@same
Just don’t participate and it’s put to bed for you, immediately. ;=)
I actually haven’t weighed in on that yet.
I do believe the majority of collisions are not accidental. They almost always involve a driver ignoring a factor that might have been alleviated or mitigated, and could have prevented the collision. Yes, there are freak accidental collisions that couldn’t be prevented, but those are pretty rare.
The problem is that we’re people, and we engage is a fair degree of cognitive dissonance. We aren’t likely to admit we were driving fast because we were running late, or that we should have been more careful driving on a wet road, or that we were driving aggressively because we were angry. Many people rear-end someone because we were tailgating, and we attempt to blame the victim by saying he or she “stopped short.”
The guy who wrecked his car on ice experienced a direct result of his choice not to buy winter tires. If he had winter tires, he might have been driving too fast for the conditions. If he was driving carefully on winter tires, perhaps he looked away from the road for a split second. Only in very rare circumstances do people do everything right and still end up in a collision.
The guy who had to lay down his motorcycle “to avoid an collision” was in a collision (with the ground), and riding more carefully might have prevented the collision, especially if the roads are wet and it is dark out. The guy with stylish tiny lights on his motorcycle dressed in all black hasn’t done everything he can do to make himself visible at night. If he gets hit by a car at night, it’s probably someone else’s fault, but to suggest there is nothing he could have done to prevent the collision isn’t necessarily true, is it?
Now, I don’t intend to blame victims here. Yes, there are people who get t-boned when someone else runs a red light. There are people who die when a semi hauling timber dumps its timber in the middle of the interstate. A piece of rebar can pin you to your car seat before you even know it’s there. However, I seriously doubt those freak accidents happen with enough frequency to worry people like me, because the vast majority of automotive collisions are completely preventable, even when another driver is at fault.
Whitey, I’ve never like driving around logging trucks but that reminded me of the time about 1979, we were driving back from South Dakota on a two lane highway. As the on coming semi loaded with hay bales came around the bend, his load was breaking loose. In about a quarter mile he dumped his whole load jack knifing the semi in front of us and causing a total brown out. All you could do was brake and hope you stopped in time and the guy in back of us also stopped in time. When the dust settled everyone was ok and the patrol tagged the driver for not securing his load. Guy behind him said his load had been coming loose over the past ten miles. I still won’t drive anywhere around trucks or wagons loaded with hay bales.
Back on topic…
I learned my lesson …the hard way…back in about 1974, and can now tell you what I SHOULD have done. ( hindsight is 20/20 )
Playing every weekend in country/rock bands has taken me all over the four corners and a ‘‘local’’ gig can be 140 miles one way. We played in Tuba City Arizona one wintery night and after the gig the weather made us decide to spend the night before returning to Gallup NM.
– In the late am hours of Sunday, five band members in two vehicles hit the road. All the amps and gear are in my 1968 Dodge van with me and the guitar player. The others follow in a car ( one of whom is a girl who takes a little longer to get ready to leave.) about 15 minutes behind.
The plows have been out, you can see one side of the road plowed. But out here the plows have a long way to go before returning plowing the other side.
– Today, the easterly direction we need to go is not plowed yet, so we travel east bound in the west bound lane easing over on to the snowy icy side to allow west bound vehicles to pass by.
This is working great as there’s not a lot of traffic out here (AZ,hwy 264 ).
Aproaching us next is a fuel tanker semi truck ( up hill for him , down hill for me ) so I ease over onto the snowbound lane as usual and just coast to await my turn back on the pavement side.
– As the semi passes by me , it has its natural wash of wind that semis make…that I had not counted on…and as that wake washes over the van it pushes me askew and I begin a slide on the snowy lane. Correcting with steering to the right , the van comes back towards straight…BUT IT GOES TOO FAR IN THE OTHER DIRECTION ! now I spin the wheel around to the left and it comes back again towards straight…BUT AGAIN GOES TOO FAR and ( youall have probably guessed by now ) begins a death wobble skidding from left to right with each of my corrections causing too much reaction.
– soon I’ve got the van spun completely around facing west sliding in the snowy lane and scooting towards the ditch.
