Topic: What's the stupidest, most suicidal thing you've seen someone do on the road?

[Schmengie]

 I was southbound on Hwy.97 between Oyama and Winfield heading to Kelowna for a family get-together. This is a narrow 2-lane section of the road and as I came around a blind right-hand bend, there was an Argo Road Maintenance truck parked on the shoulder on the other side. I almost drove right over a worker who was standing there in my lane trying to fill a pothole with a shovel, no warning signs, no safety pylons, NOTHING!!. I swerved onto the shoulder, my heart pounding in my chest and missed him by no more than 5 feet. At the same instant he ran across the opposite lane to his truck, totally oblivious to oncoming traffic. The idiot wasn't even wearing a safety vest, not that it would've done him much good if I'd hit him. I came within a split second of taking this brain-dead moron out of the gene pool and damned near gave myself a heart attack in the process.

I've seen people working for this contractor do stupid things before, but this takes the cake. It won't do any good, but as soon as I settle down a little, I'm calling them. 

[Triple Bob]

I saw someone come flying round a bend that tightened up up him, lifted off, and spun the entire car right round, missing a van coming in the opposite direction and ended up backwards on a patch of grass near the road.  The idiot nearly wrote off the silly orange car!

 

[initial_D]

I saw someone come flying round ...

Maybe you shouldn't look in the review mirror. 

[CSH]

Guelph Line noth of 401 two lanes. Mostly a 80Kmph road where people usually drive 100Kmph or more. The road is not hilly but has its share of ups and downs.
Last month i was driving on Guelph line and a old lady had stopped her car right in the middle of the road in the section where the road is lower so it was impossible to see her. I was driving at around 110kmph, saw her at the last moment and braked really really hard and missed her by a few inches.
She was asking from directions form someone on the other side of the road who has pulled over on the shoulder and was fine..
That was close...

[Triple Bob]

Guelph Line noth of 401 two lanes. Mostly a 80Kmph road where people usually drive 100Kmph or more. The road is not hilly but has its share of ups and downs.
Last month i was driving on Guelph line and a old lady had stopped her car right in the middle of the road in the section where the road is lower so it was impossible to see her. I was driving at around 110kmph, saw her at the last moment and braked really really hard and missed her by a few inches.
She was asking from directions form someone on the other side of the road who has pulled over on the shoulder and was fine..
That was close...

AFAIK that's an 80kph road. So if you were going 30kph over the limit then isn't it more your fault than hers?  If you ignore the speed limits then you should always be able to stop in the distance you can see.

[initial_D]

Park at the middle of the road will be at fault on any road.

[Triple Bob]

Park at the middle of the road will be at fault on any road.

I wasn't talking from an insurance point of view, I'm talking about personal responsibility when deciding to drive at high speed.  If you're gonna speed, drive responsibly.

[ktm525]

On the trans-Canada through the BC Rockies I was following  a loaded semi pulling a B-train. It drifted to the right and the tires started to climb a concrete barrier. The semi was almost on one side of his tires (Dukes of Hazard style), almost rolled and then came crashing back down. At about 120 km/h. I tink the driver fell asleep.

[CSH]

Guelph Line noth of 401 two lanes. Mostly a 80Kmph road where people usually drive 100Kmph or more. The road is not hilly but has its share of ups and downs.
Last month i was driving on Guelph line and a old lady had stopped her car right in the middle of the road in the section where the road is lower so it was impossible to see her. I was driving at around 110kmph, saw her at the last moment and braked really really hard and missed her by a few inches.
She was asking from directions form someone on the other side of the road who has pulled over on the shoulder and was fine..
That was close...

AFAIK that's an 80kph road. So if you were going 30kph over the limit then isn't it more your fault than hers?  If you ignore the speed limits then you should always be able to stop in the distance you can see.

Agreed..

That road is deserted for most parts.  110Kmph may be a little fast but 100 is standard on that road.
I have seen semi's overtake cars driving at 90Kmph on that road

[initial_D]

Park at the middle of the road will be at fault on any road.

I wasn't talking from an insurance point of view, I'm talking about personal responsibility when deciding to drive at high speed.  If you're gonna speed, drive responsibly.

Expect the Unexpected?   Animal crossing? People Playing Hockey? Police's Donut Fund Campaign? GrandMa's Temp Parking Stall?

[Trainman]

Traveling down the Snowshed Hill on the Coq a few years back, early May, with a late snow fall.  Hill is posted at 8% grade, so is rather steep.  It was very slick.  Had a Mercedes sedan pass us, then spin out, doing 2 360's but not hitting anything.  We passed them, they then passed us again    You can guess what happened: another spin, in front of a Greyhound bus and ending up pointing the wrong way, up against the center divider, after giving the divider a real good thump to boot.  Some people just don't learn from their first mistake I guess.

We heard on the radio later that the Hill had been closed due to several accidents.  Well duh!

I have also seen some real eye openers re road workers and safety.  Just real bizarre ones.

