I have no idea if these two things are connected, but in my head, I’m saddened to think they might be.
Driving home on 495 north, right before the 117 exit, I saw a guy walking on the side of the road, putting on gloves. I see his dumptruck (woo hoo) parked up ahead on the side of the road. Now I had JUST passed a truck tire in the right lane…on the left side of the lane so it was pretty easy to swerve around it in the breakdown lane. So of course, it’s obvious the guy in the dumptruck is going back to retrieve this blown tire. At 5pm. On 495. Three lanes of traffic doing 65mph.
Okay, doing the math in the car, with all three lanes filled as filled can be, I’m horrified that this doofus is going to try to get the tire. I cannot conceive of there being a big enough hole in the flow of traffic for him to step out and lug it out of the lane. But then I got off at 117 and wished him the best.
About ten minutes later on the traffic report they say that two lanes of 495 are closed down near 117. Okay, goosebumps. I have no idea if the guy was involved, or if the tire was, or if it was something totally unrelated, but the fact that I’d given the whole thing so much thought, only to hear about an accident (that wasn’t there when *I* had just passed through) freaked me out. And right now I don’t actually know what happened.
Either way, I think the moral of the story is, if people can safely drive around it, leave the debris in the road and call the cops to come and handle it with THEIR LIGHTS ON.
