Category: reflective vest

The Russian government has changed the traffic rules. Now in the dark when leaving the car, drivers are required to wear a retro-reflective vest. It costs a penny but saves lives. Motorists need to be brighter to live longer.

Both in the city and on the highway it is equally dangerous to become invisible. In the dark and conditions of limited visibility, hundreds of people die. Helping the victims in a night accident, the actor of the series “Fizruk” died. Yegor Klinaev noticed the collided cars and stopped. The driver of a foreign car flying past crashed cars and not a caring car owner did not see.

Sultan Zhankaziyev, vice-rector of MADI, professor: “In our system of driver training, unfortunately, in connection with behavior in the event of an accident, there are no necessary points. In other countries, this moment is given a lot of attention. Everyone understands perfectly that people are dying not only as a result of an accident but also after an accident.”

According to the traffic rules, drivers should wear vests, but passengers are also at risk when they get out of the car. In Europe, a set of 5 vests should be in every car.

Irina Pegova, actress: “This is really important because I am on the tracks and often see fatal outcomes.”

The truckers suggested using a vest on the tracks as a “need help” signal.

Alexey Levchenko, the head of the truckers’ community: “We need some kind of sign that will indicate that a person needs help. And the vest was taken for the idea, to hang it on the mirror on the left side. Perfectly visible passing cars.”

After 3 months, when the norm comes into force, every driver must have a reflective vest, and not in the trunk, but inside the car, so as not to go out on a dark and dangerous road without a vest. It is necessary to wear it, but fine, if not put on, no. People themselves must take care of their safety. Vest for 200 rubles can be a salvation. The “Main Road” program encourages both drivers and pedestrians to wear retro-reflective elements.

In several places in France, there have been confrontations between the “gilets Jaunes” (yellow vests) and the police. Along the Seine in Paris, officers who were pelted with projectiles fired tear gas to keep demonstrators at bay.

That happened on a pedestrian bridge, among other things, as can be seen on images, but also at the parliament building and the d’Orsay museum. Barricades were erected and lit in a number of places. A boat restaurant also suffered. A policeman was injured on the Seine quay because a bicycle was thrown at him from above.

It was the eighth time that the yellow-jacketed movement proclaimed Saturday as a national protest day. Apart from the French capital, people took to the streets in, among others, Marseille, Bordeaux, Toulouse, and Lyon reports the newspaper Le Parisien, which also led to some disturbances.

The authorities estimate the turnout in all of France at 25,000, in Paris there were around 3500. The enthusiasm to demonstrate seems to be waning. At the first protest on November 17, nearly 300,000 people put themselves in yellow reflective vests.

Prior to the protest, the movement wrote in an open letter to President Macron that the “vests” are willing to “go much further.” Earlier this week, the figurehead of the French protest movement, Eric Drouet, was detained for a short time because of a demonstration was not allowed for.

There are already a number of reflective roads in Noord-Holland, one to be added this week. They are also trying it out in Amsterdam and Hoofddorp, and since this spring you also see them in, yes, Los Angeles. Their workers who wear reflective vests painted a special coating over the roads, making them white. It saved no less than ten degrees. Dark colors absorb light, which makes it warmer. White, on the other hand, deflect the heat. You also notice that when wearing a white or black t-shirt in the summer.

Heat in the city

Piet Zijlstra is an engineer and designs highways. He is responsible for the white roads in the Netherlands. Our summers are getting warmer because of climate change. Especially in cities, the temperatures can rise considerably because the heat is difficult to dissipate due to the buildings. An annoying side effect is that even more hazardous substances are emitted by cars.

Safe cycling

But the new roads have even more advantages. It is also much safer in the winter. Just consider: if you cycle in the dark, you are much more visible on a white road than on gray asphalt. This means that street lighting does not have to be as bright, and that also saves energy.

Less spectacular

The reflective roads in the Netherlands, at first sight, look less spectacular than in Los Angeles. That is because Zijlstra would rather not use the coating. According to him, it wears out much faster. He mixes the asphalt with very fine gravel, which is called crushed stone. When quite a few cars drive over it, it wears out and the white slowly appears.

After the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, the UN now denounces the “excessive use of force”. More than 2,100 protesters were injured in recent months.

Stigma in the image of Emmanuel Macron in the world. International condemnations have multiplied in recent weeks due to the repression of the French police against the yellow vests. After the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, this week it was the turn of the UN. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, asked on Wednesday the French authorities to initiate a “thorough investigation” on police abuses. Although the violent incidents committed by the yellow vests who wear reflective vests filled the front pages of the press in December, another reality seems to have become a norm in France: police violence against protesters, in most cases peaceful.

The Chilean president criticized, in fact, the “excessive use of force” against the members of this singular movement of indignation. During his speech at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, Bachelet referred to the situation in France at the same time he denounced the repression against demonstrators in Sudan, Zimbabwe or Haiti. A comparison that surely was to the liking of the young French president. In fact, the spokesman reacted a few hours later, being surprised by the fact of seeing France “mentioned in the same list as Venezuela and Haiti”.

However, almost four months after the start of the protests, the balance speaks for itself: 2,100 protesters and 1,400 agents of the security forces have been injured, according to the Ministry of the Interior. According to an exhaustive compilation made by the journalist David Dufresne, and published in the digital newspaper Mediapart, there have been more than 500 cases of obvious police abuses. Among them, there are 22 protesters who have lost an eye, five who have been left without a hand, 210 who suffered head injuries …

Demonstration of the strength of the French government

“Before an extraordinary social movement, the government decided to make a show of force,” he said in a statement to Público Dufresne, an expert on police violence and author of the book. “Since May 1968, we have not seen similar levels of police violence,” explains Jeremie Gauthier, professor of sociology at the University of Strasbourg and an expert on policy issues, especially the systematic use of tear gas and bullets. gum and habitual of the GLI F4 dispersion grenades, basically composed of TNT (dynamite) and considered a “weapon of war”, according to the French internal security code.

In addition, “two-thirds of the police deployed to contain the manifestations of the yellow vests were not trained in the maintenance of order,” laments Dufresne. In the tensest weeks of December, nearly 90,000 agents were deployed. What contributed to the presence of police bodies little used in this type of tasks. Since then, “Macron has maintained a martial discourse that does not encourage riot police to remain calm,” explains the journalist.

In addition to the physical injuries, some of them irreparable, the protesters “also receive insults, force them to take off their yellow vests, prevent them from taking photographs or being attacked by street medics (volunteers who take care of wounded protesters),” adds Dufresne. Recently, boosted social networks in France the case of a marriage of elderly people in Toulouse who were beaten and plated to the ground during a protest, although not even involved in the demonstration. Or that of a deputy of France Insumisa (populists of the left), Loïc Prudhomme, who was beaten with a club during the protests on 2 March in Bordeaux.

According to Dufresne, the abuses of the security forces against the yellow vests reflect the crystallization of a “change of doctrine” in the maintenance of order in France: “After the Second World War, one of the principles of the security forces did not go to the contact of the masses. But this changed in the mid-2000s, when Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior, asked the anti-riot corps to dedicate themselves to guarantee security in the banlieues. ” These practices, common since then in the popular neighborhoods with high percentages of the population of foreign origin, “are now reproduced at the national level”, with riot officers who often go to the contact of the demonstrators.