NIP arrived. 974

Following up to Brimstone

Short answer:- no, safety, otherwise known as lack of danger.

Long answer:- They are a source of safety. The opposite of danger. So the road before the barriers were fitted was more dangerous. As crash barriers have no effect on driving decisions and at least some of the accidents they minimise are mechanical failures I find it impossible not to conclude that fitting crash barriers alters the level of dangerousness of a road without reference to drivers. The counter to that point in this thread has been that with or without crash barriers there can be no accident without drivers. I see making that point as not so much false logic but as a logical statement that when examined has no useful meaning. I do so because there can be no accident (the measure of dangerousness) without all three elements being present. In logic, confining oneself to the matter of road safety, you could make the following statements. There can be no danger without vehicles. There can be no danger without drivers There can be no danger without roads. (For the sake of logical evaluation I am ignoring off road driving or if you like including it under the broadest definition of roads). The answer was given by a couple of people that the driver could go off and cause some other sort of mayhem, but this is irrelevant to evaluating the validly of "there can be no danger without drivers" as it is about drivers not acting as drivers but acting outside the arena we are studying. If any one of the three statements is true, then they must logically all be true. They are all of course all true as far as they go but are without useful meaning. I have to conclude that while they are true they are irrelevance's, as accidents will not happen without the *three* elements being present and concentrating on the one element, "there can be no accidents without drivers" gives a false impression of what factors that exist in an accident or in danger. I buttume the reason it has been promoted is that drivers are indeed the overwhelming primary cause of accidents, but I don't believe we should let ourselves distort reality to emphasise that. However, the dictionary aside, it was the crash barrier example that made it most apparent to me that "dangerous road" was OK as a concept. No doubt you feel otherwise but that's how I evaluate the situation after some considerable discussion! -- Mike Reid