Got to witness an accident yesterday. That’s always fun. What’s more fun is being able to think to yourself “Man, you totally brought that on yourself”. Four cars in the high speed lane of 495 had to be doing 75 or 80, based on my speed. All four of them had less than a car length between them. Um, hello, you’re doing 75MPH and you’ve left yourself zero room for error. Tailgating is illegal and dangerous, or did you miss that class in driver’s ed?
What I think happened (and I’m not entirely sure because I was keeping my eyes on my own lane, thankyouverymuch) is that the first car tapped the brake (maybe to make the 2nd car back off? I didn’t see what was in front of car 1.) and the second car hit his brakes harder. The pickup behind the 2nd car swerves mightily into the median, kicking up a cloud of smoke. But then the stupidass tries to just move back into the space he used to occupy in that lane, even though a)he’d moved out of that space, which wasn’t very big to begin with, and b) he was not moving slower than the other cars in the left lane because, well, he’d gone off the road. So he sticks his nose back in and BAM, car 4 slams him, spinning him around backwards back into the median.
Now keep in mind that all this happened in nanoseconds. Basically, car 4 was still trying to slow down from the initial disruption but hey, he was doing 75 when this all started and I’m positive he never expected the guy in the pickup to try to get back into that same little wedge of space. That no longer existed.
I hear those commercials for the cops being out watching for aggressive driving, and these 4 were the poster children for it. And the runner up was the guy who passed *4* of us on a double-yellow line going up a hill with a curve at the top, because he didn’t want to be stuck behind a construction vehicle (who, I might add, was almost going the speed limit). I was just physically preparing myself to witness a horrific head-on crash, but luckily, the arsemobile made it back into our lane before he hit the curve. It must be something to be SO FREAKING IMPORTANT that you don’t have to follow the rules or even drive safely. That double yellow line probably doesn’t apply to you, because you’re an important person with someplace to be. Unfortunately, the place you will end up is in the back of an ambulance if you’re lucky, the morgue if you aren’t. Where are all the cops when you need them to see this stuff?
