Bastards.
That is all.
Street View vehicle kills Bambi
Those of you who are old enough to remember when it was all fields round here and have spent years searching for an answer to the Sex Pistols' perennial poser Who Killed Bambi? will be delighted to learn that the question has finally been answered. Yes, folks, it was Google who killed Bambi, and here's the proof (click on the …
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Friday 30th January 2009 12:37 GMT Anonymous Coward
Driver not paying attention
If the driver could not stop in time or at least take evasive action, they were driving too fast.
They only reason for a driver going too fast is lack of attention.
Lack of attention stems from a lack of training.
The driver should be sent back to school until they know how to drive.
Driving is a privilege, not a right. It is high time proper standards were enforced; then we might see a reduction in the daily carnage on our roads. Stepped licenses, mandatory re-tests, manadotry eye-tests, mandatory fitness tests etc.
What if this had been a young child? Will no one think of the children?
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Friday 30th January 2009 12:37 GMT Richard
out of sync road lines
If you look carefully you can see they are out of sync because google have removed the image of the car on which the camera is mounted, presumably by using a shot of that strech of road from further away and super imposing it ontop of where the car should be, thus you have an inconsistant picture layout
One has to ask why the dont want their own vehicles in their pictures but are quite happy to put my vehicle in their pictures!!!
Mines the one with the mangnifying glass in the pocket
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Friday 30th January 2009 12:41 GMT Bob Terwilliger
Depends on how you look at it?
Was this a field test of Google Rez (beta)?
The streetview car (equipped with Google Rez), drives past the roadkill which is drawn towards the car and restored to life.
The catch is that google then get the right to run ads direct in the brain of the restored life-form.
All hail google, what can't they do?
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Friday 30th January 2009 12:41 GMT Dino
how fast is it going?
I would have thought the streetview cars wouldn't be going faster than 30-40 mph - from first photo looks possible it could've been avoided no?
Is there any way to guesstimate speed based on photo?? prob hard due to not knowing speed of shutter/f-stop etc...
I think we need an explanation.. this is weird...
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Friday 30th January 2009 12:43 GMT Trygve Henriksen
Nope, that's an outdated scale...
It goes like this:
Deer: 4
Deer and calf(same hit) : 20
Deer and calf(separate hits): 7
Reindeer: 6
Reindeer with red nose: 20
Moose: 10
Bison: 20
Cow: 2
Sheep: 1
Lambs: 15 (they're bugger all difficult to hit... )
Fish: 5 (Fishing from roadbridges is a popular pasttime here... )
Trains: -50.000
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:00 GMT Ian
A more serious point.
Is Google streetview really worth the amount of mileage they must be doing burning petrol and chucking out more CO2, dealing with the various invasions of privacy they've comitted filming people's living rooms, trespassing on their property and now even killing Bambi!
Streetview strikes me as one of those things that would've been better if they just never started it.
It does seem like a pointless waste of time. I don't generally dislike pointless wastes of time if their net effect is zero, but this pointless waste of time in particular seems to result in negative effects.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:00 GMT jon
deer
As long as it was a clean kill then there's not much to be done.
If it's a twitcher with no antlers and is beyond saving (ie. broken bones, smashed face or jaw) then go break its neck or smash the base of it's skull. Screw driver to the base of the skull works too.
If it's got antlers then stay away unless you're packing heat and can (legally) humanely dispatch it safely, else phone the police (in the UK not sure about US policy). In the UK they'll send the local deer man to end it's suffering and get a nice meal out of it :] If he gralloches it (guts it) there and then, the carcass will be used for food, ask for a cut :D
Lastly some species of deer are tough buggers. They'll go down and stay down, but then 10 mins later get up and wander off as if nothing happened. Saw a muntjak do this after a collision with a car at 60mph. The car took more damage!
Paris; works like a muntjak
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Paul
RE:Driver not paying attention
Deer do just jump out in front of cars. It happens. It dosent matter how good the driver is it still happens, often jumping unseen from a hedge, running at 30 odd MPH. They are a dam site faster and more unpridictable than even your feral inercity kid high on caffien and e-numbers. It dosent mean thay were going to fast. I asume you live in a city and have never had a Deer jump out in front of you, or you are a troll, or both.
I wasent expecting to get angry about the comments on this story, but then I didnt expect someone to start a road safty campain. If you are making a joke (with the "wont someone think of the children" it could be), then it is a very badly excicuted joke.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Chris Hunt
D'oh! A Deer! A female deer...
Google's response posted here:
http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/01/oh-deer-street-view-and-road-safety.html
Apparently "60,000-70,000 deer collisions happen per year in New York alone", and according to http://money.cnn.com/2005/11/04/news/newsmakers/deer/ , NY's not even in the top ten bambicide states (at least it wasn't in 2005).
Amazing there's any of the blighters left.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Liam Johnson
@Driver not paying attention
Are you serious?? You want to go back to the days of the guy with the red flag walking in front of the car? Deer have natural camouflage; you can’t spot them easily on the road side. If one decides to run, you will not have a chance to avoid it. The general advice in countries where this sort of thing happens is not to try and avoid the animal as you will likely end up wrapped around a tree. So there is a compromise between the risk of hitting an animal and actually getting anywhere on time. If you want to completely avoid the risk to animals, you can always walk, but then you might end up being attacked by something vicious, so take your spear.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Chris Pearson
@ Driver not paying attention
I nearly killed bambi this month, and it was actually surprisingly hard to miss.
