Motor vehicles / cars crashing into buildings

Ah, cool, I expect the tourist double-deckers include it on their tour of the city?

Well, it would probably be the third-most tourist-worthy attraction in the City, behind the Cathedral and Oliver Cromwell's house. However the latter two are less than 200m apart, so the idea of bus tours of Ely has never really taken off. To and from Ely, yes. Around Ely, no.

Fair enough, I haven’t looked.

Ah, I see, even though you noticed my excellent joke, you're clearly playing it cool. :)

It's even less tourist-worthy now - it's been demoted to fourth place.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leicestershire-54871244

The top three are all within cycling distance of me, doing nothing to raise my opinion of the standard of Midlands driving. There's a bit much urban sprawl to make for an entertaining day's ride, but I might try and make a note to try and detour to the bridges if passing that way for other reasons...

Something has crashed or been crashed into Edmonton police station...

https://news.met.police.uk/news/incident-in-enfield-414890

Something set on fire:

https://twitter.com/LBC/status/1326626832247115778

Fortunately, the fire could be extinguished by a heroic bus driver before it ignited the car:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/edmonton-police-station-attack-b66403.html

Looks as if someone will be doing bird.

This Guardian write-up has another witness account, but it's still not 100% clear what happened, e.g. no mention of the bus driver. It seems the driver was trying to get inside the police station, perhaps to set it alight from inside.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/11/man-arrested-after-car-crashes-into-edmonton-police-station

Adam Pawlowski is the name of the man who for some reason felt it necessary to attack Edmonton police station:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/man-charged-with-arson-after-edmonton-police-station-smash-b68796.html

I dont remember seeing this posted. Driver demonstrating simultaneously careful maneouvre and terrible driving skills?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/uk-england-humber-46358541?__twitter_impression=true

Cars crashing into buildings and driving off with them...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-55028065

Houses in Audis

A driver crashed into a house

Careful now, they may be in danger of exonerating the Audi!

This isn't a crash into a building, but it's relevant to what interests me in such crashes, i.e. the high level of driver protection they've devised in racing cars. The crash sounds absolutely horrendous, but he walked away almost uninjured.

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2020/nov/29/romain-grosjean-f1-crash-bahrain-gp

I'm 100% certain that this sort of understanding will cause racing drivers to take more risks, just as I believe driver protection generally has caused 'ordinary' drivers to take more risks.

There's got to be a large chunk of luck here as well. I'm not sure F1 cars are designed in a way to safely spit in half. Maybe I'm wrong. Antoine Hubert certainly wasn't so lucky although the crashes were, and always are, very different.
Not detracting from your point about the psychology of safety though.

Oh, luck absolutely comes into it. Taking risks is basically pushing your luck. It's always the problem with risk perception--it's gone right 1,000 times and then the 1,001st time it suddenly doesn't--whatever other number of successes and failures might be applicable, the number of successes usually far outweighs the failures. You can probably assume that falling off a 200' cliff onto a rocky beach will be fatal 99.99% of the time, but jumping off a 10' something will probably be non-fatal most of the time, except when it isn't.

This. Senna’s crash was in a car deemed to be crashworthy based on what had happened to and could be predicted to happen to F1 cars at the time. No one foresaw the possibility of (all but one) suspension struts fracturing and the wheel becoming a giant, cockpit-bound pendulum.

A death here. Not much info yet on what happened, except that a driver crashed into the wall of a house in Romford. The two young men mentioned may have been the car occupants. There will undoubtedly be follow-up articles.

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/man-killed-romford-b659076.html

As we've seen in this thread, it's very unusual for car occupants to be injured in crashes into walls. The first suspicion would be that it was a high-speed crash.

RIP 20-year old.

The Bronx, bus driver refused a drugs test:

https://nypost.com/2021/01/15/mta-bus-driver-refused-drug-test-after-driving-off-overpass/?utm_source=NYPTwitter&utm_campaign=SocialFlow&utm_medium=SocialFlow

Slightly ot, no building, and knicked from my club forum, someone managed this in Richmond Park this morning. Possibly doing in excess of 20 mph.

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In a follow-up tweet they apologised for writing 'car' rather than driver.

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That deserves a 'Rider down' thread. Apart from the Tweet, I can't find anything about it on-line yet.

^^ & ^^^,
I hope the cyclist is not too traumatised, has sufficient pain medication and heals up soon.

I hope Natural England will be prosecuting the driver/registered owner
for polluting a National Nature Reserve.

I'm somewhat baffled by how the driver has managed this.

It looks like he's just passed Ham Cross, heading towards Kingston Gate. He's lost control close to the bottom of the small dip on the right hand bend, coming off the road just as it starts to climb again.

My only thought is he was cutting the corner/over taking at speed, when something coming in the other direction caused him to overcorrect and lose control, taking out a cyclist at some point. Whether that cyclist was coming in the other direction or was being over taken, I don't know. Just seems like a really strange place to bin it big time.