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April 29, 2009
Red Lights and Air Bag Burns
One week ago today, I drove straight through a red light at an intersection and struck another vehicle. Contrary to most automobile accidents I've been in throughout my life, this one was completely my fault....
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I do know what caused it: failure to pay attention. Driving a vehicle is a complicated task that I'm certain we normally take for granted, once we have been driving for a few years. Or in my case, over two decades already.
At the time of going through the red light, I had already seen that the light at the intersection I was about to enter was green and my attention was on the light at the next intersection. In the mean time, the light I was approaching turned yellow and then red, but I never did look back, I was still looking a block ahead, planning out my route.
As I entered the intersection, my eye caught movement coming at me from my left, and I had about a second to react and try to brake. Too late, much too late. I slammed into the other vehicle doing almost full city speed (40 km/h).
The good part of this story is that nobody was seriously injured. My air bag did deploy, which left me with some nasty looking burns on my arms. My neck and shoulders were sore for a few days. The other driver had some slight bruises where her seat belt restrained her. There were no passengers, and nobody else walking or driving in the area was hit. All in all, a very good outcome, it could have been much worse.
I talked with a number of my co-workers over the last week, and many of them have admitted to doing exactly the same as me - going through a red light while concentrating on the intersection at the next block. Most of them were fortunate to have flirted danger and hadn't run into any other vehicles.
As I get older, and my experiences pile up, my driving changes. It will change again. Although I do not yet empathize with all of the old people driving dangerously under the speed limit, I'm starting to understand what happened to make them drive that way.
Posted by Hammer at 04:56 PM | Comments (1)