Speed Kills

Keeping with the theme of crazy drivers, last night I'm out with my run group and we are running along a trial near the highway, on a beautiful summer evening. We can see off in the distance a congregation of emergency vehicles with their lights flashing, at an intersection on the highway. As we draw closer, I can make out a vehicle on the side of the road that has flipped onto it's roof. Now my first guess as to how this car managed to be upside down, is that there must have been some pretty excessive speed involved.

If you are driving defensively and allowing an appropriate distance between yourself and the vehicle in front of you, you should have enough time to break effectively to avoid any mishap that might be developing on the road ahead of you. But, if you're driving recklessly, speeding, tailgating, weaving in and out of traffic, like I see drivers do on a daily basis, then you would potentially set yourself up for a situation so drastic that your car would actually flip onto its roof.

Another example; this morning I'm driving to work about 8 a.m. and travelling along a residential street that is windy and narrow, so several cars have bunched up. I notice a beat up red pickup truck come up behind me and because the traffic has bunched up, we are moving in a slow down, speed up fashion as we're negotiating the curves in the road. The red pick rides right up onto my tail and starts following too close for comfort. So as the line of cars ahead of me comes up to an intersection, all of a sudden they're stopping fairly abruptly, but I've left myself enough room so I only need to break moderately hard. BUT of course the red pickup doesn't notice this soon enough and has to slam on his breaks and weave the front of the truck to the right to avoid rear ending me.

Now I can tell you, by checking this guy out in my rear view mirror, there was no Phd candidate sitting in that cab, he was gazing around as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. I'm sure that was probably a frequent occurence in the life of mister tailgater.

So I have another bumper sticker for the occasion. (click on the image to go to the online store)