Digs, those are amazing survival stories. I gotta say I’m glad your here to tell them.
I rented a car from Enterprise in the UK. I had taken 7 of the 13 mandatory lessons in Ireland yet it had been a year or so.
A bus left me little to no room on a small street and I crashed into a parked car. Looked at the other car - not “much” damage and took off. Yet my steering wheel was off by 90 degrees. I decided it best to return, knocked on a few doors and nobody knew whose car it was. I left my name and Enterprise details. Fortunately, I had paid the £20 “excess” that reduced my max payout to £100 rather than £1,000. They gave me another car and I picked up my wife for a long trip to Edinburgh - not a city made for driving or parking in.
Should have taken the train.
hey, you can’t say you didn’t leave an imprint …
Not disputing your experience. But here’s a countervaling anecdote.
I 16 or 17. So mid 1970s. I was a fairly new driver still in HS for sure. Driving home from work ~10pm I’m cruising down a suburban 3-lane each way boulevard with a ~1 mile straight stretch between traffic lights. Speed limit probably 45, most folks most times of day would drive it at 50 to 55.
I’m the only car on the road except for one set of tail lights up ahead near but not past the intersection. Just past the intersection was a major downhill, so the fact I could see the car proved it was on this side of that intersection.
I’m still a good half mile from the light and looking right at it when I observe it cycle from green to red with no yellow. And while I’m still looking right at it, not 10 seconds later, and probably more like 5, it changes back to green. Had I not happened to be looking right at the light I may have missed the entire transition and believed it was green the entire time.
Soon enough the car ahead displays a brief flash of brake lights then disappears over the crest of the downhill. So 45+ seconds later I get to the intersection (still green for me) still doing 50ish mph, and observe a smashed pedestrian lying in the road just downstream from the downstream crosswalk in the lane next to mine. I do my best to stop, but roll past them a good 50-100 feet. The car ahead is visible in the distance. I notice a smashed skateboard nearby.
This is long before cellphones. Decision time: render aid, or drive to the nearby firestation to summon professional help? About then a second car shows up and the driver stops, leaps out and rushes to the ped. That made my decision for me & I peeled out and drove to the station maybe 1/2 mile away to put in the alarm. Soon the paramedics are on the way.
The hit and run driver was another young person like me who panicked or was just too shaken to think so simply drove straight home. Then called police to report the accident / turn themselves in once they got home. In later testimony they said they saw only a green light during their entire approach to the intersection until suddenly the skateboarder was in the crosswalk in their lane just ahead and not looking their way. I also testified to what I had seen with the traffic light.
I am quite confident the skateboarder set out to cross on a green light / walk signal for their direction that almost instantly turned unnoticed back to red for them while the car driver never saw the brief red facing their direction.
IOW: that traffic light glitch lured both of them to the same spot at the same time. With bad results for all.
That skateboarder was my younger brother’s best friend. Age 14. Dead at the scene. Not that I knew who he was at the time.
That’s horrific! So sorry you went through that.
And, yes, I’m very grateful for all the times I could’ve died. After one of them (a freak snow storm while I was skiing across a lake, and I blacked out from hypothermia), I remember thinking “You’d think this would be life-changing, but I don’t notice any of that…”
I was on a 5 lane road (2 each direction, center turn lane). A tractor trailer rig was in the stopped in the right lane with his turn signal on, I was passing him in the left lane. Just as I was reached the truck cab, a small white car appeared from me. It was a very small Chevy Aveo, I was driving a loaner Chevy Yukon. I was going the speed limit of 45. All I remember of the impact was not being able to see the white car. The car spun off the front of the Yukon, I came to a stop in the center turn lane. The airbags deployed, I felt like someone punched me in the face. It took a few minutes to realize what happened, I opened the door and got out. Just about then the truck driver came up to me and told me to stay away from the white car, there was nothing to see. He had also called 911.
A 19 year old kid died that day. There was nothing I could do. The Aveo was bought new 3 days earlier, it only had 115 miles on it. I did nothing wrong. For many years driving by that place made me angry. That kid that made a left turn when he could not see any on coming traffic. The mother of the kid screaming at me because I “killed” her son like it was my fault. The family’s attorney telling me it’s normal to sue people that were not at fault, my insurance company will pay. Me having to seek phycological help to deal with all this and finding out much of my life was a mess.
I did get some good out of it. The father of the kid giving me a hug as he apologized for his son and wife. The judge ripping that attorney a new one for putting me through a lawsuit for something that wasn’t my fault. The salesman at the Chevy dealer for selling me a year old Chevy Equinox for half the asking price because the 4 year old Chevy Trailblazer I bought a month early had the transmission fail which resulted in me having to get a loaner that put me on that road that day. And the doctor the got inside my head and made me realize why I was the person I was. I haven’t driven by that place in about 5 years. Maybe I will today just to show that today I am okay with the way I am.
Nope, not superstitious in the slightest.
I pass the spot on the freeway where I flipped my car any time I go to the northern part of my county, where the shopping is.
That gouged strip of earth in the foreground was still there for over a year afterward, serving as a marker of the luckiest I’ve ever been.
Passing the spot never bothered me, but for a while I’d get really anxious when other cars moved like the one that ran me off the road.
Dang - how did you get out of the car??
Crawled out through the trunk.
If you ever find yourself in an upside-down car, be careful unbuckling your seatbelt.
IMHO, this is not at all weird. Probably some PTSD. My wife had a (not her fault) accident at an intersection that she’s been unable to drive past for the past 10 years. She’s even nervous if I’m driving in that area.