[Blue01]

Last September my wife and I were on CA 36 heading east to Redding on our Gold Wing.  On one of the few straights, maybe 150 to 200 yds long, a white van came around the corner towards us.  All of a sudden he swerved into our lane and stayed there.  With nowhere to go, not even a shoulder on the road, I just hit the brakes and rode the edge of the pavement for about 2 or 3 seconds.  Then the jerk swerved back into his own lane, with a big grin on his face as he went by.
This all took about 3 or 4 seconds and my wife missed most of it, thankfully.  All she knew is that I slammed on the brakes and she was thrown into my back, then she saw the van go by.
It took me almost an hour to settle down.  All this happened on one of the twistiest roads in California.
One of my scariest moments on a bike.

[joelietz]

A friend did a couple hundred k of a 600km trip through the rockies in the winter with a broken wiper motor in a blizzard by following the lights of the car in front of him. Needless to say the same person had a habit of doing 150k on windy forested highways while eating a big mac and sipping a coke and driving a standard.

[Zombie]

This isn't me and it does make far a crazy video but if those cables break your in for a big mess.
I'm not sure what the point was either.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgudrRyXcyQ&feature=player_embedded

[vdk]

A 3series cutting in and out of heavy traffic. I think the driver thought he's in an autocross, he/she was really pushing that car.

[PJungnitsch]

Took a night bus in India that drove without lights. Read later that the theory was it made it easier to see the lights of oncoming vehicles. Anyway, our bus is laboring in the dark up a big hill behind a gravel truck when our driver gets impatient and pulls out to pass, of course straight into the path of another bus coming down the hill without lights. All three big vehicles do a seemingly impossible 'smerge' on the narrow road and we somehow avoid a grisly death.

Farther down the way traffic is held up by something, the highway is backed up for miles. Our driver gets impatient again and cuts into the empty opposing lane, gleefully racing down past all number of stopped vehicles. Of course halfway down traffic opposing traffic restarts, we are headed again into a head on collision at highway speed. And reasonably enough, the traffic in the lane we were busy passing refuses to let him back in. Many horns and waving fists later, we squeeze back into the correct side of the highway.

[Sival]

On a merging lane of a 100 Km/h highway, an old woman in front of me decided that to merge safely, you must NOT at any cost match the speed of traffic then look for a hole to insert yourself, but instead come to a complete stop and keep looking in your mirrors until you can see no car coming so that you have then to merge into the highway from a stop. Luckily for her, there was enough space on the shoulder to pass her car or I and others would probably have slammed in her rear.

As a honorary mention, I'd like to mention the typical guy in a truck swerving in pretty dense traffic at 70-80 Km/h to save a few seconds off of their travel time. The guy in question this time misjudged the size of his truck and the space available to him and rammed into the front bumper of a Dodge Grand Caravan, disintegrating the front panels on the side he hit and tearing off the front bumper. I can still see the pieces in the air after the collision. The guy in the truck didn't stop, he just sped away and kept swerving in and out of lanes. I didn't stick around to see what happened to the Caravan, as the safest thing to do was to continue at the same speed. It wasn't particularly "suicidal" but it was goddamn stupid and he gets bonus points for actually causing an accident.

There was also those kids in a truck in stop-and-go traffic on two lanes (the one where you're stopped 1 minute, then you can move at 30 Km/h for 10 seconds then you're stopped another minute), where, seeing that the car in front of them didn't fill the space in front of it fast enough to their taste, they accelerated with wide-open throttles to make a dangerous maneuver where they changed lane in front of someone in the right lane, forcing them to brake hard, then changed again to the left lane to get to the space that was in front of the car that was previously in front of them and they absolutely wanted to get it and shave 2 seconds off their trip. Worse than that, they had the gall to honk at the car in front for not speeding up and closing the space fast enough even if there was no chance of it being taken by anyone and getting there fast would make no difference. Again, not suicidal due to the slow speeds involved, but just maddeningly stupid.

[johngenx]

Riding a motorcycle with the GPS indicating a ground speed of 325km/h?

[Flinter]

During my university years I was driving north up the Northern Peninsula of NL on a dark winter night to visit my family. Shortly after passing one of exits off the highway to one of the many small communities, I suddenly came up on a large cardboard box in my lane. Not knowing what the heck it was, I swerved to avoid the box and then stopped to go back and throw it off the highway.

While reversing back to the box I see a person getting up off the highway from behind the box. There was some guy loaded drunk who had decided to take a little nap on the highway. In the box there was a half empty 40 oz bottle of rum and a half dozen rabbits that the chap had snared that day. What a horrifying feeling came over me when I realized how close I came to running over someone at 100km/hr.

I carried the guy back to the nearest gas station and called the RCMP. While at the gas station I ran into a guy who was just about to leave driving a big 5 ton truck. He said the guy would have been road kill if I hadn't come up on him first.

Sad thing was the guy was probably too drunk to remember how close he was to getting killed that night.

[rrocket]

Between the Supra and my sportbikes, I could fill pages here........