First off, I acknowledge that alert, defensive driving can cause one to avoid the vast majority of driving accidents. However, I have long felt that there are at least some potential accidents, which the average driver avoids simply because of luck. Or conversely, they fail to avoid due to bad luck.
I’m thinking about driving on a crowded urban expressway, and the guy in front of you just slams on his brakes. You can’t keep an adequate interval because if you drop back, someone fills the space. Or you are driving in a neighborhood and a kid runs out between parked cars.
Every once in a while something will happen - maybe a car comes out of a driveway abruptly as I pass or a vehicle ahead will kick something up, and as I narrowly avoid it I’ll think, “Boy, good thing I wasn’t passing there a 1/2 second earlier/later…” :smack:
Not to mention the number of times a decent driver might be distracted, or just zoning out, expecting traffic to behave as it normally does.
My wife OTOH, disagrees.
Neither of us has been in an accident for a long time.
I’ve been driving for 43 years. I do about 15,000 miles a year, including some of the worst snow/ice conditions many people will never see. I’ve never been involved in an accident regardless of fault.
There is some luck involved, as I’ve never been rear ended say at a traffic light. But for the most part, luck has very little to do with it.
Back when I had a car, I was driving home from work, going north on Lake Shore Drive.
Usually I drove in the the left lanes, to avoid the usual bottleneck at the Belmont exit, which during summer is many times choked with Cub Fans headed for Wrigley.
Well one day, I had something in my mind and was driving along in the right lane, which meant I was slowing down into the bottleneck, but I didn’t notice for a few moments.
Just as I snapped out of my mental ruminating to realize, “Hey wait, I’m in the wrong lane…”, cars started slamming into each other across the three lanes that I would normally have been driving in. The cars in my lane were untouched.
I drove past the pileup and kept going, switching into the now empty left lanes, thinking something along the lines of, “Whoa. That was spooky.”
I told my mom this story, and she insisted that it proved Jehovah’s existence and protection.
Once in 2017 and once in 2018, in parking lots, a vehicle going into reverse struck my car while the car was stationary with me sitting in it. Both times, the vehicle going in reverse started off multiple car lengths away and both times, the at-fault driver never heard me leaning on the horn to warn them.
Most of the “accidents” I have been involved in were the result of stupidity (only once was it my stupidity. Hey I was 17! Of course I was stupid.) such as not paying attention (including texting and driving) or drunk driving, which is it’s own brand of stupidity.
My near misses, however, were all luck. Like seeing a large pickup truck go screaming through a red light not ten car lengths in front of me. If I were ten seconds faster I’d have been tee boned. Was he drunk? I’ll never know.
In both of my car accidents and two of my motorcycle crashes I will call it luck/fate/bad juju.
Car – sitting at a stop sign waiting to merge when I was struck from behind
Car - blind-sided from the rear quarter by car speeding from a gas station
Bike - drunk car driver turning the wrong way onto a one way street
Bike - drunk car driver looking to kill the next person he saw on a motorcycle (semi-long story)
None were avoidable in the sense that no level of defensive driving could have provided an escape. And with all four the matter of a couple seconds would have meant no accident. On my side of the equation they were accidents; from the other drivers view more a case of god-was-I-an-idiot.
You are not the average driver. Much of your driving is done in low-traffic conditions, where you yourself are the main variable.
One memorable day, I was merging onto the freeway. I checked over my shoulder to see if I had a clear spot. I looked back straight to see that just at that precise moment, there was now a major slow-down right in front of me.
I laid down rubber coming to a stop–and even so, I very nearly rear-ended the car in front of me.
Think about that–from normal traffic conditions to needing to stop – and all in the amount of time that was required to check my blind spot.
Another thing I have seen occasionally is three lanes of traffic in each direction; the middle lane is temporarily clear, with cars in the outer lanes basically even with each other. Every once in a while, both cars in the outer lanes will try to change lanes at the same time. If neither one is paying attention, there will be a collision. On the other hand, MOST of the time you can switch to the inner lane and nothing will happen.
The whole purpose of defensive driving is to compensate for the times when luck by itself is not sufficient. But that’s really only a stop-gap measure; a quite effective one to be sure, but still only stop-gap. The only SURE way of not being in a traffic accident is to not be part of traffic.
