I saw one once, and I think I may have been at least a factor in it.
I was getting onto I-290 in Worcester, MA (from Belmont Street) and I was moving pretty good down the onramp. I noticed an older lady who was cruising in the right lane, and I realized that if I didn’t slow down, we were going to collide. So I slowed. Then she slowed. I slowed more. She slowed more. (wtf?) Well, she slowed too much and an 18-wheeler, obviously travelling too close, rear-ended her. It wasn’t a bad accident (some plastic pieces went flying off her car from what I can tell). Since there was no safe place for me to stop (those who are familiar with this onramp can attest), I kept going.
But this is the only accident I actually ever saw happen. What about you?
I was driving to my dad’s house, on a four-lane road through town, businesses on both sides. I have to make a left at the intersection, so I’m in the left lane. Speed limit is about 50.
I’m cruising along, and I glance in my rear view mirror and there is a truck coming up behind me in the right lane WAY too fast. And I mean, WAAAAAY too fast, like 90-100 mph. I instinctively start to slow down when he SLAMS into the car next to me, driving them into the shoulder, swerves in front of me, crosses the two lanes going the other way, and ends up crashing into a telephone pole in front of a little row of businesses.
By the time I got through on 911, they were already aware of the accident and had dispatched ambulances.
One in Atlanta where I lived for 16 years, and since moving 4 more (counting the one I was in). I have lived here for 3.
The Atlanta crash was a left hand turner failed to yield right of way to oncoming traffic. It was bad, but no one was hurt.
Since moving here, once at a stop light a car in front of me change the lane so that she could go left, and was stuck on the side by a car driving up to the light in the left turn lane.
While turning left about 100 yards from my house one of my neighbors struck me on the left front fender. He was turning right and I had the right of way. I did not fix the dent and pocketed 2000$ from his insurance.
After a bad snowstorm in 2006 we were driving to the airport, we were going about 45 in the far right lane, and an SUV going substantially faster came up behind us and moved to the left to pass us, he lost control and hit the separating wall. He never had a chance to slow down.
Most recently for some reason the car that was next to me while we were at a stop light accelerated before the car in from and rear ended him. It was odd.
I used to think Atlanta drivers were bad. At least they are paying attention. People around here don’t pay attention.
A few fender benders, except for one, and that one reminded me of the scene in Dead Zone – where the truck is looming up at Christopher Walken in his little VW bug – remember that?
I was driving to work with a co-worker, in winter, slick roads, and a big Pepsi truck ahead of us swerved to avoid an oncoming car. The truck tipped right over and it looked like it was skidding toward us. Nobody was hurt, but it was scary for a minute.
My wife and I have witnessed many accidents while together in the car, starting on our first date (collision a few cars back while on our way to Santa Cruz to watch the sun set).
One memorable one was an apparently-stolen car ran a red light at a major intersection at high speed, t-boning one car and causing a chain reaction eventually involving three more cars. We were first in line in the left-turn lane as the car came from our right to our left.
The two occupants of the stolen car tried to drive away but the car was totaled. They then jumped out and ran on foot.
The most recent was a rear-end hit just in front of us, but in the next lane over, while on our way to Santa Cruz for day-spa massages for our anniversary. We avoided getting hit, and if we were any farther behind we woudn’t have made it on time because it ended up blocking Highway 17.
My boyfriend at the time was driving, and we were in the left lane of a four lane highway. We came up pretty fast on a car in front of us who obviously wasn’t getting over for us. So boyfriend got over into the second lane from the left to pass. We had just passed the car when suddenly a car in the next lane over decided to change lanes…and headed right for us, without looking in his blind spot, which we were now in. There wasn’t enough room for us to get over without possibly causing an accident with the car we had just passed. I screamed. To this day I am convinced the guy heard me because suddenly he looked over and saw us. He swerved away, then overcorrected, and my boyfriend FLOORED IT to get out of the guy’s way as he swerved a couple more times and then completely lost control of his car and T-boned the center divide, narrowly missing the car we had passed. I have no idea if the guy survived. We just kept going.