The dear sees you, spooks starts jumping all over the bloody place making it very hard to actually work out where they will be when you get there. I had to E-stop and wait for the bloody thing to decide what to do. I was going about 30-40 in a 60 so was lucky as another 5-10 would have seen bambi through my windscreen when I wouldn't have been able to stop in time. This would in turn have left me with a large repair bill/a need for a new car and a very traumatised wife and 2 year old. I couldn't have even cooked the bloody thing as it was in Windsor great park and I don't fancy being done for poaching.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Oh FFS
"Driving is a privilege, not a right. "
Bullshit. Driving is a right.
When people invented cars, we had a right to buy them and to drive them. This right is as inherent as the right to smoke if we like, or the right to climb hills if we like, or the right to have kinky sex if we like (both parties consenting). No government bestows these rights upon us. They are naturally ours.
What the government does is take rights away, sometimes for good reason, sometimes not. Just because some people have their right to drive taken away doesn't mean that the rest of us only drive as a "privilege".
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Sandra Greer
There are way too many of these...
in New York State and throughout the Northeast of the US. There have been sharpshooters assigned to cull them. Yes, people complain about them, and other people feel sorry about it.
Bambi is not your friend, now that we don't have enough predators (except us) to keep the population down. Hitting a full-grown deer at highway speed can be fatal to the driver as well as the car.
Get 'em, Google!
(ducks a thrown organic tomato)
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
@Driver not paying attention
"If the driver could not stop in time or at least take evasive action, they were driving too fast."
I take it you've never had a deer run out of the overgrowth straight in front of you? You'd have to be pootling along at 2m.p.h. in order to stop before hitting it, and driving at that speed would cause even more accidents.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:24 GMT AndyC
@Greg
So glad I'm not the only one that was laughing :)
To all those saying this is animal murder, no, it was an accident... The car was on the road, the deer was on the road. Car wins. If it was dangerous for the car to take action then tough, I'd have made the same call and taken Bambi out to. The most I've ever hit before was a couple of Grouse (sp?) that decided to run out from a hedge as I was going past. No point picking them up though, didn't feel like soup for tea.
And peguin, well, I bet it tastes like chicken
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:24 GMT Anonymous Coward
in the states
You have to understand that the state I used to live in was considering hiring snipers to shoot deer that were running around in the Detroit suburbs. I feel no remorse over one less deer. Too bad they didn't take it in to be processed. The meat would be very tender.
They really do appear out of nowhere when you're in a 45mph zone and the houses are about 20 feet from the road (deer running full bore out from between the houses into the road). I managed to miss all but one when that happened to me. Messed up my hood, damaged my door (when it flipped around off of my hood) and left a patch of fur in the grille. The deer never was knocked down and kept running. That's rural living, a brownish deer jumping out from a corn field in a 55mph zone just a few feet from the road. You can't be aware of everything unless you're driving with some nifty heat cameras mounted to your car. Considering how bad it is in the area my parents live, I'm surprised that there aren't more collisions with deer.
@Trygve
You don't want to hit a cow in that area. You won't have a car left. Moose and bison are bigger, so unless your driving a a dump truck with an A-Team styled grille, you really don't want to hit those either.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:24 GMT Stu
That is brilliant!
Its kind of like watching a freeze frame comic strip style action replay! Fantastic!
And for those who get all emotional and sad about it - Its road-kill for crying out loud! Nobody would have bat an eyelid if it were a hedgehog, or a frog, but because its an animal bigger than your family dog, everybody goes all boo-hoo about it. Simple case of survival of the not-so-stupid imho, the thing was dumb as fuck enough to keep-on-running with the googlecar in plain sight, it deserved to die. *I await the flames of hell!*
I suppose the real tragedy is that the streetviewer roadsters didn't later on take comic strip snaps of them returning to the scene of the 'crime' and retrieving the thing for their sunday lunch - it might have appeased those tree hugging hippy types from bitching about it being a 'senseless' killing.
Mind you, I can't help thinking how the crew wouldn't have realised that having roadkill recorded in streetview might have been somewhat 'controversial' to some people, and report the incident to somebody upon their return. So much for thinking people have values I suppose.
Then again perhaps the driver was asleep at the wheel when it happened...
Skill n' crossbones icons scope of use appended - 'roadkill'.
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Friday 30th January 2009 13:24 GMT LINCARD1000
AC can die in a fire
"What if this had been a young child? Will no one think of the children?"
Anyone who uses phrases like this needs a good, swift kick in the bollocks. Just go die in a fire. There are too many people thinking of these bloody children as it is - YOU are the reason so many stupid and inane laws get put on the books in the first place.
Will no-one think of PERSONAL BLOODY RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR OWN ACTIONS?
Children shouldn't be playing on the roads. And they should be taught basic road safety. And if they are too young to be left unsupervised in the first place.
Will no-one think of PARENTS WHO TAKE RESPONSIBILITY?
So AC - Shut. The. Hell. Up.
Accidents happen you lot. It's unpleasant but it's life.
That is all.
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Friday 30th January 2009 14:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
Menace
Years ago I hit an adult deer at 70 MPH, riding a BSA 650. Killed the deer, bent the bike up (antler made a big hole in the tank), and broke a leg. The ambulance took me away pretty quickly (but otherwise the NHS was crap on this and every other occasion I have needed it). By the time my wife organised someone to retrieve the bike, the deer had been taken, and there was someone poking around the bike too.
You might think this was pretty careless, but deer have a stupid habit of lying in ambush and leaping out just as you get to them. This probably works quite well in the predator/prey game, but they haven't evolved for motor vehicles yet.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
