Charging miscreant motorists for road closures might help to improve our driving habits

At first blush, Alf had some sympathy for the mother of a teenager who has been billed by the New Zealand Transport Agency for the cost of closing a road while she was cut free after a road accident.

But that’s because the first para of the report at Stuff (here) mentioned the daughter, Romy Goodfellow, having had a near-death experience, as a consequence of the mishap.

The report proceeded to make much of the young woman’s injuries.

Gravity has a lot to account for, including claims that cost the ACC $272m last year

Gravity has an inevitable effect on people who slip, trip, stumble or lose their balance.

It brings them down to earth – or towards it – and their journey ends with a jolt when they hit the ground or whatever might interrupt their downwards journey.

It happens often.

More than 261,000 people were injured in falls at home last year, costing ACC $272 million.

Data released today tell us over 3,000 people were off work for more than 3 months as a result of falls in the home and almost 10,000 people were off work for more than a week.

If it’s a good idea for more people to be obliged to belt up, let’s start with coroners

Belting up would be an impediment.

Alf is fast coming to the conclusion that coroners should make findings about how people died in the cases referred to them – full stop.

But please spare us the recommendations.

Authorities elsewhere can study a coroner’s report and draw their own conclusions about what lessons are to be learned from a sudden death.

But coroners – it seems – are attention-seekers.

They like to pepper their reports with advice and recommendations on how deaths could be avoided, and to give officials somewhere a kick up the arse for not having done this.

It’s sure to attract the attention of the media and their headline writers.

But some of that advice looks downright dodgy to Alf.

There’s a common factor in these accidental falls and tumbles – so let’s pass a law to be rid of it

Dunno where we think we are going with Safety New Zealand Week, but Alf would not rule out demands from some loopy do-gooders for a ban on living in houses.

A ban on cushions would be a bit less extreme, or – even less intrusive – a ban on playing with cushions.

His expectations of demands for the Government to do something follow the Dom Post’s making a silly fuss about an accident suffered by a toddler four months ago.

The three-year-old and his father were throwing cushions at each when the toddler who was standing on the couch, slipped and fell.

Surprise: tots tend to hit trouble on farm bikes

Looks like some farm parents should buck up their ideas.

Alf is perturbed to learn that children as young as two are being injured while driving all-terrain vehicles.

No, not simply sitting on them. Driving the bloody things.

Kate Anson, a former New Zealand researcher now working in Australia, has studied deaths and injuries caused by all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), which can have three or four wheels and are also known as farm bikes or quad bikes.