[WillowTheWhisp]

I've wanted to say something else in response to this thread but keep getting my words in a tangle and have been putting it off which is unusual for me.

A wild satement was made that "It is always the drivers fault" and I want to point out that this isn't and cannot be an automatic assumption.

When my daughter was run over by a 4 wheel drive vehicle outside her school in Oct 2003, despite the fact that other pupils witnessed the event and attested to the fact that the car was not visible when the two girls started to cross the road, the police will not accept a statement from a child and the driver claims to have been doding only 20mph and therefore the girls ran in front of her and she could do nothing.

In this particular case the driver doesn't seem to have been blamed at all by police, despite the fact that logic contradicts the account. If she had been doing 20mph and if the girls had run then they would have reached the other side of the road before she reached them and she would have had enough reaction time to have stopped sooner than she did instead of dragging my daughter along the road under her car and coming to a stop with her head under the wheel.

I've even done timing on that road myself and walking at a reasonably slow pace I can be across before a car coming round the bend gets anywhere near. All the logic points to the driver doing more than 30mph.

So no, drivers are not always held to be responsible.

And although I often make joking remarks about bus and taxi drivers I am aware that it is never wise to generalise and that by and large the majority are good sensible people. Even those hackneys don't often cut in front of the town hall because they approach the rank from the end and from a different direction.

Where would non-drivers be without public transport? Many depend on it, so as mthead says please think carefully before making sweeping statements.