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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Friday 30th January 2009 14:20 GMT Apocalypse Later
Synch
Surely the out-of-synch road markings are caused by the nature of the camera. To get a 360 degree picture, it scans around in a circle, and if it is moving linearly as well the edges of the scanned image won't match up.
Given that the thing only works properly when stationary, one wonders why it was operating on the move.
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Friday 30th January 2009 14:33 GMT Trygve Henriksen
@ A C
The scale I use is based on the assumption that you're alive to tell someone about it afterwards...
Trains get such a huge negativee because only a moron will hit it.
cows... Not much of a challenge, really. They just stand there in the middle of the road, chewing cud and looking at you...
Moose. King of the forest, and a bl**dy nuisance...
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Friday 30th January 2009 14:38 GMT Anonymous Coward
My Mum
always said "You killed it, you eat it."
So Mr Google drive go back, get the carcass and start cooking.
@Sarah Bee,
You are a tech writer working on El Reg. Before you become eligable to have little 'drains on your resources' you have to - A) Be degeeked. B) Be rehabilitated into humanity. C) Find someone who will forgive you your geek days on El Reg.
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Friday 30th January 2009 16:20 GMT Gene Cash
Ah, forest rats...
I see Google has the same opinion of them that I do... several of my friends have been hurt by these damned creatures appearing out of nowhere without warning.
The "he was driving too fast" folks have obviously had NO experience with these foul animals. They will literally jump out of the bushes at your car/motorcycle and you get absolutely no warning whatsoever. Google (heh!) for "deer motorcycle" - bonus points if you do image search.
If they went extinct, I would be much much happier. I shoot as many of them as I can get away with.
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Friday 30th January 2009 16:20 GMT Anonymous Coward
did they eat it?
most say aww how sad the remainder say cool allright 10 points etc
to me its just waste of good comment what i see is good opportunity for nice meal with lots of beer!
what i want to know if they took the carcas with them and shared it with the rest of the office staff? after all you just cant pass up a good venison right? and was it any good?
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Friday 30th January 2009 18:16 GMT Anonymous Coward
@ AC, Re: Driver not paying attention
Nice 20-20 hindsight, there.
Looks like a lot of woods there. Ever have a deer suddenly come out of the woods, 20 feet in front of your car?
Considering most rural roads are 35MPH - 55MPH, you have probably .05 seconds to:
1. Say "crap!" and hit the deer
2. Try a swerve, which may put you in the ditch/wood/path of an oncoming vehicle - and, you most likely still hit the deer.
Deer are the most unpredictable things ... I've seen entire herds of them stand on the side of the road and watch traffic go by - I've also seen pairs seem to wait for the cars to get close, and then step out in front of them with a "hey, look, an apple!" disregard for anything going on around them.
It is good fortune for the Google driver that it didn't come over the hood and through the windshield ...
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Friday 30th January 2009 18:16 GMT Martin
@Driver not paying attention
Impossible to miss deer here if you are going more than walking speed - they leap out of the trees across the road in front of you.
Worse are bloody moose - there are roads here you daren't drive at night because 2 tons of dark gray camouflaged, world's stupidest animal step into the road.
If you hit a moose in any vehicle without tracks you know about it.
Penguins are slower and easier to avoid.
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Friday 30th January 2009 18:16 GMT /dev/me
But? But? But?
Why does every news site but this one report the deer lived? Inquisitive readers need to know.
__
I never thought about deducting points for hitting trains. That seems like a sensible thing to do. Trygve Henriksen, consider your idea officially stolen under the 'there is no greater compliment than plagiarism'-act of January 2009.
Paris, just to draw attention ;-)
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Friday 30th January 2009 19:20 GMT jake
Road-kill venison
Nothing wrong with it ... as long as you are there to see the kill (i.e. you are certain it's fresh), and as long as you butcher around the traumatized and/or contaminated meat. Make certain you know the rules in your neck of the woods ... personally, I always call the county sheriff before I start cutting, so I don't get arrested for poaching (call the OFFICE number, not the emergency line!). I don't hunt anymore, but I have a freezer full of free venison and three half turkeys (the side that gets the impact is useless in birds).
To the hand-wringers, where do you think the meat at your local biggie-wiggie mega-mart comes from? Why waste the meat after a deer-car indecent?
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Saturday 31st January 2009 02:28 GMT Solomon Grundy
You All Know Nothing About Deer
More than 1 in 2 people in Virginia (US) hit deer each year. As they come across the road to reach another field they are coming extremely fast and they just jump any brush/fences/ditches. Even at 20MPH it's really common to hit deer. Especially the young like in these photos.
It has nothing to do with driver skill or vehicle speed. It's part of living where wild animals do.
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Sunday 1st February 2009 06:23 GMT GF
Need to starting arming the deer...
It is time to start arming the deer so that they can defend themselves from these Google StreetView speeding maniacs. :-)
IMHO, this deer hit could have been avoided. The deer comes out of a small driveway on the left and it is a clearing, not a bunch of trees right up the road. If the driver was actually paying attention, he/she should have ease off the gas while Bambi runs across. Then, the evasive maneuver while braking is to go on the left lane since there was no incoming traffic and the road is straight (clear view ahead, no curves). Of course, if the driver was doing 70-80MPH in a 55MPH zone (U.S. equivalent for rural roads), all of the above steps are irrelevant. Or, Bambi makes a 180-degree turn while you're trying to pass on the left lane... In both cases, Bambi loses.
