80-year-old driver arrested after hitting 2 girls on street crossing

Lucky the girls survived and 80 is too old to be driving revoked his license and jail time for reckless driving and hitting pedestrians

Sorry but running through red lights is a subconscious act in this country. 18 years old or 80 makes no difference at all. Most of the blame should be placed on a government/ police force that doesn't enforce law and has allowed this behaviour to continue. IMHO the driver is only partially to blame.

S

"Sorry but running through red lights is a subconscious act in this country. 18 years old or 80 makes no difference at all. Most of the blame should be placed on a government/ police force that doesn't enforce law and has allowed this behaviour to continue. IMHO the driver is only partially to blame."

+100. I'm sick and tired of the cops doing F.A. to enforce red light running and fail to stop at a pedestrian crossing. Why should people have to die because the pathetic cops won't do their job.

He went through a red light and hit two girls. What's the “suspicion” of dangerous driving???

Sounds dangerous to me.

factchecker,

The Japanese police pick and choose which laws to enforce. Using a cell phone in a car is not OK, but watching TV is totally OK.

He went through a red light and hit two girls. What's the “suspicion” of dangerous driving???

Sounds dangerous to me.

I have lived in this country a long and seen a mountain of poorly designed, maintained and planned EVERYTHING on the street.

You are too quick to blame the little guy while I see police all the time standing around waiting to bust people for violations at places THEY KNOW FULL WELL confuse people into doing dangerous things. You think they take the money and fix the problem? Hell NO. Its making money.

Remember when the drunk driver hit the car on bridge and the car went into the water and three kids drown? One look at the footage and I knew the guard rail was WAY too low. They never talked about that point on the news. But later, they quietly installed a higher guard rail on that bridge. Had they done that sooner, 3 kids would be alive and this accident would have been minor. We would still have drunk driving tolerance limits. Instead, once again, we have the state making MONEY by taking advantage of the strife THEY caused.

I urge you to be a bit more open to the idea that us little people are not always responsible for what happens.

Red Light running is a given right here - well in my prefecture anyway.

Discussed this untold times on this forum.

Police are tough on the small things and weak on the tough things.

Red light cameras will NOT be installed here because it takes away power from the police.

They spend ages when booking someone - all the drivers details - license , registration etc, fingerprinting (yep for 13 km/hr over the limit), personal details - job etc. A flexing of their power if you like.

Cameras would put this all into the hands of some lowly clerk who would issue the fine by mail.

For many, yellow/orange lights mean speed up quickly and red means throttle it esp when the other lights have turned green.

Weak as efforts by police to monitor it.

Weak as.

Police quoted Asakura as saying he didn’t notice the light turn red.

Exactly. Time to turn in the car keys, paht-nah.

Outside my apartment building there is a crossing where every other red light someone goes right through it, never seen the police stop anyone there. 100m away there is a super weird 5 way intersection due to construction, everyone stops in confusion as 90% have no idea who is supposed to go first. Everyone is basically standing still so absolutely no danger, but of course they have the police hiding in a corner almost every day to get some easy points.

but the guy still went through a red light; there is no excuse for that

I find it curious that you agreed with me for the most part, but not on this point.

I have seen a few intersections with confusing signal set ups that induce people to run red lights, like you turn a corner and soon come to a signal which turns red, but there is another signal a few dozen meters down the road which is green. All you need is something like a running child on the sidewalk or some jaywalking grandma to steal your focus and you look up at the wrong signal.

I have read many stories about very elderly drivers hitting pedestrians, it does seem a very common occurrence, not only in Japan but almost everywhere. What does not help Japanese drivers is the narrow streets and the over abundance of street signs, which from the pictures I have seen would confuse me, and I am only 23...........ps. I purposely went through a red light 2 weeks ago just outside my village, it was a long straight road of about 1 mile, there was a council road repair in place with lights at both ends, how ever the repair was so tiny and the lights were only about 30 metres apart, one could see if any other traffic was around. In this case there was not, not behind or in front for about a mile, so I drove through a red light. In my defence the road repair was so small it did not require lights at all.

Police are tough on the small things and weak on the tough things.

That's what I noticed. I see speeding drivers all the time. Some running through traffic lights when they have turned red. Meanwhile they are out checking bicycles, checking they are locked,, issuing warnings to cyclists for not riding in a line etcetera. Their priorities are certainly not on the dangerous things which are always going on.