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Stories about Intersections - Driving Storytime Thread
Virgil_Leads_You
Proud FatherHouse GardenerRegistered User regular
Proud FatherHouse GardenerRegistered User regular
Howdy SE++,
With our diverse community, there are lots of forumers who drive cars, bikes, and all manner of vehicles.
If you do, you are sure to encounter some interesting peers on the road.
Heck, even pedestrians encounter oddities out there.
This is a thread for discussing all the fun scenarios one might encounter on the way to school / work / etc.
I'll start off with my experience this morning.
I happened to be waiting to make a right turn, on a busy intersection, aided with traffic lights.
Now normally at these intersections, you might not wait for a green turn arrow/light
and go ahead and make a right turn if you had easy visibility and knew there was no clear traffic.
I encountered an interesting lady who decided she didn't need,
1.) Visibility
2.) Green Turn Arrows or Green Light
3.) No Cars in front of her
Her decision was to honk her horn, and then when they didn't see any reaction,
(presumably she wanted me to suicide into traffic on a red light with no arrows for her)
, finally decided to dangerously drive between my car and my neighbors into straight into cross traffic.
Thankfully everyone reacted and slowed down for this "interesting" driver.
There was a nice conversation to be had, with rolled down windows at the block down the road,
as sure enough, there was a string of red lights and intersections down the road, she turned on.
Several comments of
"Lady that was incredibly dangerous!"
"Hey! you almost hit me, Never do that again!"
with unrolled windows
To her
"They weren't turning!"
Ultimately, no time was saved by their shenanigans, and they found an awkward moment around a bunch of ticked off peers.
I generally try to be humble on the road, as heck we've all done dumb stuff.
That's my story, What sort of drivers have y'all encountered?
Feel free them to share here.
With our diverse community, there are lots of forumers who drive cars, bikes, and all manner of vehicles.
If you do, you are sure to encounter some interesting peers on the road.
Heck, even pedestrians encounter oddities out there.
This is a thread for discussing all the fun scenarios one might encounter on the way to school / work / etc.
I'll start off with my experience this morning.
I happened to be waiting to make a right turn, on a busy intersection, aided with traffic lights.
Now normally at these intersections, you might not wait for a green turn arrow/light
and go ahead and make a right turn if you had easy visibility and knew there was no clear traffic.
I encountered an interesting lady who decided she didn't need,
1.) Visibility
2.) Green Turn Arrows or Green Light
3.) No Cars in front of her
Her decision was to honk her horn, and then when they didn't see any reaction,
(presumably she wanted me to suicide into traffic on a red light with no arrows for her)
, finally decided to dangerously drive between my car and my neighbors into straight into cross traffic.
Thankfully everyone reacted and slowed down for this "interesting" driver.
There was a nice conversation to be had, with rolled down windows at the block down the road,
as sure enough, there was a string of red lights and intersections down the road, she turned on.
Several comments of
"Lady that was incredibly dangerous!"
"Hey! you almost hit me, Never do that again!"
with unrolled windows
To her
"They weren't turning!"
Ultimately, no time was saved by their shenanigans, and they found an awkward moment around a bunch of ticked off peers.
I generally try to be humble on the road, as heck we've all done dumb stuff.
That's my story, What sort of drivers have y'all encountered?
Feel free them to share here.
Virgil_Leads_You on
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It was a clear, reasonably warm morning so weather wasn't a factor in the accident (this was in Michigan so in the winter this wouldn't be as weird). I cannot to this day figure out how the car ended up upside down without digging into the median or hitting another car.
In my younger and more reckless days when I owned a motorcycle, I was following a driver of a convertible Audi A3 up to the intersection leading onto a busy shopping street - the road we're on is left turn only for everything except buses, and there is a pedestrian controlled crossing immediately after our turn left.
The lights were red and pedestrians were beginning to cross as this colossal douche just blew through the intersection and over the crossing without so much as slowing down. I don't care what you're driving, a motorcycle will beat it in acceleration, and as soon as the road cleared and the lights turned back green I opened up my throttle, positioned myself alongside the dude, and clapped him around the back of the head with my heavily-gloved hand.
Gaining a PCV license has made me a far more chill driver, much to the relief of my passengers :P
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One of those spit take moments.
I bet whatever happened caused someone nearby some fright!
Really missing the well-maintained road infrastructure and polite driving attitudes of south west Africa right now.
Having grown up here I can tell you in all honesty that Pittsburgh and North Carolina are both worse. I frequently genuinely feared for my life on the highway in North Carolina.
edit: if we're being honest though most drivers in the States are bad because driver's ed in the States is a complete joke and recertification is just a written exam.
un-do version:
I cycle in the US, so I don't think I'd be on a highway in any Carolina on a bike
Bad news about Pittsburgh though, I'm partway through a job application there
Oooooh cycling. Yeah that's a whole other story. Boston and Cambridge are fucking terrifying places to be on a bike. North Carolina's actually kind of okay because it has a weird number of bike lanes (at least where I lived in the triangle).
