The madness on the roads

Did I ever blog about nearly running someone over in the car a while back? I don't remember writing about it, so I probably didn't. I thought about this tonight, for reasons that will become clear later, but for now, here's the story.

A few months ago I was driving back from somewhere or other, in the middle of the day, and was coming up the hill towards our house along one of the main roads. After passing through a set of traffic lights in the left hand lane of the two possible southbound lanes, I was merrily trying to get Fab to go at a non-embarrassing pace, when I rounded the left hand corner in the road and straightened the car out. Coming the other way were a few cars and a guy on a motorbike. And as I rounded the corner and started to go straight, I saw the guy on the bike start to slide. It had been raining that day and the road was fairly greasy, and he did this threatening little wobble before starting to topple and slide head first, motorbike and all, right towards my wheels. It's a complete cliche, but it's true; everything was in slow motion. Anyway, as his head was coming towards my left front tyre, I took a deep breath and wrenched the car over to the right, into the other lane, where luckily there was no car. His head whizzed past my tyre with about a foot to spare and he and the bike eventually came to a graceful stop at the side of the road. The guy must have had half his skin taken off, as it was hot and he was wearing a T-shirt, but he seemed to be so shocked and embarrassed that he just pulled himself and the bike up and shot off, after myself and another guy had got out to make sure he was in one piece. And after pulling off into a side road and doing some shaking for a bit, I drove home.

I thought about this earlier, because I have just driven back from New Westminster, after watching Sunshine play baseball, and I missed being caught up in a nasty accident by about a minute. Drivers in Vancouver seem to be notoriously bad at most skills, but generally they just drive too fast and they don't take enough care when changing lanes. So after having been tailgated by quite a few jerks on the way back from New West, I came off Kingsway and onto 41st, went through some lights, came over the top of the hill, and screeched to a halt before the carnage in front of me. God knows what had happened, but there were two wagon cars and a sports car spread across our lanes, with the sports car and one of the cars mushed together in the road, and the other car smashed to the side on the pavement. I pray that no-one was passing on the pavement at the time, because they were probably under the wheels of the car by now. Traffic ground to a halt, and I hesitated, because my instinct was to pull over and get to any people in the cars, but there were already horrified passers-by at the side of the road who obviously lived in the houses and had heard the crash. And as I hesitated, I heard the sirens of the rescue trucks coming down the road*. So after checking that there were no bodies in the road, I skirted round the wreckage and continued home. The two bigger cars weren't too badly damaged, but the sports car didn't have much chance. Neither did any pedestrians.

And after seeing this, you would have thought that drivers on 41st would have slowed down on the drive home, possibly thinking about what could happen to them if they weren't careful. But oh no, that would be too much to ask for....

*In England, the crash couldn't possibly have only happened one minute before I arrived on the scene, as the sirens wouldn't have been heard for at least 10 minutes, with all the trouble with the health service. However, here they have a different approach to the emergency services. Because Vancouver is so hellish to get through at a fast pace, and because there are few ambulance stations compared to fire stations, most of the responses to calls for ambulances are from fire trucks. Firemen are trained in CPR and first aid, and fire trucks also double as rescue trucks, so usually the fire truck will get to a scene within a couple of minutes, and the fireman/paramedic will give interim first aid until the ambulance gets there. It sounded like a bizarre system when I first got here, but it works great....