I was following my dad home back to my parent’s house on a winter afternoon when there was still ice on the roads. Dad was driving his work truck, a van loaded with tools and equipment, when he lost control and rolled over onto the passenger’s side in the middle of the road. He got lucky that the van didn’t roll onto the driver’s side since there wasn’t a screen between the driver and the tool compartment. Flying tools filled the passenger side. There was more damage to the interior of the truck and the equipment inside from all of it being thrown around then to the outside of the truck.
Watching from my car as he flipped I felt sick and couldn’t believe what I was seeing was real. As I ran to his van after slamming on the brakes, he pushed open his door and managed to climb out on his own, unharmed.
When I was a kid, I saw a police car get rear-ended in front of our house. He was making a u-turn through an opening in the concrete median when a guy clobbered him without slowing down…probably about 40-45 mph. The squad car almost rolled into the River des Peres, but stopped on the service road, with the officer lying in the grass between the street he had been on and the service road. The car door had sprung open and he was ejected. Door latches are a lot better now; this was in 1967. We ran inside and Mom called the police department and the ambulance.
Not a car accident, but I saw a german shepherd get run over by a semi on Chippewa in St. Louis one day. One moment, a dog running across the street, the next moment just a bloody smear.
I saw a Chevy Vega get hit by a semi on I-70 in north St. Louis in about 1979. They have those tall concrete barriers at that location. I was heading out of downtown, when this inbound truck went wide on a curve and smashed the Vega into the barrier. The last thing I saw was the truck flying into the air.
I’ve seen some minor accidents that I was in. Probably the best was the one that totalled my F-100. I was on the way to work and a drunk in a Chevy Silverado ran a red light and broadsided me at about 50 mph. I just saw a flash of movement on my right, then powie, and suddenly I was about 4 lanes left of where I’d been. There was a dent in the cab of my truck where my head hit it; luckily I was wearing my seat/shoulder belt and that was it…on the inside. But the entire right side of the truck was crushed, some of the welds on the cab were torn open, the rear end had been torn from the springs and the drive train had thrust forward into the radiator. I hadn’t seen the right side when I got out and saw the leaking coolant - damn, my radiator. Then a walkaround revealed more - damn, my truck. And it was friggin’ cold and windy waiting for the police to come.
I saw a multi-car wreck two summers ago. We stopped to help, no one was seriously injured, but the one gal whose fault it was was in serious distress. She had just learned, via cell phone, that her sister had been murdered.
The moral of THAT story is, NEVER EVER EVER EVER EVER give someone bad information via cell phone while they are driving a car.
Riding shotgun in my dad’s car when I was a kid. We were making a left turn. I very clearly remember seeing a car bearing down on us and thinking something along the lines of “uh-oh”. (The car hit the front passenger-side door - exactly where I was sitting - at about 50 MPH. Dad and I both walked away. Wear your seatbelts, guys.)
In high school, my first time ever driving in the rain at night. “Hey, that car behind me isn’t going to stop in time.” thud
Three separate accidents, all at this insane mess of an intersection (Red Lion Rd. and the Boulevard, for Philly dopers).
Just back in March, on the road to the Albuquerque airport. Another accident had shut down the northbound lanes, and some fool in the left southbound lane was so busy rubbernecking (and/or being drunk) he drove himself straight off the road at about thirty miles an hour.
A few years ago, I was driving to work on the highway. It was a beautiful, crisp, clear, dry summer morning. Traffic was extremely light, moving at around 75 or so.
Suddenly, way in the distance, I see a car coming from the other direction turn sideways. It slides down the highway, basically perpendicular to the lane, with huge clouds of billowing white tire smoke rising behind it. It looked like a NASCAR crash, really. After sliding for what seemed like an eternity, it hit the guardrail, bounced back into the lanes, hit the other guard rail, then finally stopped skidding and rolled slowly backwards off the road, onto the shoulder.
I passed the car during the guardrail ping-pong. It was an older Honda Accord filled with five stunned teenage girls.
It didn’t seem likely that they were hurt, so I just kept going. I could never figure out what caused the driver to lose control on a straight road on a crystal clear day, with nothing in the road, and no other traffic. Something must have broken in the steering, I guess.