But yeah you'll want to be careful in Pittsburgh. Drivers there don't really understand the concept of stopping at the stop-line at an intersection rather than in the crosswalk. I know people in PGH who bike all over and they've never had an issue, it just might be slightly pucker-inducing. Good city for motorcycling if that's your thing, though. Lots of people there own one and actually know how to drive around them.
I once witnessed an accident like that. It was a four-lane road, mid-morning, good visibility on a nice sunny day, but dude was going way too fast around a bend, lost control, veered slightly towards the wrong side of the road, overcorrected onto the other side of the road, rode up the embankment and flew through the goddamn air while slowly flipping, car landed on its roof.
No brake marks because it all happened much too fast, he probably didn't even hit the brakes till he was airborne. If the car wasn't lying there smoking lightly you wouldn't have known anything had happened.
Amazingly, he survived and seemed unharmed. Killed his dog though.
It's a potentially frightful situation anytime you need to trust drivers around ya.
At least that's been my experience walking around cities.
Boston drivers, I have been told, do not give a fuck about pedestrians and will happily mow them down; but they do car about their cars, and carrying a metal-tipped umbrella in front of you will ward them off because they don't want their paint scratched.
Is this a thing you've heard of? I heard it years ago, and now that I type it out, I think I may have mentioned it once before.
Nah. If anything Boston/Cambridge drivers are used to people just walking out into traffic. It's kind of a thing here.
There's at least more pressure of a bubble and some visibility around an umbrella.
I have not heard that, no, but a metal umbrella wouldn't be the worst idea in the world, just as a buffer.
They are actually ok about pedestrians, mostly, just really really bad about bikes. I think there's some kind of invisibility shield generated by anything on two wheels. Neal Stephenson had a whole thing in Zodiac about the best practise in Boston being to ride like everyone on the road was actively hunting you down and trying to kill you. I thought it was a funny exaggeration until I moved here.
The one I'm still gritting my teeth about was a guy stopped in a t-junction who turned as I was passing, didn't halt until I literally banged on his hood and shouted because he was basically driving into me, then zoomed off - and fucking paused further up the road and waited for me to catch up so he could shout "You should be more careful!"
Even thinking about it raises my blood pressure. I need to carry some tear gas to lob into peoples windows on occasions like that.
The driver was luckily not visibly injured other than bruising from the seatbelt and the shock of the accident, but it was a real dangerous spot due to traffic and the accident being hidden until you were right on top of it by the hill. We put flares back around the turn and then a trucker came by and stopped traffic coming in the other direction and called in the accident on his radio, which was extremely helpful since there wasn't any cell coverage there. The moral of the story is that truckers are pretty reliable in road accident situations.
Glad it worked out and that you and this trucker was around to be the heroes we needed to keep things safe.
Seriously, good job. Lot of folk drop the ball on these types of situations.
I guess thinking about this discussion, I realize that a Driving Storytime Thread isn't just a thread for laughing off weird situations,
but also potentially a space for discussing dangerous and impact moments.
A space for serious experiences as well as hopeless shaking our fists in the air at silly folk.
I hope all can respect that going forward despite my more irreverent introduction.
I appreciate y'all sharing your stories.
And people wonder why some cyclists will gladly kick their wing mirror off if they get too close to them...
Then I stumbled across r/dashcamvids and now I never want to drive again
Ended up being really simple and I was found not at fault, so nothing really happened, but for the initial incident my heart was racing and I'm pretty sure I was shaking.
I should get a dashcam though. If just for peace of mind.
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Then again, I've done a lot of driving through the neighboring region of Appalachia Tennessee for work, and boy that can be stressful.
I'm guessing there are a lot less stony cliffsides/vistas.
So that's a thing.
Which only exacerbated the issue, since now the lane oncoming lanes weren't moving (since a side street pulled out and blocked them) and the lane I was in couldn't move because a person up ahead was turning left and they were blocked out from the next intersection.
It took about 3 minutes of people figuring out why the person in front of them was backing up to clear enough space to resolve the situation. Which also could've been completely avoided by people not blocking the intersection too.
Tonight was rough.
It's kind of amazing how many people seem to think that so long as the light is green they can move into the intersection when there is no clear path for them to make their turn or get out of the intersection before the light turns red. Hanging around in the middle of the intersection during a red light trying to turn left is pretty illegal but that don't stop 'em.
But there was absolutely no room for those people to merge like they did, it was pretty obvious 1, maybe 2, cars could scoot in but 5 tried to do it. And then the last 3 tried to do that thing where they over turn onto the shoulder to see if they can make it (they couldn't).
He was probably in a hurry to buy a lottery ticket
Edit: oh man, that talk of green light crowding made me remember the one intersection I hate the most on my route.