I came to a 4-way crossroads. The side I was on had a stop sign. I stopped, no other vehicles around. I started to make a left turn and I caught in my peripheral vision a flash of a moving vehicle coming from my right. I sped up and went straight across the road. I don’t know what made me accelerate instead of slamming on my brakes or what made me not continue to turn. Either choice would have meant a big crash and possibly my death. The other vehicle was a fully loaded long log truck, the driver was speeding. It would have been bad. It was sheer luck I hit the gas and he missed me.
I have had plenty of near misses. Mostly due to wildlife vs me. I have a few not misses. One really bad. With wildlife it’s just luck that keeps you safe. You cannot drive defensively against them.
You were lucky that you were the only person Jehovah cared about in that situation. I guess he was just laughing his ass off at all those other cars slamming into each other.
:shrug: Yes I am mountain rural now. But I see plenty of knuckle heads. This is ski country, with ski towns crowded with people in rental cars that don’t know how to drive in snow or know where the hell they are going.
I also spend 2 weekends a month in Denver. I see traffic.
In a few cases I am quite ashamed of, I avoided accidents due to the luck of another driver paying attention. For whatever reason, I made some stupid move, such as not adequately checking a blind spot, and it was only the defensive actions of another driver that prevented an accident. If two of us had been idiots that day, there would have been an accident. Fortunately these are few and far between, and I try to learn from them.
Another instance that was luck in a way was on a very slick and icy road. I thought I was giving adequate following distance of hundreds of feet, but when the car way in front of me stopped, and I tried to, there was just nothing. This was pre-anti-lock brakes, so as I was modulating the brakes trying to slow down at all. I kept the car from spinning, but each time I’d lock the brakes, the car would slide to the right due to the crown of the road. I eventually came to a stop with the front of my car about a foot past the back of the stopped car, but off to the right.
The lesson is, no matter how slow you are going and how much following distance you allow, it still might be too fast for conditions, and inadequate.
The wildlife around here which fits that description is deer. Often at certain times of year you will see them spurt across the road ahead of you. And every few years when they decide to spurt it happens that their path will intersect with your vehicle–and there is not enough time to react.
Late last summer my gf asked me to move my car from where it was sitting in our “parking area” at home. We were working on straightening up our two-car garage, so all the cars were parked outside.
I moved my car to the spot as requested. She then started up her truck and backed up right into my driver’s side door.
Yeah - valid observation. But I suggest that the vast majority of average drivers are distracted or on auto more than they would admit - and are just fortunate that nothing unusual occurs during those times.
If the question is asking if defensive driving is enough to ensure you’ll never get into an accident due to the clumsiness of others then I’m pretty sure the answer is no. I’ve been in two “real” (but not serious) accidents, one of which was absolutely my fault (driving round a bend too fast in the rain). But I don’t think any amount of reasonable defensive driving could have saved me from the other, where I was stopped at a traffic light and hit by a car that bounced off another in the accident that unfolded in front of me.
I’d be more curious about how many accidents would still occur if everyone was being diligent and defensive. My accident was just bad luck from my perspective, but was caused by someone making a reckless (but not wreckless!) turn across traffic. I’d guess that there would be a non-zero but negligible compared to current rates number still remaining, especially if we count substance impairment as “non-diligent”.
My thought is that I drive with enough space to stop whether someone “fills the space” in front of me or not. My husband is one of many who feel, without ever being able to justify it in words, that if someone merges in front of him because there is room to do so, his manhood is diminished in some mysterious way. That’s why when we go somewhere together, I drive.
That said, I have been in I think three accidents in my 40+ years of driving life. Once I was in stop and go traffic and was looking at some cows in a field because I was so bored and ran into the guy in front of me. Another time I was really angry that I had driven all the way to the quarry and it had just closed so I drove home way too fast, hit a log next the the road and ended up at the bottom of a cliff. The third one, I came around a mountain corner in the rain and there was already a pile up of five cars right in front of me, I was the sixth. The only one I think wasn’t my error was the last one, I would have collided if I’d been going twenty.
