I’ve noticed as i get older…I’m more susceptible to unconsciously following the stop light up the road rather than the one I’m sitting at.
My wife thinks I tend to not leave enough space in front of me, and don’t brake promptly enough when I see brake lights/red light ahead.
In 40-ish years of driving, I can recall 2 accidents with other vehicles. Once, maybe 30 years ago, I was merging onto an absolutely stop-and-go expressway traffic (80/94 SE of Chicago - an absolutely HELLISH road!) I thought it was enough that I got my nose into a gap. The bigass truck behind me disagreed, and did not stop until it had knocked off my driver’s side mirror.
Then about 20 years ago, I backed out of my garage and hit a car parked in my driveway. Simply didn’t look, and we rarely had anyone park there. (“It came at me from a funny angle, Tyrone!” ;))
I changed my driving habits as a result of each instance.
Far more frequently, I’ve had a sense of narrowly avoiding an accident - AFTER I would have been able to take any action. And there are occasional “close calls” when my wife is driving. When you avoid an accident by inches, I’m hesitant to attribute all of those inches to expertise. If things had been just a couple of inches otherwise, BOOM!
Had one over the fall. Was driving my sister’s car on the way home from cycling a century. Bumper to bumper traffic also on 80/94 heading W this time, moving at a decent clip. All of a sudden, the cars ahead of me slam on their brakes. The 3 cars ahead of me hit each other. I slam on the brakes and stop an inch or 2 short. Heart is pounding as I see the guy behind me barreling towards me - finally stopping a couple of inches behind me. Yeah, I’m a decent driver, but I’m not going to take all the credit for avoiding that one. I was lucky.
I’ve always felt that most accidents were not due to bad luck, but due to one or more persons improperly controlling their vehicle. Driving too fast, crossing the lines, following too closely, failing to stop.
I’d say that it wasn’t luck for at least one party to the accident, but is often bad luck for the other. My daughter’s first accident was when stopped at an off ramp. A car hit the car behind her who hit her. (She did not hit the car ahead of her.) That was luck, and she said she was happy because her first accident was so not her fault.
I saw a woman in the left lane of a freeway get hit by a car who swerved across 3 lanes of traffic, hit her, then swerved back. Pure bad luck for her.
Sometimes it is both. I had an accident when someone came out of a parking lot without looking. (He had neither insurance nor license.) I couldn’t avoid hitting him, but I was alert enough to not hit him hard - my airbag ddn’t deploy. So that was a bit of both.
It’s not always about “manhood”. If you’re on a superbusy, superfast highway (like 1-35 between Dallas and Austin), when you leave a gap, it gets filled, which means you have to slow down and make another gap, which gets filled, etc. Its effectively impossible to allow an adequate following distance on that sort of road. Continually dropping back just means you are forever having people change lanes ahead of you whenever there’s a gap, which is terrifying in and of itself.
I’ve been rear ended while stopped at a stop sign. Literally just sitting there waiting to cross a main road and someone plows into the back at 20-30 mph. Teenager texting while driving.
I had a car back right out of a parking space and into the side of my stationary car (I had cars stopped in front of me and behind me). This happened in a tight shopping center lot. The lady was just not paying attention.
There is nothing I think I could have reasonably done to avoid either of these.
I was in the McD’s drivethru when a teen banged right into me bounced off and did it again. He was revving his engine still after I turned my car off and got out. He told the cop it scared him so bad he punched the gas instead of the brakes. My car had a dented bumper his car was totalled. Nobody believes me when I tell them about his car. But I have a copy of the police report. He of course had inadequate insurance and his insurance company tried to get some of mine. Didn’t work. My comprehensive fixed my bumper. I felt I had NO fault in that wreck, I was at a dead stop.
Jargon alert. If you talk to Traffic People, they will never use the word accident. There are collisions, not accidents, and collisions have various contributory causes. Sometimes your actions are not a contributory cause. Sometimes nobody’s actions contribute, but that’s pretty rare. (If you’re driving along a mountain road and a deer decides to drop off of the cliff on the right and cross the road, but it misjudges and drops down onto your car roof, no human’s actions contributed to the collision.)
I wouldn’t say that a collision where the other guy was at fault was caused by bad luck. It was caused by the other guy. But I could say that it was bad luck that you’re the one who ended up part of that collision. And, yeah, you can’t control the other guys*.
Hint: if you’re on the freeway, don’t follow any pickup truck with untied mattresses and box springs in it. One good gust of wind and those things go flying.
*I’m in California, guy and guys are gender neutral words.
A friend of mine was crossing the street when the light was green and she was crossing the street in the crosswalk.
The driver was texting, and claimed in court it was her fault for 'not watching where she was going." In the crosswalk with a green light.
If you would have collided even at 20 then 20 was too fast for the conditions.
Going around a blind corner In the rain you just have to assume something will be there.
That said, as a matter of practicality most drivers do not do this. There are plenty of hills and turns in Ohio you can’t see beyond. People are often driving on faith that there’s nothing in the road on the other side. Youve just subconsciously weighed the risk and decided it’s not high enough to justify driving like you’ve just arrived from Florida where you can see down the road for hundreds of yards most of the time.
Now take a driver from Florida and they initially will slow way down every time they crest a hill or go around a blind curve instinctually.
