World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims

whoopsadoodles

Today, Sunday 19th of November is World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.

Have you lost someone you love on our roads?

Tell us about them

KERSPLAT!

I'm incredibly fortunate that I haven't but people close to me have. Those and their loved ones are in my thoughts today

Sofiztikated

Lost a brother before I could really remember him. I was 3 1/2, he was coming home from Valentines Night, out on a bike, some fool was passing on a blind hump, and that was the end of him. Brother was sober, fool driver wasn't.

£200 fine and not such else, not much of a "punishment."

First memory I have, really. Running out the lane, because our car was parked at the road. Mother cursing, Dad crying.

ytpe2r5bxkn0c1

I have lost both family and friends to drunk drivers and speeding drivers. Hence, I become incensed at times when people on the Boards Motors forum laud themselves for the speed they can drive at or ridicule speed limits because they know they can 'safely drive' certain roads well above posted limits.

Prune Tracy

I'm very lucky not to have been affected directly, but one of my closest friend's brother was hit by a car when walking home after a night out (he was 18) and unfortunately didn't survive. It is an unlit country road so it was likely just a terrible accident.

eviltwin

I haven't lost anyone thankfully but my dad was made disabled by a drunk driver, the driver took his own life after. Just a horrible situation for both families.

Myself and the husbag arrived at the aftermath of a road accident where a teenager was killed. I will never forget it. He was very obviously gone and his girlfriend was hysterical as was the driver of the car that hit him.....

I have so much respect for our emergency services who deal with this stuff every day. I don't know how they keep going.

harry Bailey esq

whoopsadoodles wrote: »

Today, Sunday 19th of November is World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims.

Have you lost someone you love on our roads?

Tell us about them

Quite a few. Youngish too teens/early 20s, all bar one on motorbikes. As soon as my first born arrived I hung up me helmet. I still mess around with them all the time and hop on a scrambler now and again and hit a proper course with jumps and stuff. I'd never use one for getting from A to B them younfellas were 9 or 10 stone zipping around on fireblades and gsxr's.

SEPT 23 1989

Remarkably no with some of the carry on years ago just very lucky

FizzleSticks

This post has been deleted.

Rubberlegs

One of my cousins died the year before I was born a few days after crashing his motorbike. Though I never knew him I have seen how it is still raw for my aunt some 40 odd years later.
A friend of ours died after being hit by two cars on his motorbike, and the girlfriend of another friend died as a pillion passenger.

RayM

My cousin died in a motorbike accident. We were the same age; he was 22 when the accident happened. He was speeding, late at night on a bike that was too big and powerful for him. He ran wide onto a grass verge, hit a rock and was thrown from the bike, dying not instantly, but at the scene. I visited the scene of the accident the next day, and the Gardai had marked the road (point of impact, where he landed, where the bike landed, etc). If he had been a few inches to the left or right, the bike wouldn't have struck the rock and he probably would have regained control, suitably shaken but unharmed. Just one of those things.

andekwarhola

Nobody close thankfully but I also was at the scene of a fatal accident years ago when a female cyclist was hit and killed by a car. I was cycling myself right behind.

I've never forgotten it and think of her often, especially I'm near the road on which it happened.

As said earlier by another poster, nothing infuriates me more than speed merchants poo-pooing restrictions because they can 'handle it'.

An extended family member knocked down and killed a child too. Wasn't his fault and he absolved of wrongdoing but he was devastated and in counselling for quite a while.

Prune Tracy

Nelson Steep Incense wrote: »

I become incensed at times when people on the Boards Motors forum laud themselves for the speed they can drive at or ridicule speed limits because they know they can 'safely drive' certain roads well above posted limits.

Yes, it's pretty odious.

donegaLroad

thankfully no family members, I was at the scene of a fatal crash where a car went on fire and a woman lost her life. The driver had fallen asleep at the wheel.

I counted up how many people I knew personally who were killed on the roads; 21 in car crashes, and 5 in motorbike accidents.

LadyMacBeth_

My cousin died when he crashed his car, he was eighteen at the time and I was sixteen. It was late at night and he was speeding and he lost control going around a bend, crashed and went out through the windscreen. He was pronounced dead at the hospital. We all did stupid things as teens, I know I did, but he paid a very high price for it.

thelad95

Someone I was in school with went up to Baltinglass in Wicklow too buy a motorbike. Took the bike for a quick test spin, lost control immediately and went head first into a wall without a helmet. He was only 20.

Vojera

My dad and uncle were killed by drunk boy racers flying around the roads to "settle an argument". Since they were driving on both sides of the road, my uncle (who was driving) never had a chance of swerving out of their way. The guys responsible fled the scene and didn't even call for help.

I can't even begin to tell you the impact it's had on all our lives. It's been twenty years and honest to God, I used to think that by the time it got this far away that it wouldn't hurt any more, but it does, it just hurts in a different way. Closer to the actual deaths was the sharp and all-encompassing grief that tainted every aspect of my day, but now it's more like a niggling itch that never goes away.

I have a great relationship with my mum now (we didn't for a while, really because we were both lost in our own process of grieving) and I'm so grateful for it, but that also draws into focus that my dad isn't here. He was a great dad and I loved him to bits, but I only knew him as a child knows a parent. I wish I had the chance to get to know him as an adult, like I have with my mum, and become his friend. I wonder all the time if he'd be proud of me, if we'd have the same sense of humour, if he'd get on with my wife. And I'll never know.

The guys who did it were given a pitiful sentence and hardly served any of it. A local TD wrote a letter to the judge about how they were "good boys" who made a mistake. Disgusting. One of them laughed when he was sentenced. That one has never said sorry. Rationally I know that it shouldn't matter - that prison is about rehabilitation as well as punishment and that nothing will change the outcome anyway. But an apology would have been nice.

EDIT: Srameen, I know exactly the type of post you're talking about. I'm reviled by them. Clearly these are people who have no clue of the devastation they might cause.

whoopsadoodles

Thanks everyone for sharing.

I met lots of people yesterday who had lost someone, from their sister to their grandson. The devastation that is left behind after these collisions is not something that can be described through the medium of text but you can see it written on their faces. The pain and the heartache. The knowing that life will just never be the same again.

Think of all of these people as you go about your business today. Think about that one wrong decision that could end someones world and decide if it's really worth you getting where you're going a minute or two earlier, or reading that text that could have waited, or changing the radio station because you don't like that song.

Just think.

Prune Tracy

Vojera wrote: »

The guys who did it were given a pitiful sentence and hardly served any of it. A local TD wrote a letter to the judge about how they were "good boys" who made a mistake.

:mad: This sort of thing is enraging. Social media is rife with it too in the comments sections - the inanities including "Hands up who has never made a mistake", "We were all young - who are you to judge" etc. Yes, we have all killed people with our cars. :rolleyes: Actually most of us CAN bloody well judge.

So sorry to read of your terrible loss Vojera.

lazybones32

Lost friends.
Heard a story from a man driving a truck for a living about a car coming around the bend on his side of the road. He told of the look of terror on the woman's face before the crash that claimed her life. I wonder if time seems to go slowly in the moments before something like that, like when you jump off a high bridge into a river...every instant seems to last 2 seconds as you travel through the air.

whoopsadoodles

lazybones32 wrote: »

I wonder if time seems to go slowly in the moments before something like that, like when you jump off a high bridge into a river...every instant seems to last 2 seconds as you travel through the air.

Literally like the world slows down. Exactly like they portray it in the movies.

helimachoptor

Lost my dad to a drunk driver when i was 6 and my brother was 2 months from being born.

Very little memory tbh, so cant really provide any stories