SEOUL: At least nine people were killed and four others were injured when a car struck pedestrians near Seoul city hall on Monday (Jul 1), police said. There were six fatalities at the scene, while three others were pronounced dead after being rushed to hospital, firefighter Kim Chun-soo said.
    • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      113·
      3 days ago

      Many people are going to blame the car driver and not the systemic problems that allowed a car to do this in the first place

      • Twentytwodividedby7@lemmy.worldEnglish
        67·
        3 days ago

        What systemic problems are you referring to? Seoul has some of the best public transport in the world and the vehicle was a sedan. The driver either was drunk/high or had a stroke.

        • n2burns@lemmy.caEnglish
          71·
          2 days ago

          The systemic problems are a stroad which seems designed for high speeds, yet with many dangerous points of interactions with pedestrians and other drivers. There seems to be no infrastructure to protect pedestrians and no design features to limit speeds. As you point out, this wasn’t caused by a tank of a vehicle but a standard sedan.

          This is in stark contrast to Vision Zero, a strategy where it’s nearly impossible for vehicle collisions to cause fatalities. It doesn’t matter if a driver is impaired, we have the technology to engineer away these deaths. From the images in article, the road seems to follow almost none of the tenants of Vision Zero.

        • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          413·
          3 days ago

          Seoul has some of the best public transport in the world and the vehicle was a sedan.

          Tell that to the 9 dead

            • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              510·
              2 days ago

              9 dead people don’t speak for themselves in your mind, I guess. Why are you on this community?

              I’d love to go through it with you, step by step, using crayons and simple wording if I must, but alas! Not one of the 19 articles I looked at provided an exact location or pictures clear enough to figure that out.

              My logic here is very simple: If a car can hit pedestrians, then the infrastructure is bad. 9 people died to prove this point and you’re acting as if this is a freak accident that happens once in a decade. It doesn’t, people die all the time because of inattentive drivers or faulty vehicles. Bollards save lives.

              • Venator@lemmy.nzEnglish
                81·
                2 days ago

                Looking at the second photo in the article it looks like it bent the bollards over, which I would guess mightve launched the car into the air…

                I think the bigger systemic problem would be the 8 lane roads in the area which enabled enough space for the car to get up enough speed to do that sort of damage to a bollard: https://maps.app.goo.gl/aHDmVJMPt3LKvAeL9?g_st=ac

                Another systematic problem is the enbiggening of vehicles in the name of occupants saftey(larger pillars for better rollover protection, and extra passenger cabin rigidity, which also harms visibility for the driver due to wider pillars)

                • drkt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                  9·
                  2 days ago

                  it looks like it bent the bollards over,

                  So they weren’t bollards, they were decoration.