I don’t get this. Yes, I notice that in this case the driver was allegedly drinking, but even drunk, how could you not notice all the WRONG WAY!! signs on the ramp? Then not realize that all the signs are backwards? Or that traffic going the opposite way is ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY??
Most of the accounts I read with people doing this have them travelling MILES down the interstate until they inevitably cause a fatal head-on collision. And in most cases, they are NOT DWI…
They’re not just buzzed, they’re drunker than piss. Most people would be passed out at their levels of intoxication, and they might have already puked.
IIRC, the last famous case in New Mexico (we get about two famous ones a year, the most memorable when Gordon House killed a family of 4 on Christmas Eve about 10 years ago) involved a driver with a BAC of .24. These people are probably closing one eye, watching only the center of their hood and the line, not even realizing that they’re lining up with a yellow line instead of a white one.
There’s little chance I’ll be able to find the link, but basically studies have shown that under ideal driving conditions people tend to tune-out and not pay attention to signs.
When conditions are adverse and repercussions are imminent drivers tend to pay more attention and accidents are statistically fewer.
So… add inebriation with complacency and, voila! Shit happens.
Several weeks ago, a drunk driver in the wee hours of the morning mid-week ended up as a headon with a semi-tractor trailer where I5 and I84 meet in Portland, Oregon. The drunk was driving north in the southbound lanes.
The kicker is he allegedly passed a sheriff’s deputy taking a prisoner to jail several miles before the accident.
If you’ve ever driven in the area, it’s quite understandable how even a sober driver in broad daylight could make the same mistake.
It’s not just drunks. Sometimes it’s little old ladies.
Last year. I was coming out of a parking lot onto a divided highway. And I see a car, but some thing’s not right. A car directly opposite me has just turned left. It trundles down the hill and out sight. I couldn’t move my car, as my jaw was jammed against the brake pedal. A few seconds later, I gently move out onto the highway and who do I see? A nice little old lady heading straight for me :eek:. She calmly swerves around me as she pulls into my parking lot.
All of these cases I’ve ever heard about involve severe drunkenness. I suppose other intoxicants play a roll sometimes. Keep in mind that this isn’t just tipsy, but shit-faced drunk at a level that would induce alcohol poisoning in those who didn’t get drunk often and with intensity.
That was more my point. Obviously, drunks are drunks…
But there are an alarming number of these incidents that don’t seem to involve drunk drivers. Assuming sobriety, how does one not realize they’re going the wrong way?
Around here, I cannot remember a single case of a wrong way driver who was not hammered out of their mind. We actually have divided freeways, so you really have to drive up the offramp and drive against the flow of traffic, which is pretty fucked up. Some people seem to lose all sensibility when completely drunk. Most people, even though they may be legally drunk, don’t enter the outer limits of reptilian brain driving. They still may crash due to decreased ability to drive, but they are at least driving on the correct side of the road.
You also have to consider some of these accidents suicides. There are some people out there that will use alcohol to fuel them up and really not care about who they take out with them.
I can’t answer, even though I saw my Mom do it. We were coming back from visiting my father’s grave on Memorial day. Road construction took her off her normal route. She went to get back on the highway and took the exit rather than the entrance, despite the signs saying “wrong way” and me saying “to the right, to the right, to the right, to the right, to the right!” In the end she got on the exit and then just sat there, not knowing what to do, being afraid to go over the median. I finally told her to risk it and I would pay for the damage.
It was then that I decided that she was not allowed to drive me home from the hospital later that summer.
Now I’m thinking of Planes, Trains and Automobiles.
Once I was in the front passenger seat of a car, with my girlfriend Karla sitting in my lap. Her monozygotic twin sister Karen was driving, and drove us up a highway exit ramp. A cop was coming along just as she emerged onto the highway, and promptly pulled us over.
Karen turned to Karla and said “I don’t have my license! Quick, give me yours!” (So I guess that’s some form of fraud as well as bad driving.)
This just happened to me about a month ago. I was driving home late from out of town and I saw another car approaching me from the opposite direction. It took a minute but I realized they were on the same side of the divided highway I was on. I tried flashing my lights and honking the horn but it didn’t seem like they noticed because they kept going until I couldn’t see them in the rear-view mirror. Nothing must have happened because I didn’t hear about it in the news. One of the few times I wished I had a cel phone.
Let me tell you , that really freaked me out. Especially after thinking about it later figuring the speed limit on that stretch was 65 we probably had a closing speed of more than 130mph. :eek:
You don’t have to be drunk for this to occur, although I’m sure it accounts for the majority of the cases. When I was a pre-teen, my Mom did this when we were coming home from the beach. It was night, and she had never driven the route at night. It was also foggy beyond belief. The intersection that she mis-navigated was tricky anyway, and she missed where she was supposed to turn and ended up going the wrong way. As soon as she realized it, she corrected.
I actually did in in broad daylight with a police officer as my passenger. :smack: That was the result of a brain fart, pure and simple.
I’ve been a passenger in two vehicles where I’ve had to point out rather urgently to the driver, “Erm, I saaay old chap, mind moving over to the correct side of the road, what?” Both times were not freeway entrances, but rather suburban arterial roads with complex intersections, and both times the driver was neither drunk nor senile.
The senility speciality in Sydney seems to be old ducks drivig their cars down flights of stairs at the entrances to subway stations, thinking they’re entering an underground carpark. We’ve had a few of those in the papers over the years.
The first was one where I was driving in heavy rain and entering the highway at a location I was unfamiliar with. I just didn’t know it was divided at that point and wound up going the wrong way briefly. I don’t recall what clued me in that I was going the wrong way but I promptly pulled a u-turn and got things straightened out.
The second wasn’t on the interstate but rather one of the service roads on one side. I’m tooling along on my side of the road when I see a little old lady coming straight towards me in my lane. I’m sure she thought she was on a one-way road and that all lanes were available to her. She changed into her own lane prior to anything distressing happening and I’d bet she went home and posted something on her little-old-ladies board about the jackass driving the wrong way that she had to avoid running into.
I narrowly avoided a similarly disastrous impact speed not so long ago. This was on a fairly quiet two-lane road, 60mph limit. I rounded a gentle bend at that limit (not over, honest ), to find a car heading towards me on my side of the road. I almost swerved right, and in a flash decided that wasn’t a good idea, that would put me on his correct side, where he might swerve, so I went left. Thankfully, all that was there was a two-foot-high grass bank. The two things I noticed in my mirror was that the car continued on the wrong side, and that it was carrying German plates. Almost certainly this was a foreign driver, who had turned off the much busier two-lane road at a junction up ahead, habitually going to the familiar side of the road. Not stopping, nor even correcting his mistake, suggests to me that there was alcohol involved.
), to find a car heading towards me on my side of the road. I almost swerved right, and in a flash decided that wasn’t a good idea, that would put me on his correct side, where he might swerve, so I went left. Thankfully, all that was there was a two-foot-high grass bank. The two things I noticed in my mirror was that the car continued on the wrong side, and that it was carrying German plates. Almost certainly this was a foreign driver, who had turned off the much busier two-lane road at a junction up ahead, habitually going to the familiar side of the road. Not stopping, nor even correcting his mistake, suggests to me that there was alcohol involved.