens to "experts" without looking back down the cheque-chain to see who they actually are representing) , and the public are indeed greedy, the root is the fact that there will be, somewhere, a lawyer who will take on anything rather than just no.
No but as one example lorry drivers used to get set schedules that they can't keep unless they speed and drive for long periods without rest. If they can't keep the schedules, they get the sack. One of my uncles used to see that a lot. No-one's daft enough to order someone to do something dangerous.
You'll probably find that the Railway Inspectorate were found to be not up to the job, or biased etc, you know how it works.
It's wrong that the vast majority of claims are solved without the involvement of lawyers? Eh?
I've had about four minor accidents in my driving career, one was my fault, the others weren't, and I've never seen "knock for knock", so hardly "never" as I can point to three cases involving me where that didn't happen.
Similarly I've never had any lawyers involved in any part of my life other than buying a house.
TBH Richard, you seem to hate the world more than it deserves! Sure there's problems, but you seem to think that the worst possible case is always the case.
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