Car Safety laws and Children
I appreciate this topic may have been done to death but I wanted to share something which I saw yesterday.
I was in the car park of a well known supermarket and just pulling into a space. As I was pulling in, a car was ready to leave but I saw the driver had a baby (approximately 1 year old) stood on his lap and he drove off without moving the child to the back of the car or even to the passenger seat.
I appreciate that this is a common sight here in Doha but when are the authorities going to crack down on unrestrained children in cars. They are keen enough to penalise speeders on the road but there are other causes of road deaths and even at a low speed, if this driver had an accident it is doubtful that a small child would survive, either being crushed against the steering wheel or suffocated by the airbag.
jjj75,
The technology is not their creation.
Their intellect allows them to understand tangible and straight forward, easy fixes which don’t require to much intellectual inputs for implementation.
They don’t design, produce or even install and operate and maintain the radars. Its all given and easy task, all they do is collect the cash.
Now, when it comes to educate societies and change pattern behaviors, it requires the study of that society, the design of adequate, efficient and effective educational material, the development of laws, its enforcement, etc... All that requires a lot of awareness, the recognition of the problem and the need to correct it, a mind set and intellect that is just not yet there...
Shortcuts from the assigned routes and diversions from the rules, disrespect of the other is pretty much the trend of the behavior, in this part of the world. To fight these trends, requires civilizing where the obvious huge gaps still remain!
Nic, how is it that they are able to catch and punish motorists who speed and jump red lights with far more sophisticated technology than many western countries have and yet they cannot control this? There is clearly an understanding that there are reckless drivers, so I don't agree that they don't know or understand or have the intellectual capacity to deal with it.
jjj75,
Only people with a certain education and a certain degree of civilization are able to think the way you do.
Obviously here in this country, we witness many cases of individuals unable to achieve that level of intellect!
Once they get there (in a few decades or centuries), they will obviously agree with you. Until that time comes, expect amazing!
Nic
I appreciate what you are saying but in western countries we learnt by our mistakes, such as making seatbelts mandatory when we realised that too many people were dying through lack of them and following on from that proper child restraints when we realised that normal seat belts (or none at all) were just not sufficient.
This is one time I would say, they don't have to go through the pain and realisation that we did, it is already fact that these things save countless lives, learn, they don't have to find out the painful way.
And the sad thing is that this is so easily enforceable, it just requires the right 'appetite' from the authorities to deal with it.
Civilized behavior takes generations to be ingrained in a society that have been isolated all its existence from the rest of the world and steel ruled by tribal traditions for nomads in the desert.
The authorities are also part of that society, thus part of the problem.
Eventually they will catch up with the rest of the world, maybe it will take decades, maybe it will take centuries, but they will!
http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/7-month-old-killed-in-dubai-car-crash
But it should serve as a warning for everyone. Even if you think that you're a great driver, you should be thinking about all the other yahoos out there who could cause an accident in a split second.
I, too, wish the police would for once, instead of ticketing people parked illegally or checking for licenses at R/A, start stopping cars without car/booster seats for children. Fine them on the spot (QR 500) and tell them they have one week to show up at a police station with a car seat installed in their vehicle or else their license will be revoked and they'll be prosecuted for child endangerment.
sam18550, not the first time I have seen it but I only mentioned it because of the way the authorities go after the easy driving convictions - speeding fines and those going through red lights and let technology do the work for them, but it appears that they have zero interest in violations where they actually have to pull someone over and physically 'give them a ticket' I call itlazy policing
he was one ignorant parent regardless of his nationality..
may this is the fst time u have noticed this kind of act, but this is a normal practice here. and people here they feel its a prestige to do all this acts.
but the authorities have to take sum action against these parents
I believe it is the number one cause of death in young people
But true. A very common sight here in Qatar. So what was the ethnicity of the driver? Arab? European? Asian? American? African?
thats not a violation if kids shown some stunt, father is preparing him for grand-prix.
Another example of the reason automobile death is the number one cause of death in Qatar.