So there's a busy intersection where my bus has to turn left into a shopping district with high foot traffic. The cars are not the problem with this intersection. The light will be turn green for 8-12 seconds before cycling through to the other direction, and then back to pedestrian crossing (and it will always stop all traffic for pedestrian crossing because there are people forever hitting the button to cross)
In the UK, our crossings will change lights to red, and then an audible beeping will begin to signal to blind pedestrians that it's now safe to cross. Every single person waits for the beeping to start before actually crossing despite their functioning eyes telling their brains that the cars have already come to a stop well beforehand.
You'd think people conditioned to this Pavlovian behaviour would stop crossing after the beeping ends. Hell no they don't.
What kills me the most about this particular shopping district is that there is a large amount of elderly people there. And they are the worst perpetrators when it comes to crossing the road after the beeping has already ended, signalling that the lights are about to turn green again. And they're so goddamned slow that they've turned back to red by the time they've gotten to the other kerb.
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Highest of high fucking fives for the NPR, bloody good little trucks!
Ah. A future organ donor. Otherwise known as "squid"s, because Stupid QUick Inevitably Dead takes too long to say, and beloved by people who home-build off-road buggies because Hayabusa motors are expensive as hell to buy new, but pulled out of a near-new wrecked bike? Quite cheap!
Sometimes some kind soul would notice the gaggle of teenagers shivering on the sidewalk and stop to wait for us to cross, which I kind of hated because often as not they'd sit there and wave at us while cars kept driving past in the other lane.
One day, a driver in the far lane (US, so moving right to left from our perspective) stopped to let us cross. The near lane was clear, so we waved thank-you and took the opportunity. I was at the front of the group, and just as I cleared the far side of the stopped car, some idiot coming up behind them decided to illegally pass on the right while barely slowing down. Their driver's side mirror missed me by inches.
I hope I scared them as much as they did me. They didn't stick around to ask.
I heard the term "meat crayon" once. It's certainly... evocative.
Yeah some girl got killed by a tractor trailer driver up where I used to live because the bus never stuck around after it dropped you off and she had to cross a busy road.
It just so happened he was going 60 in a 45 and the girl was something like 7 so she probably wasn't very good at determining that. She died from it. I think that's one of the big things in NYS that forced lawmakers to make it illegal to not only pass buses that were stopped with their lights but also that buses had to wave children over once it was safe. I don't know if this is a federal law but the troopers absolutely do not fuck around in NY with buses and their lights.
The only thing that gets me is there's this light over here with a lady who is a daycare and their driveway is like in the middle of the intersection and it causes the worst traffic jam in the world in the morning as it blocks 3 lanes of traffic for like 3 turns of the light (and impacts the two other main arterial roads that are within a stone's throw).
My parents went away on a week's vacation and
They left the keys to the brand new Porsche
Would they mind?
Umm, well, of course not
I'll just take it for a little spin
And maybe show it off to a couple of friends
I'll just cruise it around the neighborhood
Well, maybe I shouldn't
Yeah, of course I should
Pay attention, here's the thick of the plot
I pulled up to the corner at the end of my block
That's when I saw this beautiful girlie girl walking
I picked up my car phone to perpetrate like I was talking
You should've seen this girl's bodily dimensions
I honked my horn just to get her attention
She said, "Was that for me?"
I said, "Yeah"
She said, "Why?"
I said, "Come on and take a ride with a helluva guy"
She said, "How do I know you're not sick?
You could be some deranged lunatic"
I said, "see'mon toots - my name is the Prince =
Beside, would a lunatic have a Porsche like this?"
She agreed and we were on our way
She was looking very good and so was I, I must say - word
We hit McDonald's, pulled into the drive
We ordered two Big Macs and two large fries with Cokes
She kicked her shoes off onto the floor
She said, "Drive fast, speed turns me on"
She put her hand on my knee, I put my foot on the gas
We almost got whiplash, I took off so fast
The sun roof was open , the music was high
And this girl's hand was steadily moving up my thigh
She had opened up three buttons on her shirt so far
I guess that's why I didn't notice that police car
We're doing ninety in my Mom's new Porsche
And to make this long story short - short
When the cop pulled me over I was scared as hell
I said, "I don't have a license but I drive very well, officer"
I almost had a heart attack that day
Come to find out the girl was a twelve-year-old runaway
I was arrested, the car was impounded
There was no way for me to avoid being grounded
My parents had to come off from vacation to get me
I'd rather be in jail than to have my father hit me
My parents walked in
I got my grip, I said, "Ah, Mom, Dad, how was your trip?"
They didn't speak
I said, "I want to plead my case"
But my father just shoved me in the car by my face
That was a hard ride home, I don't know how I survived
They took turns -
One would beat me while the other one was driving
I can't believe it, I just made a mistake
Well parents are the same no matter time nor place
So to you all the kids all across the land
Take it form me
Parents just don't understand