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Changing the subject matter slightly ...
I happened upon some local news, as you do, when looking for some other information. Two local "news" stories that made me wonder about realistic expectations in life.
The first was about traffic problems on a main road (but an old style narrow one) in a Derbyshire town due to an 'elderly' man collapsing on the pavement. His age was mentioned - did not seem that old to me!
Apparently the ambulance service sent 2 ambulances and the Air Ambulance. One wonders how the NHS can afford such a level of response and by what criteria it is justified. Presumably the Air Ambulance is an easy option since most are supported by charitable public donations.
The second story was about what must have been a minor bump on a main (but old and narrow) road in Derby.
Looking at a photo of the fire service lifting the roof of a quite new looking Nissan SUV one wondered what had happened. Rear-ended apparently. A lady passenger, according to a post on social media by someone claiming to be her daughter, suffers for a painful bad back and this has been aggravated by the accident, the poster said.
As we know from numerous stories and the 2 years of roof removal demos at the Stoke Row and Nuffield motor sport day, the immediate response to any mention of neck or back pain is to cut the roof off the vehicle in which the complainant is sitting.
Given that this did not look like much of a bump and the vehicle was a medium size SUV that, presumably, should be relatively easy to get in and out of, do we need to insist on special design attributes that must be used for passengers with bad backs and necks?
Bear in mind that destroying relatively new vehicles for something that may or may not be an medical issue is both an expensive waste of materials and energy consumption that must be, according to some, ecologically unacceptable and that the disruption to traffic make well have further consequences.
Should people with pre-existing high risk medical conditions be assessed for travel suitability and, perhaps, be encouraged to adopt special protective precautions of some sort?
Should motor insurance policies require disclosure of such conditions and a premium surcharge to cover the additional risk - as would be normal for some medical conditions for general travel insurance?
Also in the news are the reports that the Govt, possibly mindful of their exposure to the costs of Civil Engineering company failures, are getting cold feet about the cost of the HS2 vanity project.
It's relatively easy to take a project like that and throw together a cost estimate on the back of an envelope that includes a range of values to cover various eventualities related to government contracts. There are plenty of historic deals to provide data.
But what is the hidden annual cost of attempting to deliver services that are costly but not obviously correlated nor very manageable - like how the authorities respond to RTAs and similar?
One could also discuss minority risk activities like mountain biking, horse riding, skiing, mountaineering and fell walking (to pick a few examples) but the net economic effect of those would likely be much less than the far more common Road Traffic Accident response.
On a more general level - just how realistic are people's expectations of the life they expect to lead in a modern world?
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