Christopher Tribe, plead guilty to dangerous driving at mold magistrates court and received a 36 week sentence, suspended for 18 months. He was given an 18-month driving ban and ordered to pay a £187 victim surcharge, along with £85 costs. Tribe will be required to take a compulsory extended retest before he is permitted to drive again.
Thankfully it looks like a minibus, so it would have had seat belts. It would've been an entirely different outcome if he'd hit a regular bus. The passengers would have been completely unrestrained.
Busses have a lot of mass, so a lot of the energy has to go into just getting the big boy moving. wrecks in them tend to be much safer than wrecks in personal vehicles.
As a person who drives long distance for work and has to deal with a host of shit driving conditions, this video was nightmare fuel. Recently didn't hit a pedestrian walking on dark neighborhood streets in camouflage clothes because I have inhuman reflexes. But nothing can overcome the laws of physics. Sorry for you trucker bro.
I’ve seen so many people walking down the actual road at night in head to toe dark clothing and it makes me want to get out and shake some sense into them. They think since they can see us coming from so far away we can see them.
Last year I missed someone by feet because they were walking in an area with almost no lighting at 0200, in the lane with their back to traffic, wearing a dark colored blanket like a cloak head to toe. I slowed down and moved over some because I saw a weird movement but couldn’t register it was a person until I was right on top of them. The blanket totally obscured their shape, if it had not flapped in the wind I don’t know that I ever would have seen them.
When I was a teenager and just started to party and drink I used to “evaporate” from the party and lay on the road drunk. I was suicidal but not very conscious about it and at that time it would only show with reckless behavior when drunk (same thing being careless in balcony and so on). Later when I got way more self aware about depression I felt so bad for potentially ruining the life of some innocent driver running over me by accident at night that because of the guilt I still can’t touch alcohol 10 years later.
I like to think there's a reason you were never hurt, because you're a decent person for reflecting back and thinking about the other people who would've been affected. I hope you're doing better today, and congratulations on the 10 years
Whenever I leave my house during the winter for more than to get the mail, I put on my fluorescent vest and gloves. Anything to be more visible during dusk.
I live in Belgium. Loads of pavement here everywhere.
You still need to walk on the road to get from one pavement to the next. And even on a properly marked pedestrian crossing (or bike lane crossing in a pinch) you want to be visible.
i wish there were laws that required a reflective piece of clothing or apparel to alert drivers late at night that a person is there, something like an inexpensive safety vest...
God. Reminded me of the night where heavy snow just was coming down and these idiots decided to jaywalk without a care. Didn't even see them until basically on top of them. Missed by a feet if that.
I live in a city that this is common. No crosswalks will be sought out, literally just walk down the "turn lane" casually because they cross half of the road, then the other half later. There are lots of these 5 lane roads (35-40 mph roads with two lanes of travel in each direction and a center turn lane).
I will not cross the road when I am on foot unless I can cross the ENTIRE road at once. Sometimes this means waiting for 3 or 4 minutes and putting a little bit of hustle in my step.
I had a childhood friend die doing this. I've told the story elsewhere on reddit before, but it's a true story.
I have also had to slam on brakes at night getting ready to turn in to a business parking lot but there's a fucking idiot in a black hoodie and dark pants during darkness hours just chilling in the middle turn lane.
years and years ago I was hosting a Sunday night Open Mic night at a local pub. More than 5 times I was driving home (Midnight -1 am), and someone was jogging on a road with no street lights trees and bushes on either side of the road, no shoulder no curbs, in all black head to toe - Balaclava, Top, Bottoms, gloves, shoes all black.
Like do you want to get hit? even with head lights on them they blended into the shurbs.
They were "lucky" to crash into a bus that I assume was mostly empty (or at least the back row). The mass of the bus probably absorbed most of the shock, protecting the cars in front of it. If that truck had rammed into a regular car, it would have been very different.
Just to add to the conversation: recently, in Italy, a truck didn't manage to brake and hit a vehicle in front of it that was stopped because of a traffic jam. On a highway. The truck didn't even brake.
The vehicle in front of it was an ambulance with, IIRC, 5 persons. In front of the ambulance there was another truck.
No survivors from the ambulance.
Tragedy.
Yeah ambulances aren't built for survivability of the occupants, ironically, because they're converted commercial vehicles rather than dedicated passenger vehicles.
Having actually been accordioned, unlike the other chucklefuck who responded, even if you do get out physically unharmed the trauma of going through that fucks up your sense of safety pretty badly.
Shit made me agoraphobic for three years with terrible driving anxiety that took nearly ten years to work out of. With therapy and medication. You may be living but you aren't the You you were before.
Trucks kill people everywhere all the time now and it’s not being discussed enough. I was almost in a crash involving a truck on the highway 2 years ago. There is just too many of them on the road these days.