Even a lot of rear endings are avoidable. You learn this as a motorcycle driver. You stop with some distance, and stay in gear, watching behind you. If a vehicle approaches too quickly, you pull out to the side. Youre far more aware of your outs as well. (They’re also more plentiful since they can be much less side space)
As a dirt bike rider and off roader I’ve avoided accidents in both cars and on motorcycles by making off the road one of my outs. That’s not instinctual for most people but my brain is trained so the road itself means a lot less.
In any case you’re much more aware of ways to avoid not at fault accidents as a motorcyclist because the risk of serious injury or death is equal to the risk of most fender benders. So you realize that in a car you’ve subconsciously accepted a certain risk of minor accidents in exchange for convenience.
To answer the OP , I think you are actually more curious how many accidents are luck …given that most people drive in a way that assumes some risk and yet aren’t in accidents every day.
Which is probably 90 percent of them. Barring times when people are just blatantly neglegent , like being drunk.
Your average driver is in an accident once every 18 years or about 12000 trips … So essentially people drive in a way they’ve accepted a one in 12-14k chance of an accident each time they drive.
We can more accurately call it luck every trip you make without an accident.
I have had several accidents where I wasn’t the cause of the accident but the other driver was each time. Several times I was stationary. I don’t think someone hitting a motionless car can be attributed to luck.
I remember, as a teenager, being the passenger when a friend’s car began aquaplaning on a multi-lane road. Luckily the road was straight at that point and the adjacent lanes were empty, so he was able to let the car slow down and regain control. Had there been a bend in the road we would have drifted across the other lanes. Since his tires had the legal tread depth I guess an accident then would be bad luck.
Still simply driving too fast for conditions.
I have been rear ended at a traffic light.
I was at one of those long, lights (multiple directions, left turn lanes, etc. The ones where you will be stopped for a while.) There were cars in front of me. When I did come to a stop, there was no one behind me. While I was waiting for the light to turn, a woman drove into my car. She wasn’t going so fast that I had any reason to believe she wouldn’t come to a stop (so I had no reason to try to get out of her way). There was nothing I could have done to prevent that accident.
Most of my near misses have been luck. There is more than one time that I nearly caused a collision and just barely did not.
One of the concepts I learned in the Flight Safety course I did many moons ago is called the Swiss Cheese model. Think of each individual factor in an accident as a slice of swiss cheese. In order for an accident to occur the holes in the cheese all have to line up in a particular way and any slice that doesn’t is not an accident but a close call. Driving a car is no different. Luck has nothing to do with it. One accident I was involved with was due to me trying to make a left turn from a two lane (each way with a designated turn/through lane on the inner) road onto a side street. Had I waited for the turn light, had the other driver that decided to jump out of the inner lane to the outer and accelerate to beat the light not done so, had my car not had a design flaw that causes a very brief hesitation under hard acceleration (Subaru 2.5 Litre), had there not been a line of big ass pickups waiting to turn left in the opposite direction that blocked my view of the other lane, etc. I would have cleared the intersection. But I did not and the result was roughly $15000 damage total to the three cars involved.
Hadn’t heard of the Swiss Cheese model, but I’ve always thought of safety in terms of multi-digit security code that’s being repeatedly guessed at by a gremlin; if he manages to correctly enter the whole code, disaster strikes. If you are operating according to best safety practices, the gremlin will have to guess at every single digit of the code; disasters will still happen, but they will be extremely rare. But the more lax you are about safety, the more digits you correctly pre-enter for the gremlin, leaving him with fewer digits to guess and making disasters more likely/frequent. Doing your pre-flight checklist from memory instead of actually reading it and doing point-and-call? You just entered a digit for the gremlin. Skip the checklist altogether? That’s another digit. Didn’t look both ways before taxiing across the runway? There’s another digit. Cut just a few corners for years on end, and eventually the gremlin may guess what’s left; cut a lot of corners, and the gremlin will probably guess the rest of your security code later this year.
Driving/motorcycling is no different. Adhering to best safety practices minimizes your odds of disaster, and every safety corner you cut bumps up your odds of disaster. Nothing is guaranteed: Some terrible drivers get through life without crashing, and some of the best drivers will rack up a crash or two because of something even they could not have anticipated, or because of their own very rare lapse of attention that just happened to happen at exactly the worst possible moment. That’s luck.
Every time you have a close call behind the wheel? That’s the gremlin screwing up your security code on the final digit. That’s also luck. In the book Traffic, the author points out that every close call is an occasion when tiny factors could easily have tipped the situation into disaster; if a driver has frequent close calls, that’s a clue that they should reassess their driving habits and look for ways to stop giving the gremlin so many free digits. In aviation, AIUI, close calls (e.g. runway incursions, violations of minimum aircraft separation distances in the air) are subjected to detailed investigations that look to understand what happened and how to ensure (if possible) they are not likely to happen again. My workplace is no different: when there’s a safety incident, our safety group drills down to find root causes that can be corrected. ISTM that a good driver should do a post-incident review of every close call they have and think about how they might modify their driving habits to avoid a repeat.
Good explanations all. I especially like the last couple, describing how multiple factors combine. I guess that is what i considered "luck - both good and bad. And I agree with the folk who suggest that an individual’s own driving habits are the greatest single factor among those.
Rode w/ my wife driving in light snow yesterday. Have to admit, she drove slower, and braked earlier than I expect I would have if I had been driving. :rolleyes: