" Gridlock " !

[Johnathan404]

But I would argue, is it worth waiting 12-15 hours to discover facts that in all probability could be deduced away from the roadside?? I think investigations should only take place at the roadside where the evidence is completely unclear and further investigation is essential.

So do you know this collision could have been investigated away from the roadside or are you just assuming?

[Bryn666]

The evidence is never clear. That's why we do a forensic investigation.

Gene Hunt might have liked guesswork but in 2017 there are established rules and procedures to ensure the cause of death is clear.

[Arcuarius]

But I would argue, is it worth waiting 12-15 hours to discover facts that in all probability could be deduced away from the roadside?? I think investigations should only take place at the roadside where the evidence is completely unclear and further investigation is essential.

So do you know this collision could have been investigated away from the roadside or are you just assuming?

There's no way of knowing, unless you do a full investigation. And even then you're not guaranteed a definite answer.

[brummie_rob]

Apologies I may have sounded like I was caught up in it, thankfully I took a scenic cross-country route home to avoid the trouble and granted these incidents are rare.

I have seen video footage taken around midday when the lorries were being removed but the road was shut until 5pm. Would further investigation then take place once the vehicles are removed?

[Arcuarius]

Apologies I may have sounded like I was caught up in it, thankfully I took a scenic cross-country route home to avoid the trouble and granted these incidents are rare.

I have seen video footage taken around midday when the lorries were being removed but the road was shut until 5pm. Would further investigation then take place once the vehicles are removed?

Probably; it's possible that surface conditions played a part. And they'll need to fix any damaged VRS and make sure that any structures were not affected.

[FosseWay]

The default course of action is for it to take exactly as long, and cost exactly as much, as it needs to. And rightly so, too.

I have no time for selfish armchair "experts" who only mind because it delays or diverts them a bit. Just put yourself in the position of that poor guy's family. Or the driver of the HGV into which he crashed. I'd bet you anything that you would want to know why his life needlessly ended too soon.

Obviously it's necessary to get to the bottom of what happened, mainly in order to prevent it happening again. And broadly I accept the practical reasons that Bryn and others have given for necessary causing of inconvenience. But the kind of response that I quote here to people who dare to question the authorities' MO is unhelpful, IMO.

For a start, it is clearly *not* the case that investigations can take as long and cost as much as they need to. If that were the case, several governments would still be combing the Pacific seafloor for MH370 (which by all measures of seriousness is more significant than the specific case here). Sometimes a boundary has to be drawn. I'm not saying it was drawn inappropriately in this, or any other, specific case; only that it is inaccurate and unhelpful to use that as a reason for very long closures.

Secondly, you demolish your own argument by using words like "selfish" and "armchair experts". On "selfish", it is not simply a case of private individuals being slightly inconvenienced. If you bring traffic on a large town's arterial roads to a halt, there are economic consequences, social consequences and consequences for other people whose lives are in danger. It is not "selfish" to point this out.

On "armchair experts". Anyone who uses the roads is to some extent an "expert" on their particular context and geographical area. Moreover they are entitled to a say in how those roads are managed. They may well be factually wrong in various assertions, or not realise how much work is needed to achieve a given outcome, or the limitations of that work. In that case, it is up to the experts to explain and justify what they do and why it needs to affect other people. Name-calling isn't helpful, and neither is saying "we know what we're doing, don't worry your pretty little head about it".

It is also notable that there are significant differences from country to country in time taken for any investigation to take place and for wreckage to be removed. My subjective observation is that both rail and road accidents that don't involve serious damage to the infrastructure get cleared much more quickly in Sweden than in the UK. The road and rail safety of the two countries is broadly comparable, so it would not appear that one method is notably better than the other at preventing recurrences. Again, I'm not saying one country does it better than another, but rather that it there is a prima facie case for wondering whether the UK sometimes overreacts in its response, and that therefore it is perfectly reasonable for someone to question the methods used.

[2 Sheds]

The evidence is never clear. That's why we do a forensic investigation.

Gene Hunt might have liked guesswork but in 2017 there are established rules and procedures to ensure the cause of death is clear.

There was a tragic case a few years ago when a poor confused elderly person set off the wrong way down a slip road onto a motorway and hit another vehicle head on. My 5 year old grandson could have worked out the cause. But the motorway was shut for something like 20 hours and this caused massive delays and gridlock in 2 large nearby cities. The costs of these sorts of delays are huge, and not just in £££s. People miss flights, meetings, hospital appointments, urgent (even life saving) medical treatment, job interviews. It causes frustration which frequently results in further accidents on alternative routes. The problem is that every very serious accident site becomes a crime scene and has to be forensically investigated. If senior officers were trusted to take the kinds of decisions they are paid to take (and overrule procedures if appropriate), then sometimes we could have the roads flowing again much quicker.

[Ruperts Trooper]

Surely the real issue is that UK roads are operating well beyond design capacity so little or no duplicate capacity to cope with disruption of any type.

[KeithW]

There was a tragic case a few years ago when a poor confused elderly person set off the wrong way down a slip road onto a motorway and hit another vehicle head on. My 5 year old grandson could have worked out the cause. But the motorway was shut for something like 20 hours and this caused massive delays and gridlock in 2 large nearby cities. The costs of these sorts of delays are huge, and not just in £££s. People miss flights, meetings, hospital appointments, urgent (even life saving) medical treatment, job interviews. It causes frustration which frequently results in further accidents on alternative routes. The problem is that every very serious accident site becomes a crime scene and has to be forensically investigated. If senior officers were trusted to take the kinds of decisions they are paid to take (and overrule procedures if appropriate), then sometimes we could have the roads flowing again much quicker.

Fortunately we live in a country where police officers CANNOT decide to overrule the law. Such countries as do allow this tend not to be very nice to live in. The police are required by the home office to investigate all fatal collisions as ‘unlawful killings’ until the contrary is proved.

That said the RAC Foundation produced a report some years ago suggesting several measures that could be followed to streamline such investigations. They involve introducing a nationally organised road traffic investigations organisation along similar lines to the Rail Accident Investigation Branch and the Air Accident Investigation Branch which. Several teams located around the trunk road network could be made available for investigations when necessary 24 hours a day. At present most local forces only have one or two which may be overwhelmed by a major incident which has follow on incidents and many not be available for some time after the accident occurs.

Implementing such a system is a political issue that needs to be done at government level. Blaming the police is simply wrong, they are doing what they are required to do by the courts and the politicians, any chief constable who decided not to comply would swiftly be removed from office and quite likely prosecuted. The reality is that local and national governments have been cutting police numbers for decades while increasing their workload and reducing the scope for individual judgement of chief constables.

The guidance they have to work to is available at this link.
https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-c ... ad-deaths/

[darkcape]

The evidence is never clear. That's why we do a forensic investigation.

Gene Hunt might have liked guesswork but in 2017 there are established rules and procedures to ensure the cause of death is clear.

There was a tragic case a few years ago when a poor confused elderly person set off the wrong way down a slip road onto a motorway and hit another vehicle head on. My 5 year old grandson could have worked out the cause. But the motorway was shut for something like 20 hours and this caused massive delays and gridlock in 2 large nearby cities. The costs of these sorts of delays are huge, and not just in £££s. People miss flights, meetings, hospital appointments, urgent (even life saving) medical treatment, job interviews. It causes frustration which frequently results in further accidents on alternative routes. The problem is that every very serious accident site becomes a crime scene and has to be forensically investigated. If senior officers were trusted to take the kinds of decisions they are paid to take (and overrule procedures if appropriate), then sometimes we could have the roads flowing again much quicker.

You say your five-year-old grandson could work out the cause - of course your grandson would come to a conclusion based on the evidence and ultimately it is the court, coroner etc that makes the decision on the cause. The police are have the duty of collecting as much evidence as possible, to explore all reasonable causes and factors, and then present this for the best decision to be made. If you started leaving these decisions to the police (no matter how much faith you have in the service) somewhere along the line corners would be cut, and victim's families would be impacted.

Two examples near me where everything is not as it seems:

1 - man jumped off a bridge in an apparent suicide, shutting the motorway - turns out he was linked to an incident at a property earlier in the day where two people had been killed. So I'd assume the police would have the investigate other factors such as was it a suicide, was he pushed etc. To Joe Public trapped on the road, they're thinking "He jumped off a bridge, clean it up, reopen it, hurry up".

2 - RTC at a village crossroads, emergency services discover a person in the rear of the car who was deceased prior to the RTC - so scene is shut off as now you're looking at a potential murder investigation.

If anyone has read an RAIB investigation report they'll see how much attention to detail is gone in to minor things such as shunting collisions etc - imagine how much detail is required if you're trying to prove someone has broken the law. The whole scene has to be electronically scanned and surveyed, with enough detail to recreate using 3D digital modelling (depending on the method used this alone can take two hours - and maybe an hour of identifying all the points you need to survey). Photos taken, showing the road conditions at the time of the accident, angle of the sun etc (if they believe it is a contributing factor). You may need specialists to inspect the vehicles before they are recovered, in case any evidence is damaged during the removal process. Sniffer dogs may need to be brought in if drink, drugs, or other substances are suspected to be involved. If you're trying to prove a crime has been committed the case may collapse if you've omitted to collect the one vital piece of evidence, and the whole process is for nothing. Then you may have to get an engineer out to assess any damage to the road or structures, get the relevant teams in place to come and carry out the work, you may have to wait for asphalt to cool, or concrete to set, before you reopen the road.

I'm not defending that some closures can seem to go on too long but it would be madness to expect a road to be reopened within 3-4 hours of a serious incident.

At least with the A500 there are alternative routes, even if they are not of the same quality - I'd imagine some communities in Scotland get completely cut off or face a very long detour if a road gets shut for investigation. So I struggle to see the uproar with this particular event.

[Bryn666]

The general uproar is "you closed a road and my journey is more important than your investigation".

[Big L]

"Something mildly inconvenienced me so there must be a massive conspiracy against me".

[FosseWay]

The general uproar is "you closed a road and my journey is more important than your investigation".

To be fair I don't think it's as simple as that, at least not regarding the cases that come up on SABRE, where we have people commenting who have taken an interest in a particular incident without necessarily having any kind of personal stake in it.

These comments arise when we read in the media that a major road is shut for hours or even days. IMO the default situation should be that roads are not closed to those with the right to use them. It therefore follows that any decision to close them is supported by a clearly formulated case. There is no doubt that many fatal accidents will require such a closure, but if that closure extends beyond the immediate practicalities of evacuating injured people, extracting deceased casualties and removing wreckage, then the public is entitled to know what, when and why. More generally, the public is entitled to a broad assessment of the benefits gained by longer closures compared to the dislocation caused by closing them, which as several people have pointed out, extend beyond individuals taking longer than normal to get where they're going.

I think in some cases this kind of information is lacking from the authorities. At the same time we get comments from professionals along the lines of "when fatal accidents occur, it's standard practice to ... ", which rings alarm bells in the absence of any more specific information. It makes it sound as if various measures are robotically introduced without regard for anything else (including public inconvenience) because "that's what it says in the handbook". No doubt some investigations have been carried out in such a clumsy, ineffective way - human beings are involved, after all - but I have reasonable confidence in the investigators' ability to be effective. But without feedback it's just as easy, and tbh just as justifiable, to take the opposite view.

[KeithW]

I think in some cases this kind of information is lacking from the authorities. At the same time we get comments from professionals along the lines of "when fatal accidents occur, it's standard practice to ... ", which rings alarm bells in the absence of any more specific information. It makes it sound as if various measures are robotically introduced without regard for anything else (including public inconvenience) because "that's what it says in the handbook". No doubt some investigations have been carried out in such a clumsy, ineffective way - human beings are involved, after all - but I have reasonable confidence in the investigators' ability to be effective. But without feedback it's just as easy, and tbh just as justifiable, to take the opposite view.

There are at least 2 very good reasons why it is standard practice.

1) If someone is accused of murder, manslaughter or causing death by dangerous driving the first thing the barrister acting for the defence will do is ask for the results of the investigation. If there was none or just a perfunctory check then the accused will walk.

2) If the incident was caused or made worse by a technical fault in a vehicle or the road or roadside equipment it may not be detected and could recur.

[FosseWay]

I think in some cases this kind of information is lacking from the authorities. At the same time we get comments from professionals along the lines of "when fatal accidents occur, it's standard practice to ... ", which rings alarm bells in the absence of any more specific information. It makes it sound as if various measures are robotically introduced without regard for anything else (including public inconvenience) because "that's what it says in the handbook". No doubt some investigations have been carried out in such a clumsy, ineffective way - human beings are involved, after all - but I have reasonable confidence in the investigators' ability to be effective. But without feedback it's just as easy, and tbh just as justifiable, to take the opposite view.

There are at least 2 very good reasons why it is standard practice.

1) If someone is accused of murder, manslaughter or causing death by dangerous driving the first thing the barrister acting for the defence will do is ask for the results of the investigation. If there was none or just a perfunctory check then the accused will walk.

2) If the incident was caused or made worse by a technical fault in a vehicle or the road or roadside equipment it may not be detected and could recur.

You misunderstand my point. It may well be standard practice for very good reasons, but the impression it gives to the travelling public if the first thing they hear is an apparent knee-jerk reaction will lead to the kinds of comment we've seen in this thread. My point throughout is that in most cases the problem lies in communication, not in that the authorities close long stretches of busy roads for ages for no good reason. The public needs to be told (in order of urgency):
1. That a given road is closed.
2. How long it's going to be closed for (where "for the time being" may be as good as it gets to begin with, but with more accurate estimates as they appear).
3. Where they should go instead.
4. Why it's closed.
5. What is being done, after the immediate incident is made safe, casualties treated etc., that warrants the road being closed for longer.
6. (possibly much later) What the outcome of the investigation was, and what effect it had on any judicial outcome.

[2 Sheds]

There was a tragic case a few years ago when a poor confused elderly person set off the wrong way down a slip road onto a motorway and hit another vehicle head on. My 5 year old grandson could have worked out the cause. But the motorway was shut for something like 20 hours and this caused massive delays and gridlock in 2 large nearby cities. The costs of these sorts of delays are huge, and not just in £££s. People miss flights, meetings, hospital appointments, urgent (even life saving) medical treatment, job interviews. It causes frustration which frequently results in further accidents on alternative routes. The problem is that every very serious accident site becomes a crime scene and has to be forensically investigated. If senior officers were trusted to take the kinds of decisions they are paid to take (and overrule procedures if appropriate), then sometimes we could have the roads flowing again much quicker.

Fortunately we live in a country where police officers CANNOT decide to overrule the law. Such countries as do allow this tend not to be very nice to live in. The police are required by the home office to investigate all fatal collisions as ‘unlawful killings’ until the contrary is proved.


The guidance they have to work to is available at this link.
https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-c ... ad-deaths/

I didn't think I suggested any police officers should be overruling the law. I was suggesting that guidance and procedures issued to police could allow some leeway for the most senior officers ( who are very highly paid ) to make judgements about how much evidence needs to be gathered in some cases. I wasn't aware that the very interesting document accessed by your link was 'the law' ?

[Ruperts Trooper]

There was a tragic case a few years ago when a poor confused elderly person set off the wrong way down a slip road onto a motorway and hit another vehicle head on. My 5 year old grandson could have worked out the cause. But the motorway was shut for something like 20 hours and this caused massive delays and gridlock in 2 large nearby cities. The costs of these sorts of delays are huge, and not just in £££s. People miss flights, meetings, hospital appointments, urgent (even life saving) medical treatment, job interviews. It causes frustration which frequently results in further accidents on alternative routes. The problem is that every very serious accident site becomes a crime scene and has to be forensically investigated. If senior officers were trusted to take the kinds of decisions they are paid to take (and overrule procedures if appropriate), then sometimes we could have the roads flowing again much quicker.

Fortunately we live in a country where police officers CANNOT decide to overrule the law. Such countries as do allow this tend not to be very nice to live in. The police are required by the home office to investigate all fatal collisions as ‘unlawful killings’ until the contrary is proved.


The guidance they have to work to is available at this link.
https://www.app.college.police.uk/app-c ... ad-deaths/

I didn't think I suggested any police officers should be overruling the law. I was suggesting that guidance and procedures issued to police could allow some leeway for the most senior officers ( who are very highly paid ) to make judgements about how much evidence needs to be gathered in some cases. I wasn't aware that the very interesting document accessed by your link was 'the law' ?

How are investigators or police officers to know the significance of individual items of evidence until they've ALL been collected and conclusions drawn - expecting the road to be opened quickly would need instant knee-jerk "conclusion" so that only evidence supporting that theory is collected.

[Vierwielen]

Some years ago an HGV driver died when somebody lobbed a brick over a footbridge onto the M3 in Surrey (See here). The road was closed for several hours. After a "finger-search", the police recovered the brick and had it analysed. They were able to extract the DNA from a finger-print, but the computer did not recognise the pattern, but found similarities with the DNA pattern of a close relative who was already on record. The brick-thrower was sentenced to six years (See here).

Had the motorway been reopened quickly, it is unlikely that the culprit would have been found.

[Johnathan404]

How are investigators or police officers to know the significance of individual items of evidence until they've ALL been collected and conclusions drawn - expecting the road to be opened quickly would need instant knee-jerk "conclusion" so that only evidence supporting that theory is collected.

Given the phrases used in this thread such as "surely it is a clear-cut case" and "my 5 year old grandson could have worked out the cause" it seems an instant knee-jerk conclusion is exactly what people want.

The investigation could be sped up even more if it were just filed under 'speed limit too high'. I'm sure there'd be no complaints then.

[doebag]

The investigation could be sped up even more if it were just filed under 'speed limit too high'. I'm sure there'd be no complaints then.

Of course, inappropriate speed can be blamed on anything from walking in to a door frame to Concorde crashing in a Paris suburb.

The lorry incident on the M11 yesterday closed the n/b carriageway for 15 hours, and there was no other vehicle involved according to the BBC

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-42123264