On the way to work a couple months ago I saw a bike-on-bike accident caused by a guy on a bike sailing through a red light and not seeing the other bike crossing the intersection on a green.
I don’t think anybody was seriously hurt, but I kinda wished the douchebag running the red had been.
The framing of the one at 5:25 tickled me. He’s gonna make it… he’s gonna make it… denied!
If there’s a middle turning lane, or no lane and no divider, the road is probably 45mph max. Otherwise, it’s rare to see a 4-lane 55mph highway without either a concrete divider or a grass median. I honestly can’t even think of one.
Oregon is jam packed with twisty curvy 55mph two lane roads separated by nothing but a yellow stripe.
Note to self: SUVs flip easy, do not buy.
I should have clarified. 55 mph 2-lanes are everywhere. I can’t think of a 55mph 4-lane road that doesn’t have a median, divider, or middle turning lane.
On the phone…
Seriously - look at the worst drivers on the road, the ones weaving and going 10 miles per hour under the speed limit. Chances are, they are on the phone and oblivious.
I was just about to post how awesome that one was.
Having just … ahem . . . taken a defensive driving class (I was going 86 in a 65 on an open highway with no one around and just happened to get caught by a speed trap … in Va that’s 6 points! so I was just avoiding points) . . . we covered stop lights in detail. Apparently the vast majority of traffic light accidents are drunk people, second to distracted people (makeup, cellphone, texting, etc.). I’m betting a lot of people in this video were drunk.
Not that I’m going to always follow this, but the thing they taught us about crossing intersections was to take your foot off the accelerator and cover the break while maintaing speed. Gives you a tiny bit more reaction time, I guess. Kind of a pain to do that through every single intersection, but there you go.
Of course if you are blind t-boned, there is nothing you can do, really.
Having grown up in Turkey, I don’t trust anyone to follow stop signs or traffic signals, so until I see them stop, I proceed cautiously. That kind of cautiousness has prevented me from getting t-boned twice in the past 10 years.
On the one occasion it did not, it was because I didn’t see a stop sign heavily obscured by tree foilage until I was 6 feet from the intersection in a residential neighborhood. Stopping at that point would have just put me in the middle of the intersection, and come on, what are the chances of a car coming through at that very moment?
A pickup truck smacked me in my rear quarterpanel about 2 inches from my rear bumper.
Oops.
That’s ridiculous. Might as well say to accelerate through every intersection because you get out of the intersection quicker that way. In fact, assuming you’re not going to hit the car in front of you doing it, that’s probably a better plan.
Of course if you are blind t-boned, there is nothing you can do, really.
Exactly. When I was T-boned, I didn’t see the Escalade until it was halfway through me. And then it was gone by the time I got out of the car, so there you go.
You get better traction if you need to swerve if you aren’t accelerating or braking, just letting the wheels turn, so that might have something to do with it. I agree that not everyone is always on full guard while driving (I hardly ever am), but considering the stakes while driving it isn’t unreasonable to expect people to be.