According to the article, people were likely saved because the driver was stopped by hitting a telephone pole.
Things are just getting way too crazy anymore.
Once upon a time, my friend’s uncle, who was not familiar with the city, turned the wrong way onto a narrow one-way street in Boston. As he nervously inched along, what did he encounter but a cop car coming down the street. The policeman bade him roll down his window, and loudly admonished him, “Drive on the sidewalk, ya moron!”
I’m always amazed at when people drive the wrong way but decide to just keep going. There was an incident a decade ago around here where somebody went the wrong way down the freeway in major traffic but decided to continue and play car frogger until slamming into an incoming vehicle head-on and dying.
I’m not sure what driving the wrong way had to do with anything if these were sheriff recruits on a run. I’m also not sure how a telephone pole should enter into it, seeing as the object of driving down a road, wrong way or not, is to avoid the telephone poles (not unlike the pedestrians in that respect).
I think the reason the lamp post was important is because that is the only thing that stopped the car.
Driving the wrong way could demonstrate confusion, but I would think that even if someone really is confused about which way they should be driving, they probably should understand that driving through a crowd of people is not the best idea in the world.
According to news reports, the driver was originally going the right way down the road but suddenly swerved into the opposite lanes, and through the crowd of people. It does not appear to be a medical emergency; authorities administered a sobriety test at the scene that came back negative and did not report noticing any other impairment. There is no suggestion so far that it was intentional, which had been among my first thoughts. Perhaps some sort of catastrophic failure of attention – a bee in the car, an attempt to retrieve a dropped burrito.