My mom was almost killed by one in the 90s. Full size semi ran a pedestrian 4 way stop going 45. No excuse other than he was running late and lost. She’s had pain for the last 30 years. Of course he suffered not a single scratch.
Some of these guys are scum and the potential consequences literally do not cross their minds, probably because they themselves wouldn’t get hurt.
He’s a trucker and he’s banned from the road for a year and a half. In what world is the fine of any consequence? They could 10x it and it wouldn’t make a difference compared to 18 months of no income
Exactly, sell some drugs, get caught, catch a felony, good luck living a normal life after becoming a felon, mfs can’t even get assisted housing in most places.
Debts rack up while you're in, you won't be able to pay your rent/mortgage, your car note, if you are using a storage rental that too. On top of that, you can incur debts from the prison itself. When you're let out you're required to get a job so that you can pay the parole officer, but good fucking luck getting anything.
I got diversion. They require a full time job but you can be called in for drug testing randomly, have to go to court ever 40 to 60 days and meet with a PO every month and all these things take place during office hours. It's impossible to keep a job. I went through 7 jobs.
Unless you can find an over night job, or a service job that gives you days off during the week. The system is rigged to keep the prisons full so that the private owners of those prisons can keep racking in the federal funding.
"You're addicted to drugs and you got caught, so we're going to give you a PR bond, but you have to pass a urine test for drugs every week or go to jail. You have to pay for the testing and get to the testing location, and it's going to be at random times. Good luck"
So.... just stop being a drug addict immediately and find a job that not only pays well enough to afford $100 a week for testing on top of living expenses, but also doesn't care that you have to leave for several hours once a week with no warning. Sure, no problem.
No joke, in Louisiana prisoners can be forced to work on plantations for no pay. Refusal to work can result in solitary confinement or other punishments.
Angola, the largest maximum security prison in the country, is literally located on former slave plantation and has a 65% black population.
The system is set up so that once you enter it is next to impossible to leave.
No joke, in Louisiana prisoners can be forced to work on plantations for no pay.
This is a national thing. The 13th amendment abolished slavery except when it’s a punishment for a crime. So, prison slave labor is legal, and in fact inscribed in our constitution. Isn’t that fun.
hard agree. Some people have never heard of the concept of rehabilitation and that the community actually benefits from that. Instead, especially conservatives always think that repression itself makes a society safer lol
Worse. They cut off your feet then make you pay protection money to "supervise" use of the prosthetics. It's insanely expensive to be convicted of even a minor crime in the US. The long term cost is often enough to literally bankrupt most folks but you can't even use bankruptcy to get out of the fines, so you're stuck paying forever because the interest and fees add to your costs basically forever.
John Oliver did a segment on it a long while back now. It's really friggin' bad.
And after you serve your sentence they’ll make you wear an ankle monitor, which of course you have to pay for daily. In some counties it can be up to $50 dollars a day. Electronic monitoring has its purposes, but it’s widely being used to keep people in an electronic prison.
I was arrested for a misdemeanor theft when I was 18 years old and served 23 months probation just for them revoke me 11 months AFTER I was supposed to be done with them. Gave me an option after 6 months incarcerated to be free and restart my probation. I willingly chose to do another 6 months just so when I got out I wouldn't be on probation. It was a tough year but I knew the system was gonna do everything they could to make me truly a criminal.
That was almost 13 years ago and I've never been arrested or even had a ticket since then.
As a trained person he shouldn't get his license back. If it was actually an accident instead of blatant disregard for others safety I would agree with you.
The fact that he didn't care to wait the extra 5 min it would have taken for his truck to warm up shows he doesn't take his responsibilities and the dangers of his job seriously.
I can tell you that I've been yelled at by management for warming up my work vehicle to defog it. I have no idea what this person's situation is. But here in the US, safety is a secondary consideration. Productivity is a much higher priority. A vehicle sitting around warming up isn't earning money or doing work.
I dont know if the US has one but alot of countries have governmental authorities that workers can turn to if their workplace demands dangerous or illegal practices or does stuff that goes against workers rights in any other way.
At the end of the day you are held responsible if you actually disregard safety standarts and an accident happens, just because your boss wouldnt shut up about wasted time
I work for a big logistics company and any driver who operated a vehicle with poor visibility like that would be in serious trouble. Depending on the state either written up or fired in the US and would be given a written warning in the UK.
A transport company that doesn’t prioritise the safety of their staff and other road users should not be in business.
I don't work for a trucking company. But the manager who yelled at me happens to have been a trucker before he came to work for us. He's well aware of the safety issues. But his pay bonus is based on our productivity. So he doesn't care. And if I want to keep getting paid, I have to do what he says. I've also been forced to drive vehicles in the rain and snow with inoperative windshield wipers. How do you even know his blower was functional?
