Does youe car run? Then why are you parked on the expressway?

The BBQ Pit
1

Is it just Chicago? because I have never ssen this anywhere else but this is the 2nd time I’ve been pissed off by this action here in Chitown.

Traffic this morning was actually less dense than usual but, just as I’m getting to a place where trafiic clears out a bit and everyone picks up speed, we all come to a stop because someone makes an unwise lane change. Except two cars don’t stop fast enough and there’s a little fenderbender in the far left lane of a three lane highway, speed limit 55. They all then get out of the cars and start discussing the whole thing. I’m about 4 cars back from the accident. There is no way for me to get around them because traffic in the next lane is going 55mph now. 5 minutes goes by, during which I watch for an unlikely gap in the traffic zooming by on my right, hoping that when further accidents happen I’ll somehow not be involved. The car directly in front of me picks a spot in front of a tractor trailor and goes for it. The truck has to slam on his breaks and white smoke comes off his wheels as he avoids collision, everyone in that lane then is slowed down to about 10 mph, I pull into the slow moving traffic and go on my way. The idiots who are stopping traffic seem to be chatting away about triviality, smiles on their faces and not a pencil or other notes taking device in sight.

GET OUT OF THE ROAD!! I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that further accidents occurred before these guys got back in their cars and drove away. What were they doing? Waiting for the police? I hope the police showed up and gave them all tickets for obstructing traffic. What the fuck were they thinking? Isn’t it standard procedure to pull off the road to deal with these problems? There was no shoulder to pull of on on that side of the highway, but they could have accellerated and gotten over to the left further down, or at least pull over closer to the median. I think they could have gotten over far enough that cars could have gone past them. Afrai the guy who hit you is going to leave without giving you his insurance info? Then get the liscense plate, but don’t sit there parked in the middle of the highway!

2

Heck, as I’ve been traveling around, I’ve been seeing this sign more and more frequently on the interstate (espically near metro areas):

MOVE DAMAGED CAR TO SHOULDER IF NO SERIOUS INJURY

(Or words to that effect.)

And I’ve seen the ‘not moving the cars over’ bit in one form or another in every place I’ve lived in. From Hawai’i to South Carolina, and heavens know how many other places inbetween.
(Mmm. For the Pit, I have a lack of gratuitous colorful metaphors in this post. insert words here <-- I’m sure the people here can come up with more creative swearing than I can at the moment, so I’ll let your imagination come up with them.)

<< I don’t do perky. >>

3

… and why do we express ourselves on the parkway?

makes ya think, don’t it?

yrs trly,
Gallagher

4

I had the opposite experience on my last accident.

It was a nothing fender-bender. Broke a headlamp. I was stopping and hit a patch of oil and skidded into the tow-hitch of the junker pickup truck in front of me.

He had no damage, at all, so I told him to just go, that I would contact my own insurance company. I pulled off the road and picked up the major pieces of glass, to protect the next cars. Then I pulled into a gas station literally 50 feet from the site and asked him to see if he could fix my headlight so I could continue on.

Then twenty minutes later a cop arrives and reads me the riot act for “leaving the scene of an accident”. Says he can’t decide if he should put me in jail for hit and run, removing “evidence”, and “avoiding a police officer”!
But I was still right there at the scene!

As I was describing how it happened, and he was debating my “version”, someone else skidded on the same patch of oil, and ran off the road. At that point he just left, and never returned. I waited for an hour, lest he say I had “escaped”, but he never returned.

5

I had a woman freak out because I moved my car into my friend’s driveway across the street after she hit me. In Texas you have to move your vehicle from the road if it is a non-injury accident and the vehicle is capable of moving.