I had thought there are two types of people in this world: those that speed up when approaching an intersection with a stale green light, and those that slow down. But I discovered that there are also those that will actually just stop while the light is green.
We were coming up to an intersection that had a count-down walk light for the pedestrians. There were 3 seconds left and the car in front was almost at the intersection - lots of time for him. I was preparing to gun it and follow him through. Fortunately I was wary and attentive enough to brake in time when he unexpectedly stopped.
Last week I was approaching an intersection when a car made a right turn in front of me and came to a complete stop. I had to brake pretty hard and he stayed there for a good 5 seconds until he realized I had also managed to come to a complete stop and then he sped away. I suspect he was looking for an insurance payout, but I was driving a semi and he would have been dead as shit about eight times over if I hit him at 40mph.
Asian driver? I’m not trying to perpetuate a false stereotype (this one is true). In the parts all of the lights have countdown timers, and like most of the world, green is followed by several seconds of amber so that you have time to get through. It’s amazing how many idiots stop when the green countdown timer still has one to three seconds remaining. It’s pretty amazing just how poor the driving skills are in general, though.
I almost killed a motorcyclist last year. Going about 45 mph, he suddenly stopped to turn into the parking lot of a bar called “Big Woody’s” or something like that. I didn’t see him signal, although it’s possible I was being inattentive. Really glad I didn’t hit him. Even people who go to Big Woody’s deserve to live.
The driver was being overly cautious. I wonder if they had a close call recently where some other car nearly T-boned them as an intersection? I know that it Shouldn’t happen, but sometimes bad experiences on the road cant haunt a driver’s decisions for a long time after the accident / almost-accident.
In Michigan we have the kind of Highways that exit, then merge onto the service road at a very acute angle. The service road has a stop, but the ramp exiting from the highway doesn’t. However the stop signs for the service road are on both sides of it, making one of them in middle of the pointy intersection and on the right hand of the exiting ramp. The have angled louvers that supposedly make it only visible to that lane, but even when they are still in place, they are completely ineffective. However after you drive a route enough you mentally never notice the stop sign because it doesn’t effect you.
The other thing is that during rush hour, it is nearly impossible for the service road people to get through the stop sign an through the merge. So eventually they just pull into the steady stream of traffic.
So one day recently I am exiting the freeway in heavy traffic it has a bit of a steep ramp, so you can’t see the through traffic on the service road till you are nearly at the merge. So as I got high enough to see I turned my head to see what kind of a stop sign runner I could be expecting to need to dodge. No one was there, so I returned my gaze to in front of me…
Only to see that the Ontarian in front of me was stopping at the stop sign for the other road. I haven’t had a good loud 4 wheel skid like that in a long time, 10 years maybe.
Back way back then I used a cell phone to call someone, I was travelling back from work with a colleague next to me, it was dusk, we were driving through town and I didn’t see the pedestrian until she was next to my bonnet. I didn’t see her, at all! Since then I’ve never used a phone whilst driving, if she’d stepped out I wouldn’t have seen her until she’d crashed through my windscreen.