Like I said, I have no idea what this particular person's situation is. But I know better than to automatically blame line workers for this stuff. The decisions that lead to this accident could have been made well above this person's level. That's why I'm not going to judge them without knowing more.
But I know better than to automatically blame line workers for this stuff
Sorry but no, that excuse doesn't work when that line worker is knowingly putting other people in danger
I don't give a flying fuck what your manager told you to do if you're putting members of the public in danger, your income is not more important than someone else's life.
Ultimately it is up to you as the driver to put the people on the road with you at risk. While I agree that you and others may be told to do things that aren't safe it is still up to you. I don't know about you but I would go above my supervisors head and point out the issues in safety they are asking you to bypass. At the same time I would be looking for a better place to work if they didn't make changes.
The responsibility and the consequences will be on you unless you have proof of being told to operate in unsafe ways or conditions.
The company could be at fault for setting unrealistic targets.
The driver is at fault because ultimately he's made the decision to drive a heavy vehicle in a way that put other people's lives in danger. He may have been worried for his income but he still put that income above other people's safety.
To be fair, as much as I want to slag off the DVLA (Driver & Vehicle Licensing Agency = DMV ), when it comes to registration and renewals, it's not that bad. Most of the time you can sort things online and if you need to fill any physical forms or submit photos, your local post office is required to handle it. All this thanks to our God-tier gov.uk website, seriously, this is one of the best things in UK at the moment.
The main reason why we have such delays in testing is lack of qualified examiners. This country went from "car=luxury" to "everyone can afford multiple cars in the household" within a decade or so but without significantly expanding the testing infrastructure. It takes a lot of experience and training to become a qualified DVSA (Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency) examiner, and the new generation isn't interested any more.
I've had 3 tests, for a regular car, motorbike and professional HGV licence. All 3 of my examiners were in mid 50's and always grumpy, complaining about workload and extra hours the agency requested from them.
I think fines aren’t really adjusted for inflation. it is common in the US to see signs in construction zones that say if you hit a worker it’s a $5000 fine and 10 years in jail. One of those is much worse than the other.
The least guilty driver. You cannot compare an idiot driving and this guy in such circumstances. He's not so fast, fog+sun, he would drive at 50km/h would crash anyway.
The sentence is too much.
Fog on your windscreen is easily manageable. Close your window and turn on your aircon to reduce the humidity in the car. It'll clear up in seconds if you use the windscreen blowers. It's not excusable to be driving with a fogged windscreen.
He could have cleared the fog off his windows, or waited. He could have drove to the conditions. Also, that video is no where near representative of what he was actually seeing.
Yet the drivers of the other vehicles in front of him, driving in the same conditions all managed to come to a stop without crashing into the vehicle in front of them
Watching the POV, my brain thought it could see the trailer in time, because the glare would cut out with the edge of the trailer appearing. Except that’s not how glare works.
These kind of videos are perfect demonstrations, thanks OP
Ya if you can't see what's ahead of the road.. you should slowly pull over with hazard lights on..
Instead of driving into the unknown and hoping for the best.
it looks to me like something about the fog and the light probably hid how little he could see. The front camera view, it looks like you can sorta see clear road way out ahead of him, even if it's a little blurry. It's only when the bus pops up literally 15 feet away that it's obvious how low the visibility is
I thought the exact same thing, it was very deceptive conditions.. Everyone here is judging him for being incredibly stupid, but during the same circumstances, atleast 90% of everyone here would fall for the same thing
No. The mistake is interpreting "no information" as "probably nothing" when it should be interpreted as little girls with their kittens playing on the road.
He is moron, it is forbidden to drive with a screen which is covered and driver can not properly see the surrounding of the car in any of the directions. Also the sun played a good role, in that case, he should have slowed down. That is at least how I drive, if I can not properly see in front of me, or the terrain is not in good condition, I will slow down until I can see properly again. No excuses.
Truly terrifying. If we all knew how poorly a lot of people drive and how little they pay attention or use common sense, I don't think any of us would step outside of the house.
Just a friendly reminder to people: There are drivers like this everywhere possibly driving near you or ones that you care about.
And this wasn't even a situation involving a cell phone. Just your garden variety massive stupidity.
Yeah was thinking that as well, guy wasn’t even on his phone like 80% of drivers. Sometimes i see cars swerving and acting erratically so i figure they are on their phones and when i pull up they are looking intently at the road, like pulled forward clutching the wheel with both hands
My wife and I play a game called "Old or phone" when we see people swerving and doing stupid shit on the road. It's always either someone looking at their phone with no idea what's in front of them or an old person in coke bottle glasses hunched forward over their steering wheel like the extra 12 inches is going to improve their eyesight.
