A CHP officer in San Diego explained to me that he considered the after midnight hours on the long stretches of almost deserted freeways outside of the city as the most dangerous. An impaired driver manages to ignore the signs and gets onto the freeway by going up an off-ramp (in California the on ramp and off ramp of a freeway can be next to each other). The wrong way driver recognizes that something is wrong (for example, the reflective dots between lanes reflect red traveling the wrong way) and instinctively moves into the “slow” lane. Unfortunately, this is, of course, the fast lane, the one you’re likely to be traveling in if you’re the only car on the road.
It’s a formula for a high speed head-on. His advice: If you have to travel those roads during those hours, avoid the fast lane and slow down a bit.
Never knew that. Interesting.
Me neither. Why isn’t it on the DMV test? This is clearly something that should be known by every driver?
I was southbound at night on a rural Virginia four-lane highway back in the seventies (for those familiar: Rt.29 in Madison County) when a northbound car passed me in my passing lane. I don’t know if it was a confused person or kids playing chicken but it scared the living shit out of me.
But when it happened three more times, you started to wonder.
As pkbites noted, wrong-way drivers tend to be people who are suffering from some manner of cognitive impairment: they’re drunk or high, they’re elderly and suffering from cognitive issues, or they’re diabetic, and suffering from a blood sugar issue (typically hypoglycemia) that’s causing confusion.
In such cases, it seems like they aren’t able to process that “cars are coming the wrong way” means that “I must be the one on that’s on the wrong side of the road.”
Back in those days I had a low opinion of rural Virginia drivers in general. There’s a very good chance that the driver had simply made a dumb mistake. That highway was in dark countryside with very little traffic (at the time).
I finally got the joke, though.