Thursday, January 23, 2014

Gas Pedal Confusion

Gas Pedal Confusion

Evidently there are no documented cases of people deliberately hitting things and lying about confusing the gas and brake pedal, although people disagree with experts who said George Russell Weller accidentally confused pedals completely explains the path of destruction of the Los Angeles Farmers Market. But some cases look awfully wierd, and would make a great hard-to-prove excuse like DUI or drugs in case somebody did do a deliberate attack.


Pedal Application Errors - National Highway Traffic Safety ...

www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/nti/.../811597.pd...

National Highway Traffic...
Available sources provide an estimate of 15 pedal misapplication crashes per month in...... error of mistaking the accelerator pedal for the brake pedal—and the driver, ....who is only temporarily confused, e.g., by a distracting noise or thought.

Pedal confusion = truck in store - a retailer near-miss | Fire Geezer

www.firegeezer.com/.../pedal-confusing-truck-in-store-a-retailer-near-mi...

Nov 28, 2013 - Pedal confusion According to the owner of the store, the two people inside the truck are regular customers. The driver apparently hit the gas pedal instead of the brake


  1. Storefront crashes: A bigger urban-design issue than we think ...

    www.minnpost.com/.../storefront-crashes-bigger-urban-design...

    MinnPost
    Aug 2, 2013 - It turns out, however, that storefront crashes are not oddities. ... A 74-year-old woman confused the gas and brake pedals on her car and plowed into .... if damage is done, the driver is stepping way too hard on the gas pedal.
  2.  paper published the other day by Robert Reiter with Dean C. Alberson and Felicia J. Desorcie, both with the Texas Traffic Institute at Texas A & M University, estimates that there may be as many as 50 to 60 store front crashes each day in the U.S., about 20 of those involving convenience stores.
 Reiter says he used to work on terrorism issues but then "decided that the worst terrorist was an 84-year-old man on meds behind the wheel of a Buick." Wright sustained a knee injury when a car crashed into a 7-11 where he was shopping.
een both varieties in the Twin Cities. Last year, Rudolph's rib emporium on Lyndale and Franklin saw its corner entrance and sign crushed when a passenger van drove into it. In late 2010, a drunken driver crashed into the Juut Salonspa on the corner of Hennepin and Lake in Minneapolis, leaving two pedestrians with injuries, albeit minor ones.

Rash of crashes

In fact, there was a rash of such crashes in Minnesota that year, at a Stillwater pizzeria, a Blaine flower shop and a pub in Rosemount. In St. Paul that year, a toddler left buckled in a car seat freed herself, crawled into the driver's seat of her mom's SUV and put the car into gear. It crashed into a Cost Cutters salon.
 the complaint, “the parking area at the restaurant was specifically designed so that automobiles were required to park close to and facing in toward the restaurant, in close proximity to patrons dining inside the Restaurant.” Further, “there were no wheel stops, bollards (vertical concrete and steel tubes planted in the ground), curbing or barriers of any kind to prevent an automobile from crashing into the restaurant and its patrons.” 
, only Miami-Dade County has an ordinance dealing with safety in parking lots. It requires that anti-ram fixtures be placed in shopping centers when head-in parking is located in front of a store. A



  1. Driver Mistakes Brake for Gas Pedal Crashes into Coco's Restaurant

    www.allvoices.com/.../16042377-driver-mistakes-brake-for-gas-pedal-cr...

    Nov 26, 2013 - Police in Citrus Heights are saying that an elderly driver looks to haveconfused the gas pedal for the brake pedal and crashed into Coco's  ...

Driving: How many people sometimes confuse the brake pedal with ...

www.quora.com/.../How-many-people-sometimes-confuse-the-br...

Quora
Feb 22, 2013 - At least 15 crashes per month in the US are caused by pedalconfusion. One inventor designed a new combined gas/brake pedal to try 

October 26, 2012 Elderly Woman Accidentally Rams Canoga Target Back Door At the Canoga Park, California Target, an elderly woman driving a new BMW 3 series down the ramp from the garage towards a T intersection with a stop sign. But she blew through the stop sign and "threaded a needle" by crashing straight through the narrow emergency doors and drove deep into the electronics section, injuring two shoppers, one critically. Police and the woman's son were leaning towards pedal confusion. None speculated it could have been a deliberate attack

Fail Friday: Chinese Woman Confuses Gas Pedal for Brake, Goes ...

www.carbuzz.com › Mazda › China › Crash

Nov 11, 2011 - Fail Friday: Chinese Woman Confuses Gas Pedal for Brake, Goes through the Wall. Mazda China Crash. Somewhere in Guandong a man is  .

  1. Retail Store Safety - Crash Prevention: Gas/Brake Pedal Confusion ...

    www.storefrontcrashes.com/.../gasbrake-pedal-confusion-solution-in.htm...

    Aug 6, 2010 - When you skim through news accounts of vehicle-into-building crashes, you'll notice that drivers in such accidents often confuse their gas and ...

Investigators said George Weller, who was 86 at the time, mistakenly stepped on the gas instead of the brake and then panicked. He was doing up to 60 mph when he plowed through the market.Weller was convicted of 10 counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and was sentenced to probation. It was not immediately clear how fast the car in Saturday’s crash was going.http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/driver-plows-crowd-venice-beach-boardwalk-article-1.1417146#ixzz2rI6RTnix

George Russell Weller - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Russell_Weller

Wikipedia
1 Santa Monica Farmer's Market incident; 2 Aftermath timeline; 3 See also; 4 Notes ...on the accelerator pedal instead of the brake, then tried to brake but could not stop. ...On 
Investigators determined that Weller mistook his gas pedal for the brake 

But others suspected it was deliberate: 

  1. The Farmers' Market - Human Kinetics

    www.humankinetics.com/excerpts/.../the-farmers-mark...

    Human Kinetics
    On July 16, 2003, 86-year-old George Russell Weller drove his Buick ... it was no accident—that Weller deliberately drove his car through the crowded market. ... staring straight ahead with a death grip on the steering wheel, and with her foot  ...

  2. George Weller Guilty in Famer's Market Crash - Broadband Reports

    www.dslreports.com/.../r17126994-George-Welle...

    Broadband Reports
    Oct 21, 2006 - 30 posts - ‎10 authors
    George Russell Weller -- who was 86 years old at the time of the July ... I feel for him, but his own deliberate actions - especially the hit and run .... Sad all around , for thosekilled, the 70 injured some who will live in pain for life.

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