I was driving in France a couple of years ago, on the autoroute, and saw a camper van that had rear-ended a queue of traffic in the middle lane in the opposite direction. It wasn’t badly damaged, and the occupants were just standing around in the middle of the road scratching their heads and shrugging Gallicly etc. Just as I was passing it, this big truck approached and I saw the camper van owner frantically waving at it to slow down… to no avail, as in my rear view mirror I saw it crash straight into the back of the van, crushing it. :smack:
Oh, and more painful from a personal point of view was the time when I parked up outside my local train station, went inside to buy a ticket, and watched out of the station window as an elderly driver reversed back… and back… and accelerated straight into my driver’s-side door. You see, when he’d parked five minutes beforehand, there were no cars behind him, so apparently he assumed there would still be nothing there… :dubious:
A couple were minor. I was by the inner harbor in Baltimore when a car slammed into the car next to me for no apparent reason. We were stopped for at least half a minute, so I don’t know what the guy’s problem was.
On the Baltimore beltway, everything came to a standstill because of bad rain. Some guy came barreling down the road at a speed way too fast for conditions, and predictably skidded a rather long distance and slammed into the back of a station wagon.
I watched a guy drive off the lot in a brand new car only to get rear-ended less than 50 feet from the lot.
A couple were more serious.
I was driving into work on day in downtown Baltimore and a pickup truck apparently thought he could make the light. He didn’t. Instead, he hit a little white car (something like a Nissan Sentra). I thought wrecks like this only happened in Hollywood, but he went up partially over the hood and went airborne. The truck flipped over in mid-air, dumping the tool box from its bed all over the street. At this point everything was in slow motion as I realized an airborne truck was heading directly towards me, and I had a car in front of me and a car behind me and couldn’t move out of the way. The truck did a 360 in the air plus another 90 degrees and slammed down on the passenger’s side, then came skidding to a halt about 3 feet from my door. There were three guys in the truck who were all screaming, and everyone just kinda froze. I got out of my car and climbed onto the truck and pulled the door open, then helped pull the guys out of the truck. The guy who had been sitting in the passenger’s seat was cut up all over his arm, but otherwise everyone was ok. After speaking to the police about what happened, I went into work and just vegged for a while.
I was driving into Baltimore on I-70 when I saw a car ahead of me suddenly take a left hand turn right off the highway. The car went into the median and began flipping end over end. As it went, it slowly rotated and instead of flipping end over end began just rolling to the side. I was certain I just watched someone kill themselves. I stopped (along with a bunch of other people) and miraculously, two women came out of the car, both very much alive. The one who had been sleeping in the back seat had a broken nose. The driver was unhurt. Apparently she fell asleep at the wheel and woke up when her car drifted over to the right and hit the wheels of a truck. She snapped awake and jerked the wheel in the other direction, which sent her flying off the road. She was lucky to be alive, IMHO.
My husband and I witnessed a fatal car wreck about 10 years ago, just outside of Decatur, AL. A smallish car pulled right out in front of a big truck that was moving fast. The truck smashed directly into the driver’s door. A few days later when my husband went to the police station to give a statement, they told him the driver had been killed.
A few (not counting ones I have been involved in).
I saw some dude lose control and take out one of those massive green highway signs on I-95 just north of Providence, RI.
Coming back from Kilington during a storm (had a paper due, otherwise I would have just stayed up there and skiied) some jackass thought he should drive through the ice storm at 70mph. About a quarter of a mile ahead he lost it and drove into the ditch between the highways.
Neither accident was fatal or involved a rollover or anything.
On my last trip from Boston area to NC, 8 years ago, on I-84 in Hartford I saw a semi sidewswipe and roll over the front end of a car, then on the Cross Bronx Xway traffic was tied up more than usual and I just missed seeing a rearender in the right lane but there was a sheet hanging over the drivers side door trying to hide a deceased guy leaning on the passenger side of the front seat. Then, half way down the NJTPKE I was in the 2nd lane from the median and a box-on-cab van was in the same lane two vehicles in front of me. He started to merge to the right lane and merged into the side of a flatbed trailer. All at 60 mph bumper to bumper of course. He caromed off and teetered and tottered and careered and swerved then tipped over on his right side and slid several hundred feet to a stop in the lane to the left of me. I made sure that no one was hurt (the driver was walking around in his cab on the right side door and window) and I went on my way. Oh and in Nice France I saw a car run down a pedestrian crossing the main drag in a well-marked crosswalk. The *Nice Matin * paper the next day advised that the ped was dead. That was in 1965.
