Reply to Ashburton school student hit by car

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This is horrifying. I wonder if the elderly driver had vision issues and then maybe also mixed up the gas and the brake or something. Until I saw that it was an elderly person I assumed the driver was texting or something (or maybe they were anyway). Or that someone had a seizure or a heart attack and their foot jammed on the gas. Learning that it was just sheer horrible driving is really bad.

This is not an MCPS bus stop location issue. It's an issue of an incompetent elderly driver. This driver could have jumped any curb and hit any pedestrian on any street anywhere. It's not like the stop was out on Rockville Pike. Unless we are going to make kids wait 250 feet away from the stop in the middle of a field somewhere, or install bollards along every roadway in the county, there is always going to be the potential for a horrible accident of some kind. This sounds like the kind of driver you might see on the news another day who gets the pedals confused and drives through a storefront.

Let's hope this is an impetus for making elderly drivers take steps each year to prove their fitness for continued driving. Reaction times, vision, cognitive performance, etc. Heck, all drivers. We are so lax in this country in qualifying people to operate these lethal machines with minimal training and standards compared to other countries. [/quote]

If it hadn’t been a dangerous bus stop there would have been no one to hit!  
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This accident has nothing to do with the bus stop. It’s all about a driver who had no right being on the road. 
Something needs to be done about elderly drivers [/quote]

It had everything to do with a bus stop at a cross street on a main road. BOE has blood on their hands. 
[/quote]

We used to live in the area and DH did not want our child walking to that bus stop and standing alone so we actually drove DC to school even though DC was old enough to walk to and from the bus stop alone. It is a very busy street with a lot of traffic. My heart goes out to the family.[/quote]

Grosvenor Lane is busy, and the speed limit should be 25, but that is not what caused this particular accident.[/quote]

But would he have been pulling on that road if it weren't a major road to begin with? Do you see how this is relevant? It may not be the main cause but the number of cars on a road does increase the chance there is an impaired driver. Other accidents that have happened recently involved bigger roads.[/quote]

I see your point.  That particular spot on Grosvenor Lane is tricky. There is a turn lane for Grosvenor Park condominiums, is on an uphill and about a block from the intersection with Rockville Pike, which makes for intermittant streams of cars.  The elderly driver might have felt pressured to step on the gas harder to make the uphill turn successfully and beat some cars.  That could have been part of the midjudgment the elderly driver made.  That is Route 1313 out of Bethesda bus depot, which stops on Grosvenor for the townhouse complex and then turns left to go through Grosvenor Park Condos/Townhouse/Apartments.  Could the bus turn into the townhouse complex and make a loop back out rather than do the more efficient stop on Grosvenor and take the immediate left?  Probably with a few extra minutes.  [b]But that doesn't eliminate all risk - maybe it is actually more dangerous to stop in a parking lot type area where cars are backing out of spaces in the morning?[/b]  There are probably studies, but that is for the experts.  This was a terrible freak accident that could have happened to anyone in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I don't think blaming MCPS in this instance is the right call.[/quote]

That's what I think. King Charles Way looks narrow and windy, and there are parking spaces all around it. There really aren't any great locations for stops for this townhouse community. The Grosvenor Lane stop seems the most sensible of the options.[/quote]

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