Bad Drivers
There are a lot of bad drivers out there. In the last week, I have had three pretty close calls. Two of them were almost indentical. Last Sunday, I was driving home from my mom's house, and I was crossing the Alex Fraser Bridge. The bridge first goes up, and then goes down. Just as I started the descent, I saw a car rapidly approaching me in my rear-view mirror. As it got extremely close to me, it switched lanes (I was in the far-left lane). As it was switching, something didn't look right, and my first thought was that this person was drunk. (That may have indeed been the case, though I'll never know.)All of the sudden, the car lost its traction, and started to spin in a clockwise direction. My eyes widened as I witnessed this car travelling at around 120-130km/h starting an extremely dangerous spin. I quickly did a simulation in my head, and my conclusion was that when this car rotated such that part of the car hit the right-side barrier, it would come back towards me with increased velocity. This didn't look good for me at all.
The car ending up spinning a full 540 degrees (that's one and half rotations) and came to a stop parallel to the right-side barrier, facing the wrong way on a bridge relatively close to the descent. For cars coming over the horizon, this would be a very unexpected sight.
I kept going, relieved to still be alive. This dumb fuck (pardon my French) could have easily killed me because of his idiotic driving. What's worse is that my girlfriend, Joanna, was following me back from my mom's. She was a little bit behind me on the bridge, so as she came over the peak of the bridge, she thought she was going to witness my death. She then had to deal with this idiot who started to drive against traffic on a bridge!
On Thursday, I was driving with Mike and Jamie. We approached a busy intersection where we would be turning left. (For those who know the area, south-bound Boundary and Kingsway.) This intersection only permits left-hand turns on a designated left-hand turn light. The advanced turn light had expired, but the person at the front of the line somehow didn't realize that he wasn't supposed to be in the intersection waiting. The north-south lights turned red, and he was stuck slightly ahead of the stop line.
There was one person in between the person in front, and us. She decided to back up ever so slightly (not actually enough to give the person in front room to reverse into a safe position). I anticipated this in advance, so I had left a fair bit of room between our car and the lady in front of me. After backing up a little bit, she still was in reverse. It was pretty clear that she did not realize she was in reverse. I backed up a little bit more to allow for a greater buffer between us.
(For those of you who think honking would have helped here, I beg to differ. Honking usually startles people, and usually their first reaction is to go forward, thinking the light has changed, and they didn't notice. There simply is no way to fully indicate exactly what you mean by the honk, which leaves a great margin of error in the interpretation.)
When the light turned green, she gunned it -- backwards... Luckily for us, her reflexes in conjunction with the great deal of room I had given her, were sufficient enough to avoid a collision. But let me tell you, it sure was close. Like within-inches-of-disaster-close. Mike nearly had a heart-attack.
The next day, the exact same thing almost happened again at a different intersection. The guy in front of me (who was at the front of the line) was a bit too far into the intersection when the light went red. He backed up a bit until he was not blocking traffic (instead he was blocking the crossing pedestrians). After he had backed up, sure enough he had left his car in reverse. I could not believe it! The exact, same thing.
I handled this situation slightly different than the day before. I got out of my car, and ran up to his. His back window was open, so I spoke into it: "Excuse, I had this exact situation yesterday -- you are still in reverse." A dog sleeping the back was slightly startled by the sudden stranger peering into its window, but before it had a chance to react, I was back in my car. Once seated, the man driving gave me a wave. Disaster averted!
I just don't get it. Why are there so many bad drivers? Actually, I do get it, and I know exactly why: many people do not pay attention. It's not too hard to be a good driver. Know and follow the rules and/or the flow of traffic, and pay attention! That's basically it! It's not rocket science, people!
