If I am driving down a highway, and I see flashing lights to the left of me, and then see a car in front of me swerve onto a shoulder that apparently was not a real shoulder but a grass shoulder, and see they have a sign in front of them, I don’t speed up to pass them, I slow down knowing that they are likely to swerve back onto the road to avoid running into a sign.
You appear to be correct that, as a legal matter, the white truck did “nothing wrong”. But a guy was nearly killed, and two cars were damaged, one seriously, because he did not practice safe, defensive driving techniques.
I’ve been in an accident or two that were unavoidable, but I’ve had a LOT more accidents that never happened because I paid attention to what other cars were doing, and anticipated them doing stupid things.
When I was back in high school (a long time ago) there was a film they showed us to scare us into safe driving. In the film, the father has his family out for a sunday drive. However, they get stuck behind a really slow car with a couple of “aunt-looking” women chatting away and driving erratically.
To his credit, the father, stuck directly behind, follows a safe distance and doesn’t honk or pass (there is no passing). However, lots of people behind him DO pass {note: At this point I would fault him, in that if I were him today I would have pulled over for a minute to let cars behind me catch up to the women’s car rather than having to pass both of us unsafely}.
BUT, after following them for a while while people pass and honk, the women turn off into a side street. As they turn, he punches the gas to pass them. Except they turned in the wrong place, and realising it they simply swerve back onto the road.
The guy of course has to swerve away, gets hit by a car coming the other direction, and is killed.
Then we saw his family all sad. Either that, or he survived, but his family all died — I can’t remember, I just remember that it was very sad, and all because he didn’t give himself that extra few seconds to make sure the crazy drivers were really out of his harm’s way.
As a big fan of defensive driving (I used to teach it), I agree with you. It may be that the white truck could have done more. But, again, I’ve seen nothing that says he “sped up”. All this happened in an instant. I would like to think I would have observed that the red truck was getting himself into trouble. But there was a lot going on to both the right and left of the white truck driver.
I think we only disagree on the extent of culpability to assign to the red truck driver. In my mind, he caused the accident because he didn’t perform a safe maneuver when he pulled onto the shoulder. Whatever other drivers did, his action caused the accident.