Manslaughter is a form of homicide – conduct which causes the death of a person – committed when a defendant recklessly causes death (second-degree)

Does Cooper’s Law apply as well? A TLC driver issued a failure to yield should automatically have a license suspension until investigation is completed?

Giant SUVs should not be permitted as livery vehicles by the TLC, both for safety and environmental reason.

I’m imagining that’s how it went town, too.

As usual, let’s blame the intersection. It’s dangerous! The driver had nothing to do with it. You apologists are fools. If thousands of drivers can drive safely through the intersection on a daily basis and one driver kills someone, why is it the intersections fault?

I agree with your point made here and other-where among these comments that the primary cause of the deadly collision was the driver. He drove irresponsibly and due to that he killed someone. This should be treated as a greater crime rather than misdemeanor failure to yield. However, the comments you deride do have some value as well. The commenters are trying to think of ways to keep dangerous drivers from being so dangerous. I don’t think they are trying to diminish the responsibility of the driver. But we do have to sometimes design things to save people from themselves. Dtrain suggest that we look at the structure and use of the intersections. Geck suggests that we look to fix the vehicles used. Nothing wrong with trying to problem-solve.

This gets to a good point: we have a state of affairs in which drivers don’t expect consequences for breaking the law. We have gone so far down this path, entrenching this pattern as the norm, that it is very difficult to accomplish anything with laws. The only hope for improvement is to somehow alter this underlying cultural pattern.

Compare it to smoking in offices and restaurants. No one even attempts that anymore, because every potential smoker knows that the lighting of a cigarette in such a location would be shut down immediately.

We need something analogous regarding driver misbehaviour. Instead of drivers routinely stopping ahead of the stop line (sometimes even within the crosswalk), running stop signs and red lights, turning with no signals, barely slowing to make a right on red (in foreign lands outside the City, of course), speeding, blocking the box, etc., we need to create the expectation that doing any of those things will bring about immediate consequences. Only then will drivers stop doing them.

The means of acheiving this state of affairs would be partly technological: cameras at every intersection; ID sensors and speed governors in every car. And there would have to be substantial changes in the law, allowing for the introduction of severe penalties for these infractions (lifetime loss of driving privileges, for example). Finally, the personal touch on the part of law enforcement would be necessary: we would have to have an officer at nearly every intersection. This, of course, would require a shifting of the police department’s focus away from the militaristic efforts to battle largly imaginary “terrorists” to the actual problems that plague us in day-to-day life here in the real world.

The bad news is that all of this would require political will that is entirely absent in our backward society. For this reason, the prospects for positive change are extremely slim.

Added to our database of dangerous intersections. Do a search on our database badintersections.com for “fatal accident” and “pedestrian”.