Posted on 06/06/2008 8:12:24 AM PDT by george76
A car plowed into a bike race along a highway near the US-Mexico border, killing one and injuring 10 others.
Police investigator Jose Alfredo Rodriguez says the 28-year-old driver was apparently drunk ...
A photograph taken by a city official shows bicyclists and equipment being hurled high in to the air...
(Excerpt) Read more at mercurynews.com ...
“Strike!
PATHETIC COMMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!”
YES! The judge should put this driver and the maker of this comment on bicycles exclusively for six months. Let them see life from the other side.
BTW, I do know what its like from both sides, and IMO there's typically plenty of blame to go around.
Do you have any links showing it took place in Texas?
Well it was reminiscent of a bowling ball plowing into ten-pins
Seriously, all I could think of was the sound of a bowling ball striking pins.
That is kind of what the car was there to prevent from happening.
Was the driver in the escort car also wearing a clown outfit?
Drudge has got a wild video of an out of control office worker
Someone should post it if it hasnt been posted already
(I cant as Im not on my computer)
I think the police car wasn’t parked. It looks to me like it was moving, and swerved to avoid the oncoming car.
I doubt there was time to do much thinking at all. While it's an interesting question... "would you sacrifice your vehicle and maybe yourself to save the cyclists?"... I suppose most of us would like to think that we'd do the gallant thing.
In reality there probably isn't time to think through all the options or really think about anything. The instinctive jerk of the wheel to avoid an imminent crash is just ingrained in our reflexes, and would happen before you realized the consequences of it.
Sometimes, particularly for certain things that you have imagined in your mind's eye over and over, those instinctive reactions can be trained to do the "harder" thing. I'm thinking of the guy who falls on a grenade to save his comrades. I imagine that the guy who does that has probably wondered before --perhaps at length-- about just such an occasion and whether it might ever happen. When it finally does he instinctively does what he's seen himself doing already.
But in a new situation that you couldn't have imagined so closely, the instinct reverts to whatever you've done before in similar situations. Your hand jerks the wheel to dodge the obstacle. By the time you have time to process what might happen next it's already happened.
My .02
O.K.
Peace.
Unfortunately, I’ve faced this situation in real life a few times. Having logged somewhere in the low hundreds of thousands of miles on the highways of America, I’ve run into a lot of bad, bad, bad drivers. I’ve used my horn to wake up sleeping drivers on freeways and harassed obviously drunk drivers into brief sobriety.
But in one instance, I had a choice of being sideswiped on an LA freeway by some record industry a-hole who wanted to jam his sportscar onto the freeway despite there being no room for it. I watched the guys face and could tell he was considering doing this before he even took his foot off the brake. I was already surveying the other cars around me to see where I had room to maneuver if he committed the act of insanity and jumped into 55mph traffic from a dead start. Unfortunately for me, I was boxed in front and back and had an old lady to my other side where I would ideally have wanted to cross the dotted line and swerve into that lane.
My choice left (and all of this was somewhere in the 2-3 seconds between spotting the idiot and him entering my drivers door) was to brace myself and try to keep my car from knocking others out of their lanes and creating a chain reaction. So I ‘let’ this ahole hit me and I bounced his car into the median where it stopped and I could keep enough momentum to prevent the car behind me from rear ending me.
The worst part was the guy tried to take off!!! In bumper to bumper LA freeway traffic, this jack@ss tried to get away. He didn’t know I had buddies in the LAPD so all I needed was his tag and I got his address and I showed up at his office the next day. He then claimed that it was ‘no big deal’ and offered to give me a few hundred dollars to go away. He was the only guy I sued who ever hit me in a car. And I further tortured him in ways that nobody can legally prove in court.
But without training and/or practice and experience, you’ll never know how you would react. To this day, I predict numerous possible disasters on the road which never happen. But they are less likely to happen if I’m planning on avoiding them when/if they happen. It keeps me awake.
Disturbing picture, thanks geo.
>>A car collides into cyclists participating in a race in Mexico’s northern border city of Matamoros, Sunday June 1, 2008.<<
Yeah.... sure seems like it happened in Mexico. Usually the Mexicans are making a mess here the taxpayers have to clean up
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