– it slides into the ditch.
the ditch stops the tires from sliding and the momentum takes the van over onto its driver’s side…kerplop ! Paul lets loose his belt and comes down onto me ( patiently awaiting him to stand up and open the pasenger door to climb out )
" Ken , are alive ? “
” Yes just waiting for you to climb out so I can too. "
And now you get the picture ; a 68 Dodge van on its side in the ditch loaded with band equipment with two feezing guys standing at the side of the road awaing the next passer-by for assistance ( which should be our band mates )
– Sure enough, the next car is them and it zooms by in the plowed lane…zooms by…bye-bye type by !
" hey look, an accident" Jr says.
" WAIT, THAT"S KEN AND PAUL" Theresa yells and we can see the brake lights waaay down the hill …finally.
– Hard learned lessons about ;
- Semi truck wake,
- Skid correction and when to beging the recovery turn. ( BEFORE the vehicle comes back around to straight so it might stay straight )
- The need to slow waaay down on the clear lane prior to getting on the snowy lane.
- And to have realized to simply wait untill later in the day to begin our trip for roads to clear.
@the same mountainbike
No I wouldn’t say the kids made a choice, the school did. And yes Doctors, Nurses, Police, Plow drivers, all made a choice when they decided to go to work, do you ”applaud” them when they wreck, get injured or worst die, because they didn’t have the skill to drive in the conditions or when they injure or kill someone else? In my state they will pull plow trucks and police off the road if the state feels they are in danger. Yes driving home from work is a choice, and yes I’ve tried to find a motel room during a storm, some advice start looking early or be prepared to sleep in the lobby. If you’re at work and can’t afford a motel room even more of a reason to stay at work.
I’m on medication; I carry a week’s worth of medication with me, because you never know what’s going to happen. After the first time you get stuck someplace without it you learn to keep some with you. When you say disabled dependents at home, I’m also have to assume you have no neighbors, or friends close by who can look in on said person, you don’t have anyone watching said person, in which case you choose to leave work because someone else is in danger, notice in one of my other posts I stated that if I was the only person who could save someone else I would risk it, that would be a case to risk it, but it’s still a choice. After all if you crash, get injured or worst die, who’s going to look out for that person?
No if you fell off a cliff you didn’t choose to fall, nor did you make a choice to be deployed, but in the first case how did you get close enough to fall? In the second you knew there would be a chance that you’d be deployed when you join, with the exception of a draft. Cliffs don’t follow people around, and you would know there was a possibility of being deployed when you joined.
“you need to give people more credit than you do. “
All accidents are a chain of events, if you break one link in the chain there would be no accident. I read there was a lady who left work to pick her son up from school, got stuck, and walked an hour and a half to safety. Now the article didn’t say why she was stuck, but she was safe at work her child was safe at school, she decided to leave work and pick her son up, she got stuck and walked an hour and a half with her child. She was very lucky, but how many stories were there like that, 6 hours in a car, 12 hours in a car, thousands of abandoned cars. You can’t tell me that all those people needs meds, or had a disabled person needing their attention.
BTW someone voted to say I was a troll, really? A troll, I won’t spend this much time on this if I was a troll, I’m stating my opinion, nothing more nothing less. If I was a troll I’d just make an outrageous statement and let the fun begin.
I’m kinda losing track of what this was all about and where it was coming from. In Atlanta I remember seeing the stopped school bus on an ice covered road, with the driver outside the bus petrified to drive the bus any further. It just made me think that a lot of these buses are driven by retired folks, young mothers, and not professional drivers. They can’t go places any better than anyone else in bad weather and we shouldn’t put them in that situation.
Like I said though, I have a little higher expectation of public officials to make reasonable decisions and communicate and coordinate with each other. In Minnesota, we close the roads and each school system decides whether to close school early or not based on among other things what the bus companies say. If it isn’t safe for the buses to run, they don’t run. If the roads are blocked, the roads are closed. I can’t remember ever a school that had to house the kids overnight and if they did they would certainly have provisions to feed them and not just let them go hungry.
Yes, it maybe doesn’t happen that often, but you train and practice and evaluate emergency responses anyway in preparation. Floods and tornadoes and mass casualties don’t happen that often either, but there is not a county in Minnesota that has not prepared for a 300 passenger plane coming down in their area and how to coordinate and respond to it. Thats what all hazards training is all about. Having a couple thousand cars stalled for up to a day and kids trapped on school buses or at schools without provisions is just not acceptable from the public leadership.