Drove over a central traffic island!

Norman_Castle

Try contacting your councils highways department to ask who is responsible for these unmarked pedestrian refuges and if they should have bollards on them. send them pictures.
Its highly unlikely you are the first person to drive into them. Most drivers would expect an area like this to be either ok to drive over as in being not too high and having sloping sides or to be clearly marked as they are a hazard in the road without clear markings.

General_Applause

Stu_Wilkie wrote: »

Yes and I'm going to to stick with 'poor lighting'. There were streetlights and they were on, but they were pretty dim. And my point is if you combine that with the almost non-existant white road markings and an unmarked concrete island in the middle of the road which is fairly obstructed from view due to being 4 inches off the ground, then you have a situation which is more ambiguous in my opinion. And at what point in that manouver would my headlights clearly illuminate the object I made impact with?

sevenhills wrote: »

Cars drive on curbs all the time, in order to park on them.

Stu_Wilkie wrote: »

But not normally head on at, let's say, 15mph?

You have answered that question yourself. You admit that you hit the island 'head on'. I don't know about your car but mine and everyone elses headlights point forward ie head on.

Stu_Wilkie wrote: »

With regards to me cutting the corner, I did indeed slightly cut the corner. The trajectory in which I hit the island at is not accuratly depicted in my illustration. I would say that I missjudged the center of the road I was turning into more than cutting the corner massively because I could barely see any markings.

Not 'slightly' cut. Seriously cut. That island is set back from the junction a good 6 foot.

Stu_Wilkie wrote: »

And finally, with regards to your conspiricy theory regarding my fluctuating speed, I don't know how fast I was going. I do know it wasn't 70, or 60, or 50, or 40, or 30 and even not 25. I would say the max speed I'm guessing I went round that corner is 20, which is perfectly reasonable to tackle a junction at if the road is clear. I guess you'll just have to take my word for it, or not.

Every time you post you state that you didn't / couldn't see the road markings, traffic island, road layout, speedometer blah blah blah.


You were on your phone or not otherwise paying attention. Oh, and you were doing 40 at least to cause the kind of damage you describe.


Forget any ideas of claiming for this. All these questions will be raised if you do and you don't have any satisfactory answers to them.


Pay for the damage to your car, book yourself an appointment at the opticians. You may well be suffering from night blindness. Whatever the outcome of that appointment, lock your phone in the boot and pay attention.

Stu_Wilkie

General_Applause wrote: »

You were on your phone or not otherwise paying attention. Oh, and you were doing 40 at least to cause the kind of damage you describe.

Pay for the damage to your car, book yourself an appointment at the opticians. You may well be suffering from night blindness. Whatever the outcome of that appointment, lock your phone in the boot and pay attention.

Ok Columbo, thanks for that.

seatbeltnoob

DoaM wrote: »

So you were turning right from Inchinnan Road on to Marchburn Drive?

The street view image of that junction does show poorly-maintained road markings. The island would be near-invisible in the dark, and headlights wouldn't illuminate it very well if you were turning as I asked above.

Add to that, youre turning right snd headlightd are pointed to thecleft slightly so they illuminate the nearside pavement so you see pedestrians

iwb100

The damage from driving over that would be minimal unless at very high speed and if the kerb is "high" I'd expect the tyres to have blown out...did they?

Stu_Wilkie

iwb100 wrote: »

The damage from driving over that would be minimal unless at very high speed and if the kerb is "high" I'd expect the tyres to have blown out...did they?

Front tyre had a blow out and the alloy got dented. Tracking is also slightly off.

tonyh66

Sorry dude, taking any junction like that at 20mph is not recommended. looking on google maps you should have been doing about 5mph approaching the junction so you could see if there was anything coming in either direction. You learn by your mistakes, luckily there was no one else involved.

Joe_Horner

oldagetraveller wrote: »

MSMPSL should be a well known list and almost an acronym!

Muppet Struck Mound, Pee'd Self Laughing?

In all seriousness, it looks like one of those things where yes, the markings could / should be better, but ultimately you're responsible for not hitting things in the road ahead of you.

Pretty sure if everyone here was completely honest just about anyone who's been driving for more than 5 minutes has had near misses and, occasionally, the miss is just a little too near.

Certainly far easier to "not see" that island than "not see" a motorbike, or car coming the other way, yet people hit those all the time and don't (usually) get judged too harshly.

unholyangel

Joe_Horner wrote: »

Pretty sure if everyone here was completely honest just about anyone who's been driving for more than 5 minutes has had near misses and, occasionally, the miss is just a little too near.

There was a thread a few years back where we were sharing some stories of near misses but one poster in particular was quick to jump on their high horse that we must all be bad drivers to have near misses, that they'd been driving x time and never had a single one.

IMO if you've been driving that long and think you've never had a near miss, you're probably so oblivious to other vehicles that you're the one causing the near misses.

Joe_Horner

unholyangel wrote: »

IMO if you've been driving that long and think you've never had a near miss, you're probably so oblivious to other vehicles that you're the one causing the near misses.

Yep, pretty much.

In 35 years or so I've had maybe half a dozen really close shaves caused directly by me, a lot more fairly near misses, and been involved in countless others where someone else did something really silly that I didn't anticipate well. Thankfully, in the same time, none of them ended up as an actual accident.

Lots of them were avoided by sheer blind luck but, by admitting to myself that they happened and that I could have avoided / controlled pretty well all of them better, over time they became less and less frequent and the ones that still happened have (touch wood) been avoided without drama for a very long time now.

It's called learning from experience - but to do that you have to avoid the natural temptation to find anyone and everyone else to blame and that "you did nothing wrong"