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Monday 2nd February 2009 05:48 GMT Fozzy
title needed apparently
Here in good ol' OZ, it is actually a traffic violation to swerve to avoid hitting an animal on the road. Consdiering that you are typically doing in excess of 110km'h on those roads it makes sense too. A sudden swerve and your more likely to be hitting a very large tree rather than a kangaroo or wombat.
Ron white does a great piece on deer hunting. Unfortuantely can't provide the link. No access to youtube at work. Damn it
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Monday 2nd February 2009 05:52 GMT Henry Wertz
Not avoidable
"IMHO, this deer hit could have been avoided. The deer comes out of a small driveway on the left and it is a clearing, not a bunch of trees right up the road. If the driver was actually paying attention, he/she should have ease off the gas while Bambi runs across. Then, the evasive maneuver while braking is to go on the left lane since there was no incoming traffic and the road is straight (clear view ahead, no curves)."
Doubt it! It's really hard to tell from these shots, but in reality, it's probably "deer stood near driveway on the left. Deer ran straight in front of car at stop speed." You DO NOT swerve to avoid deer! 1) Car is very likely to lose control. ESPECIALLY if you "evasive maneuver while braking", that's the WORST way to avoid a deer accident, he car will almost certainly go out of control, and since you brake less than if you just braked, you'll be going faster when you hit the deer or the ditch. 2) Seriously, deer will go from a full run, stop dead in their tracks, and jump backwards, zig-zag, whatever. I've SEEN cars try to swerve around deer, the fuckers will actually jump BACK out in front of the car! 3) Natural selection. I have actually noticed MORE deer here in Iowa recently that see cars, and wait for them to pass, rather than just leaping right out in front as they almost always did in the past. The ones stuipd enough to play chicken here have almost all been run over and not reproduced -- that's evolution in action!
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Monday 2nd February 2009 09:37 GMT Larry Adams
Not Aoidable...
"IMHO, this deer hit could have been avoided. The deer comes out of a small driveway on the left and it is a clearing, not a bunch of trees right up the road. If the driver was actually paying attention, he/she should have ease off the gas while Bambi runs across. Then, the evasive maneuver while braking is to go on the left lane since there was no incoming traffic and the road is straight (clear view ahead, no curves)."
OBVIOUSLY, you have never hit a deer, or come close to hitting one. Making a fast lane change to avoid a deer on the road is an almost guaranteed way to roll your car. Eighteen months ago I had a deer run out in front of my car while I was doing 60 mph. I was on a straight road, after dark, and I had at most a half second to react before I hit the deer. I didn't have time to brake, and barely enough time to grab onto the steering wheel to keep the car in a straight line. End result, one dead deer, over $7,000 damage to my car, including a hole in the radiator which prevented me from driving to the next town, but fortunately no injuries. The deer was running from right to left in front of me... if I had tried to swerve to the left at that speed I still could not have avoided the deer and probably would have lost control of the car as well. The was only one car or truck every 10-15 minutes at the time...
Paris, because she's had some close encounters too...
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Monday 2nd February 2009 12:07 GMT passionate indifference
Re: title needed apparently
I moved to Oz a few months ago, from Wales. Around Melbourne, everyone, from the overly modded gleaming white Asian imports to the idiotically engined and spoilered Holden Commodores and the frankly stupid dayglo lycra-coloured Ford XR6 utes (which still make me laugh) do exactly 103kmh on the freeways, otherwise a sniper from the Victoria aerial traffic cops shoots off a tiny portion of bodywork, bringing the car to a screeching halt and causing it to empty its load of bogans onto the Nepean Highway to fuss over the fascia in the midst of oncoming, if slow, traffic.
On a more serious note, surely tuning a five-litre Falcon with enormous wheels to get to 60kmh far quicker than any pedestrian would notice in a traffic system that allows you to turn left into an active green man crossing is just simply wrong.
Perhaps this was in response to the outrageously complicated city limits traffic system? Sometimes you'll need to cut across seven lanes of rush hour traffic in order to make the poorly signposted turning into Barkly Street, and how better to do that than in a car more powerful than around three hundred charging wildebeest?
bugger, where on earth did i put my keys
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Monday 2nd February 2009 14:38 GMT Christopher
Google drivers suck
I have seen several of these on british motorways, they obviously don't know where they are going and several times I have seen them force their way out on junctions.
I have seen this on the M25, the M11/A14 stretch at the A10 turn off and its not like their cameras were mounted so they weren't taking pictures.
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Tuesday 3rd February 2009 05:56 GMT Steve Roper
@ Fozzy
It depends on the roo. If it's one of those 7 foot big grey buggers then there's not much to tell between hitting the roo and collecting a gum tree - unless you're in a truck with a decent bull-bar in front. And wombats may be smaller, but they're just as bad since the roo-bars don't collect them! (For our non-Aussie friends, a wombat is a creature that looks a bit like a short-legged overgrown hamster on steroids, about the size of a pit bull with the structural solidity of a house brick. They're famous here for ripping the sump and/or diff out of your average car if you make the mistake of running one over.)
My brother and I once collected a grey plains roo in his Bronco out near Parachilna. He had a truck-rated, oversized bull-bar on it. The roo bent the end of the bull-bar back through the left-hand headlight, and put a two-foot dent in the passenger door as it bounced past. Had that car been a sedan, it would've been a write-off, and I wouldn't be telling you about it today!
So yeah, it may be illegal to swerve, but half the time the end result is the same!
This topic is closed for new posts.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
