Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

Syne Wrote:If you've failed to start a steep downhill grade properly, you're already screwed...

You don't address how the trucker is supposed to know what is 'proper' for a downhill grade he meets for the first time. The perpetrator does seem to have called two other truckers for advice - what more should he have done?

My solution would be radical - truckers must be accompanied by someone with experience of the route whenever taking a route for the first time. My solution would increase transport costs and the feason would be given that the cost of saving a small number of lives doesn't justify the expense involved.

Deliberately rolling the truck might have been the least bad option when he'd fouled up every other option.

Quote:48% of truck occupants died in crashes including rollovers, while only 22% of car occupants died in accidents involving rollovers. Truck occupants experience a much higher death rate in case of rollover than occupants of other vehicle types, mainly due to the specific features of the trucks.

[ https://www.steinberginjurylawyers.com/b...-after.cfm ]

He's either been given bad advice or failed to implement good advice - and now we want him (50-50) to kill himself because he didn't have an experienced driver in the cab with him.

Truckers refusing to deliver to Colorado, protesting Rogers 110 year sentence. 

I can't find any news stories about this though. Could be fake news. I'm not sure, but there's more videos on TikTok



Here's one news story and another. No, I don't think it's fake news. 

"Many in the trucking community are expressing outrage in the wake of what they believe was an unjust outcome in the case of the trucker who this week was sentenced to 110 years in prison.

In what is being called #NoTrucksToColorado, a growing number of truckers are vowing to boycott all load pickups and deliveries in Colorado in response to 25-year-old Cuban immigrant Rogel Lazaro Aguilera-Mederos receiving effectively a life-sentence for his role in a fiery 2019 crash along Interstate 70 which claimed the lives of four people and severely injured six others.

Truckers are largely coordinating the boycott on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok.

New video shared to these platforms purportedly shows a long line of trucks pulled off along the side of the roadway as a gesture of solidarity with Mederos."


Boycott Brewing-#Notruckstocolorado

Millions sign petition asking for reduced sentence for truck driver in I-70 crash

Egads! I hope the victim's family members don't see this.< [sarcasm]

(Dec 17, 2021 07:28 AM)stryder Wrote: [ -> ]

(Dec 17, 2021 04:28 AM)Syne Wrote: [ -> ]You're still trying to excuse his actions. Again, hope the victim's families never come across all these callous posts of yours.
Imagine how you'd feel, if you'd lost a loved one, the perpetrator was legally convicted and sentenced, according to longstanding law, and then there was an outpouring of support...for the perpetrator.

Unfortunately road accidents happen all the time.  Some are out of a persons control and others could of been prevented, or at least reduced in effect.  The problem is that we only observe such an event in hind-sight.  Hind-sight is the outcome of causality there is no changing it.  People should be wary thinking that they would know what to do in a given situation.

Except that there's plenty of signs, on that route, like this one:

And all truck driving training includes how to handle steep grades.
(BTW, seems we could resize images at one time, via [img=200x200], but can't get it to work)

Quote:There is a possibility of an underlaying health issue like PTSD, Aspergers with mild Dyslexia.  If that was the case then it's possible that he realised the vehicle was out of control and panicked. 

Then again, it was his responsibility to not put himself in that position, operating a dangerous vehicle knowing he was a potential liability. He could have been working somewhere that his actions didn't put anyone at risk.

Quote:In a person who has a hidden disadvantage like dyslexia, they might be able to compensate (to appear normal) most of the time but re-routing calls through other switches.  This means their brain (the switchboard) is doing more work than a normal person, which in turn means it has little extra room for an increase in activity (more calls).
...
A person with dyslexia is already taxing their system from rerouting calls, they can't keep up with the logistics of it.  (This could be pushing/flicking the wrong buttons/switches at the wrong time, or shifting the wrong gear). 

Again, all stuff he would have known makes him a liability, which again makes it his responsibility.

Quote:Furthermore there could be the complication in reading signs or even directions. 

Quote:"The simplest problem some people have is knowing their right from their left... no!, their other ⬅"

What I'm showing here is that it should be easy to digest which the written meaning of right or left is, however when you interchange words and directional arrows it can cause confusion to some, even if it's only a couple of milliseconds (for their re-routing to handle it) it's a small delay that can cause problems in a situation where the right action needs to be done expediently.

All the signs for the runaway ramp only had arrows.

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(Dec 17, 2021 02:07 PM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]

Syne Wrote:If you've failed to start a steep downhill grade properly, you're already screwed...

You don't address how the trucker is supposed to know what is 'proper' for a downhill grade he meets for the first time. The perpetrator does seem to have called two other truckers for advice - what more should he have done?

All CDL training includes how to handle steep grades. He was probably told to keep the truck in low gear, but either didn't heed the advice or didn't heed the signs warning of the steep grade until it was too late. All his own fault. If nothing else, if he was that unsure of himself, he should have admitted he was not adequately prepared to drive that route. His job was not worth those lives.

Quote:My solution would be radical - truckers must be accompanied by someone with experience of the route whenever taking a route for the first time. My solution would increase transport costs and the feason would be given that the cost of saving a small number of lives doesn't justify the expense involved.

No, drivers just need to be held accountable for their own driving knowledge and skill. Enough examples like this one will make truck drivers aware of the consequences of their own negligence.

Quote:Deliberately rolling the truck might have been the least bad option when he'd fouled up every other option.