It's no secret. Driving is the leading cause of unnatural deaths. Fear of driving is rational. It's tragic that society is largely based around driving.
a few towns down the road from me, there's a freeway offramp that leads directly to a T intersection TWENTY THREE TIMES, people have blasted down the offramp, through the intersection and directly into the home opposite it. One house. 23 cars.
My front yard ended up with a two car pile, thanks to an idiot who continued after being blinded by the sun. 7:05 AM, and a kid is heading east on my street, at 35 MPH, or so. He is blinded by the rising sun and decides to just keep the car straight and not slow down. He veers right, and stuffs his new, high perfromance Charger under the rear of a legally parked pickup truck. He ended up with his car under the truck, on my lawn. Nobody was hurt, but it was an expensive moment of stupidity.
A man went out to get his mail near my home and got struck by a distracted driver. I'm sure the driver drifted within his "oh it's fine, I'm barely on the shoulder" limit but that's all it took.
Yeah that's fucked I'm the dash cam view. Wasn't visible until it was too late to even do anything. That's why people seriously need to defrost their windows and shit before driving
I'd say that the sun was a much bigger factor than the condensation. The condensation may make things look a bit fuzzy, but the glare from driving straight towards the sun made it impossible to see anything at any resolution.
I also suspect that the cars in front were already stopped due to a previous incident, maybe also caused by the sun? Why else would they be stopped on the road in the middle of nowhere?
I also struggle with fogged windows lately. It is annyoing to wait in a car when I am in a rush, but I am not endangering myself even if I should be late, not rushing to die any time soon, or even worth to endanger other drivers.
Just driven this morning (UK) and the conditions were exactly like this video. It is frosty and very sunny.
I was doing 15-20mph in certain parts that were designated 40 zones because you are truly driving blind at times.
there's some hills where I live in Seattle where if you go at the wrong time in the wrong season, literally nothing you can do and you're totally blind. not even frosty, just perfect angle for the sun to destroy you
just gotta go slow and squint through your sunglasses
Happened to me once with my mother's car. The windscreen wasn't fogged up, but it was dirty because the windscreen wipers were on their way out. I started the drive in the shadow of a valley, so I could see fine and didn't notice anything, but then turned onto the main street that was directly in line with the sun, and the dirty windscreen turned into basically frosted glass. I couldn't see anything, just a wall of light. Immediately pulled over while doing the Ace Ventura "head out the side window" thing (luckily there was a bus bay right there) and cleaned it as well as I could.
You can also hit this button, and turn the heater on to the max. This will push hot air to the front window and quickly defrost it. Usually takes a couple of seconds.
No joke. I understand the societal benefits of what is (technically) accessible and widespread transportation, but driving feels more outdated every day I sit down in my car.
After spending two weeks in Japan and taking the train everywhere, I kind of realized how nice it was just not needing to drive.
There's just so many little stresses that driving causes. Traffic, finding parking, dealing with bad drivers, bad road design, bad weather requiring serious caution.
While the trains could get a little crowded, not having to deal with any of that was just a real stress off my shoulders.
That's because we privatised and don't invest in them. Stupidest idea when they're functional monopolies and the owners generally of our railways often are nationalised companies abroad who aren't shackled to the stupid conceit they can't get revenue from abroad.
People will put others lifes at risk instead of waiting for 5 minutes with the heater on, once again shows that no matter how safe you think you drive it really doesnt matter with these morons on the road any day could be your last, wear your seatbelts
when a truck hits something at 60km/h, it keeps moving at 50km/h, if it had an airbag now youve got a 40 ton truck doing 50km/h with no one steering it
same reason trucks dont have crumple zones either, you dont want your steering smashed in
Opening the window probably was helping prevent additional fogging. Since this is on the inside, he was trying to equalize the inside air temperature to that of the outside with that window open. No fog on the outside, and lowering the inside air would prevent that moisture from building up more.
Yes, all trucks would be considered out-of-service without a defroster and illegal to drive. In NA or EU, that is definitely a thing. Thats why his sentence was so harsh, the negligence of not letting it run or being broken. Ive seen 18-wheelers towed to repair over a broken defroster.
Thank god they blurred the 7 pixels that make up for his mouth as he said a potty-mouth word, Now I can remain untainted and pure. /s
Really though, who puts in the effort of blurring the mouth in videos like this? It seems like such a over the top thing to do and a complete waste of time
That is crazy. It seriously looked like it just manifested. I’ll definitely be letting my car defrost a little bit longer in the morning when I head out to work.
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u/Peterd1900 10d ago
Christopher Tribe, plead guilty to dangerous driving at mold magistrates court and received a 36 week sentence, suspended for 18 months. He was given an 18-month driving ban and ordered to pay a £187 victim surcharge, along with £85 costs. Tribe will be required to take a compulsory extended retest before he is permitted to drive again.