I’ve seen a few, but the scariest one was an accident I didn’t see.
I was on a railway station platform, at the end of which the tracks ran over a bridge across the main road. There was a big concrete wall blocking my view of the road. Below that was a small laneway runnig parallel to the railway and it came out onto the road.
So I hear a car driving fast. I mean fast. Some young idiot coming down the main road. High? Drunk? Dunno, but by yhe engine note and the gear changes, it sounded like he was doing about 55MPH (the street is a suburban shopping strip and is driven at about 25MPH). I didn’t even hear a screech of brakes (that was the scary part). Just pure acceleration and then the worst car accident BANG I’ve ever heard. Some poor innocent had come out of the little laneway just when this idiot speeder came through. After the bang, there was silence for a second, and then car alarms going off, and shocked, ashen faces appearing in upper storey windows. I actually wish I’d seen it, because I coud get a handle on it better. But I didn’t and it made it much worse.
I’ve seen a bunch, not counting a few I’ve been in. An incomplete list:
A drunk guy in a late 70’s Chevy Nova, trying to pass me on the right late one night near Ligonier, PA, losing control when he dropped a wheel onto the shoulder, and ending up bouncing the car off the guardrail and several trees and getting himself thrown out the driver’s side window, all without apparent injury.
An old codger in a Plymouth Valiant, who I was behind on a street in Johnstown, PA. Despite being on a perfectly straight road and going at least 10 under the speed limit (25 MPH), he, for no apparent reason, veered off the road, clipped a telephone pole (sending splinters flying every which way) and kept going as though nothing unusual had happened.
A very hard rear-end accident at a rural intersection (I saw the heads of the driver and passenger of the following car break through its windshield) while driving around on Labor Day somewhere outside of Pueblo, CO.
A Burlington Northern freight train hitting a fuel truck (at low speed) while negotiating the trackage though Denver Union Station. The truck driver backed across the track right in front of the train, apparently not seeing it approaching from the side opposite his cab.
A guy driving a quad alongside a road in suburban Houston, who hit a hidden curb and went flying over the handlebars while the vehicle tumbled behind him.
A collision between a Paris taxi and a guy on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, with the biker coming off rather the worse for it.
Another guy in Paris, in a Ford Escort, apparently having a brain fart and making a sharp right-hand turn directly into the side of the bus that was alongside him (and that I was riding in at the time).
Yet another guy in Paris (actually in the suburb of Le Blanc Mesnil) who hit a car at an intersection, hard enough to spin it around, but just kept on going.
Back in Houston again, a drunk guy sideswiping the concrete barrier on I-45 North around Tidwell, emitting a rather pretty trail of sparks as I followed behind him.
Yet another Houston drunk slowly drifting his Civic off the right side of Sawdust Road, going down into the ditch, up the the other side, and landing in a Whataburger parking lot.
I really don’t know why anyone even gets into a motorized vehicle; those things are frickin’ dangerous.
I was standing at the side of a fairly busy road one day, in Vancouver, BC (Broadway at Hemlock, I think, for anyone who knows the city), waiting for the light to change so I could cross. A jeep with two guys in it came flying down Broadway, towards the now-changing green light, and pulled a surprise left turn onto Hemlock just as the light turned to yellow. No slowing down, no signaling, nothing - and he was definitely speeding.
Anyways, the jeep turned just as a small car (like a Golf or something) was gunning it through the yellow light in the other direction. The jeep slammed into the Golfs driver side, plowing it clear across the intersection and into the side street, probably about 50-70 feet. The noise was incredible, and while the two guys got out of the jeep, the driver of the Golf never got out while I was there. The cops showed up right away and the Jeep driver started yelling that the other car had run the light and caused the accident. I went over to another cop and told them that wasn’t how it happened - another pedestrian did too. I gave a statement but never heard what happened.
What really got me was how everyone else on the road just kept on, like nothing ever happened. They just swerved a little around all the carnage on the street and kept going. I mean, I know there not going to stop everything, but most people didn’t even seem to care.