Quote:48% of truck occupants died in crashes including rollovers, while only 22% of car occupants died in accidents involving rollovers. Truck occupants experience a much higher death rate in case of rollover than occupants of other vehicle types, mainly due to the specific features of the trucks.

[ https://www.steinberginjurylawyers.com/b...-after.cfm ]

He's either been given bad advice or failed to implement good advice - and now we want him (50-50) to kill himself because he didn't have an experienced driver in the cab with him.

False dilemma. As I said earlier, even after the runaway ramp, he could have run the truck against the guardrail to shave off speed. And according to the source for your quote:

A total of 4,119 people died in large truck crashes in 2019. Sixteen percent of these deaths were truck occupants, 67 percent were occupants of cars and other passenger vehicles, and 15 percent were pedestrians, bicyclists or motorcyclists.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-sta...rge-trucks

So the potential deaths of passenger vehicle occupants far outweighs the risk of truck driver rollover death.

That's also cherry-picking "cars," when 45% of SUV and 41% of pickup occupant deaths were due to rollover: https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insig...tatistics/
The heavier the vehicle, the more likely it is to protect you, unless you have a rollover. Which is why semis, SUVs, and pickups have fewer multi-vehicle accident fatalities.

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(Dec 17, 2021 03:04 PM)Secular Sanity Wrote: [ -> ]Millions sign petition asking for reduced sentence for truck driver in I-70 crash

Egads! I hope the victim's family members don't see this.< [sarcasm]

SS trying to excuse her callousness with an argumentum ad populum. Sure, if everyone wants to kill the Jews, it can't be a bad thing, right?

There’s was this case where a young woman drove through a pile of leaves on the side of the road. Two little girls were hiding in the leaves. She and her brother felt a bump but thought she ran over sticks or something. She didn’t realize that there were two little girls hiding in the leaves until later. 

"Defense attorney Ethan Levi said Garcia-Cisneros was in a state of denial after learning of the children and fixated on the possibility she wasn't the driver who struck them. Levi asked jurors to imagine themselves as a teen driver confronted with the same information."

There was a study done by The Moral Lab at Harvard University. When they described this story to online respondents, ninety four percent thought that she should be punished by serving at least 1-3 years in prison. "It really isn’t safe to drive through leaf piles; you never know if a child might be hiding in one." Hindsight bias for sure.

When they described the story without anyone being harmed, no one thought she should be punished for driving over a pile of leaves.

When someone is harmed, the negative effect causes us to judge the actor more harshly.

Oddly, when judging her morals, most people said that driving through a pile of leaves is minimally morally wrong, regardless of the outcome. But when it comes to punishment, it’s a whole other ballgame.

Why do we punish others for accidents? Is it to modify behavior—to teach them and others to be more careful? If so, are such severe punishments needed to achieve deterrence?

Or is it us? Do we require—suffering for suffering?

If it were in the road, it would be the parents' fault...and letting children play too close to a road could still partially be. But swerving off the road to intentionally hit something, even as innocuous as a pile of leaves (forcing someone to rake them up again, at best), is not responsible driving. It's reckless and careless. Like the guy who tried running over a snowman only to find it built around a tree stump, there could have been a hidden obstacle, like a fire hydrant, that could have led to injury or death of her passengers. At the very least, veering off the road to hit something on some else's property is vandalism.

Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros was an illegal alien. Even after being told she killed the two children, she didn't try to contact the parents or police. An appeals court reversed her conviction on a technicality. Her boyfriend, who took her SUV to a car wash and then home with him, was sentenced to 13 months in prison.

So a sympathetic 19 year old girl got off scot-free, but her boyfriend, who had no more certainty that she'd killed anyone than she did, went to prison. Hell, her initial sentence didn't even include any prison time at all. Sounds like emotional reactions worked in her favor. Or society really doesn't think women can be held accountable for their own actions.

If Syne were in charge, everybody who ever made a mistake would be thrown into prison. It's almost as bad as Sharia law.

(Dec 17, 2021 10:13 PM)Magical Realist Wrote: [ -> ]If Syne were in charge, everybody who ever made a mistake would be thrown into prison. It's almost as bad as Sharia law.

Democrats are the ones who didn't deport that illegal alien and gave her a driver's license. They're also the ones releasing violent offender back into communities with cashless bail and early release. If you don't enforce the laws, you only encourage people to break them.

And I guess you missed the part about someone who didn't kill anyone getting 13 months in prison while the killer got off scot-free.

Given a free hand, assuming the leaves weren't on the road, I'd go with 1 month in jail and ban her from driving for life for driving through the pile of leaves. If subsequently caught driving then the sentence for vehicular homicide would automatically be applied - 10 to 60 years in prison depending on the state.

Really? Compared to her boyfriend getting over a year in prison?
If anyone had any sense, if she gets off, he should too. But our society doesn't care what happens to men.

(Dec 18, 2021 12:00 AM)confused2 Wrote: [ -> ]Given a free hand, assuming the leaves weren't on the road, I'd go with 1 month in jail and ban her from driving for life for driving through the pile of leaves. If subsequently caught driving then the sentence for vehicular homicide would automatically be applied - 10 to 60 years in prison depending on the state.

Neighbors had raked the pile of leaves near the curb for leaf pick-up. The leaves were in the road across the street from their house. The father was taking pictures of them playing in the leaves. He went back into the house to put his camera away. The parents pleaded with the court to not have her convicted or deported. She was here legally since the age of 4 under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The parents and the community opened a park where other children can safely play.

‘It’s here!’: Anna & Abby’s Yard