Re: Auto accident versus collision; I was wrong

On 2025-03-19 5:50 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

On Mar 19, 2025 at 2:44:36 PM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
wrote:
 

On 2025-03-19 3:42 PM, BTR1701 wrote:

  On Mar 19, 2025 at 10:03:23 AM PDT, "Rhino" <no_offline_contact@example.com>
  wrote:
 

  On 2025-03-19 11:45 AM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:

    The law is entirely semantics. Perhaps ordinary people (who don't watch
    fictional lawyers on tv and become legal experts like me) don't
    appreciate this, but a state legislature that employs professionals who
    are specifically experts in legal language and statutory construction
    fail to grasp the consequence of a semantic change?
        In this video, Steve Lehto discusses the unintended consequence of
    substituting "collision" for "accident" when Hawaii amended a law. Years
    ago, I was one of those people who stopped using the word "accident",
    influenced by others who wanted newspaper reporters and others in the
    media to stop reporting such incidents as "accidents" because the reader
    or listener would assume that the incident was unavoidable.
        But that's not what "accident" means. Neither in dictionary definitions
    nor statutory language has it meant "unavoidable" in which there is no
    fault to find. Instead, it means that the party at fault for the
    incident had not committed an intentional act.
        "Accident", therefore, means "without intent" not "without fault".
        To the uninformed reader or listener, as "crash" or "collision" is just
    a factual statement without finding of fault and without proving intent,
    "unavoidable" isn't incorrectly assumed.
        Lehto went off on a bit of an incorrect tangent about why people were
    pushing for the word "accident" not to be used.

>
  When I was driving school buses, I found that my employers never used
  the word "accident". If someone hit something while driving their bus,
  even if it was the merest scratch, it was never an accident: it was
  *always* a collision. (I'm sure this would have been true if a person
  were hit, although I don't recall anyone ever hitting a person while I
  worked there.) I feel sure this was their way of making us take
  responsibility for what had happened. We didn't get to say anything that
  implied that whatever happened couldn't be helped in some way. Even if
  we weren't at fault, I think they expected that we could have done
  something to prevent or minimize the event. Drivers were always taken
  off the road for a day or two and made to have a retraining session with
  another driver after a collision.

    Even if a meteor fell out of the sky and hit the bus? You still have to go
  through retraining?
    I absolutely hate bureaucratic nonsense like that.
 

My employers were reasonably sensible people for the most part so I like
to think that they wouldn't force a retraining session on a driver if
something like a meteor strike happened.
>
Then again, my brother - who worked for the same company but drove a
minivan instead of a bus - had a flat once. It took many hours for the
repair service to come and change out the tire and then he was told he
needed a retraining session. I asked why, given the circumstances, and
he said he didn't really understand it either. But I don't think he ever
actually *did* the retraining session. It was one of the very last days
of the school year so it may simply have been lost in the shuffle. Or
maybe they realized how silly it was to do a retraining session for that
circumstance.
>
And that reminds me that I had a flat tire myself once. I ran over a
piece of something on the road just before I got to the school and
didn't notice anything off but after I'd let the kids off and was doing
my child-check (to make sure no one was still on the bus), a teacher
crossed the laneway in from of my parked bus and noticed a hissing from
the left front tire. He brought that to my attention and I realized that
I'd driven over something. Having remembered how long it took someone to
come for my brother's flat and being in dire need of a washroom, I
decided to drive the bus back to our office - the repair bays are in the
same building - because drivers were not permitted to use the school
washrooms. I took slower secondary roads rather than the expressway -
and got back without incident. However, I was surprised to discover that
the damaged tire was not even properly seated on the rim. The bus hadn't
ridden oddly with the front left side sagging as I would have thought
given the circumstances. I told the mechanics that I probably shouldn't
have moved once I knew about the flat and they agreed but I didn't get
into any trouble let alone forced to take a retraining session.
>

  When I was a super-secret government agent, the absolute worst thing that
  could happen was for you to have a car collision. You could walk down the
  street and shoot someone at random and have less paperwork and bureaucratic
  hoops to jump through than there was with a minor fender-bender.
    In the aftermath of 9-11, I was assigned as the detail leader for Lauren
Bush
  (George W's niece) who was a high school student at the time. It was a very
  loose detail and we didn't go into the school with her. We sat out in the
  parking lot in a car, parked near hers and would pick her up when she left
  school each afternoon. She had a panic button that she could push if
anything
  happened inside the school that would bring us running in.
    So over the course of several months, as I was sitting in my parked car, I
was
  backed into by high school kids not one, not two, but three different times.
  Each bump came with reams of paperwork and repair estimates (even when no
  repairs were necessary) and as a bonus on my third incident, I was told I
had
  take a mandatory driver's education safety course.
    Even though my car was parked in each instance and the engine wasn't even
  running. They told me if I'd been standing nearby and the car was empty, it
  wouldn't have counted, but because I was inside the car each time when it
  happened, then according to the bureaucratic rules, I was presumed to need
  re-education.
    Whoever thought forcing people who carry loaded firearms to deal with such
  inscrutable and intractable bureaucracy wasn't thinking very clearly.

 

LOL!
>
I'm gonna guess that the paperwork was to cover their asses in case you,
or anyone else in the car, developed an injury after the fact - "I
thought it was just a bit of whiplash but the doctor says I've got a
serious injury" - and limit the government's liability.
>
I hear you though: the bureaucracy seems to be able to conjure up
mountains of paperwork for circumstances that don't seem to require it.

 All it did was teach me the lesson: if it happens again, say you were out
stretching your legs and not in the car, regardless of whether it was true or
not.
 

That might work once but I suspect if that started being a regular thing among agents, the bureaucrats would insist that you couldn't leave the car without prior permission from a supervisor or dispatcher (if you have dispatchers). I'm not even joking.
Last year, I had to have a gastroscopy at a local hospital. I was having a bit of trouble with things "going down the wrong way" so they stuck a tube down my throat to look around, then to make a bit more room for food, pills, whatever to go down smoothly. They sedated me first. The whole thing apparently only took about 5 minutes and I felt absolutely fine when I woke up but the rules of this procedure are that I am absolutely forbidden to drive myself home, take the bus home, or even take a cab. The ONLY way they would do the procedure was for me to have a friend pick me up afterwards and drive me home. Luckily, I have friends that are retired who could drive me and someone was available for when my procedure was scheduled but my friend lives out of town, maybe half an hour from the hospital. It really irked me that this was the only way to get the procedure. I was absolutely fully capable of walking to the bus stop and getting home from there. I asked the doctor and he said it was "hospital policy"; I have no doubt that policy was developed when their lawyers said it reduced liability.
It would make sense to have a policy like that if I was woozy after the procedure but I was 100% fine. But if I hadn't agreed to that, they would have cancelled the procedure. Bloody bureaucrats!!!
--
Rhino