WRONG WAY!

[Valentinian]

I really hope this didn't turn into literal roadkill... we checked the traffic reports afterwards and there were a couple of serious accidents that might have been related, one fatal.

We (me, husband, two nieces being 'borrowed' for a shopping trip) were driving home from spending Christmas with the family yesterday afternoon. Fairly long drive, nearly home, southbound on a divided highway about to enter my home city. There's an onramp coming up, and a light-blue car waiting at the end of it (stupid, you shouldn't stop there, it's a merge at speed) angled as if the driver wants to cut directly across the slow lane to get into the passing lane.

The car in the slow lane goes past, I go past in the fast lane, and the light blue car pulls out and turns to head north in the southbound fast lane. Oncoming cars start flashing their lights and getting the hell out of the blue car's way, but it beetles on obliviously.


Me: "Wait, what the hell are they-- they're going the wrong way!"

Husband: "Shit, she is!" (He'd got a good look at the driver as we went past, it was an elderly woman.)

Niece: "What do we do?!"

Me: "CALL THE COPS. My phone's in the console, unlock code is (blah), call the police!"

Husband: *gets phone unlocked, goes into contacts* "Uh, where's-- don't you have the police general line saved?"

Me: "Only for (suburb we live in). This counts as an emergency, call 000, never mind the other line!"


So the police got called, they were of course very interested and got all the relevant details (it's a good thing my husband was the one calling because he's way better than me at explaining locations), and we spent the rest of the drive home speculating on which police force would go looking for her (we'd just crossed the state border and she was heading back towards it).

Really hope they found her fast, or she realised what she was doing and got turned around, and that neither of the accidents we heard about had anything to do with it.

[notalwaysright]

(He'd got a good look at the driver as we went past, it was an elderly woman.)

It's sad, I think I read somewhere that most people who merge the wrong way on the highway are either elderly or drunk. Every once in a while people get all "oh, there should be more signs!" But the article said that signs wouldn't really help the people who end up doing this.

I once was behind someone at the onramp to the highway, and they came to a dead stop, looking over their shoulder. Thankfully it was a calm stretch of highway, but I was really

[EvilEmpryss]

There's an onramp coming up, and a light-blue car waiting at the end of it (stupid, you shouldn't stop there, it's a merge at speed)....

I saw this happen today on a road trip to visit the MiL. Two lanes coming down to merge on a highway, and the guy in the car nearest the highway traffic came to a dead stop, even though he had plenty of lane left to get up to speed before he would be forced to merge. All I saw in passing was a row of cars about plowing their noses into the road as they came to screeching halts behind him.

If someone is that afraid to drive, they shouldn't be driving anymore.

[Kogarashi]

If someone is that afraid to drive, they shouldn't be driving anymore.

Or they're a student, but that's generally why cars with such newbie drivers have signs on them warning others.

I know I've mentioned this on here before, but I've done this exactly once. It was in Driver's Ed, and luckily the highway in question was a back-country highway so traffic was extremely light (I'd stopped because there was an 18-wheeler in the near lane that hadn't merged over and I got nervous). The teacher corrected me, got us on the highway, and then gave the four of us in the car a lecture on why you should never ever stop at the end of an on-ramp. I don't think any of us ever did after that point, either.

[eltf177]

The elderly scare me too. A while back I personally witnessed a horrible crash.

It's a 4-lane road with a high dirt berm dividing them. The berm is not continuous as there are drains in spots, these have guardrails running from berm to berm which are buried in the berm sides.

I'm in the right lane heading eastbound, there's a huge SUV in the left lane a few car lengths in front of me. All of a sudden it starts to drift to the left. It doesn't stop, and I'm really starting to panic. I stomp my gas just as the SUV _slams_ into a guardrail and flips over it. Luckily I got past just as the SUV flipped. Several people behind us stop. I can't but call 911.

I later read there was an elderly couple in the SUV, the woman who was driving supposedly fell asleep. Her passenger was severely injured and the entire road in both directions was closed for several hours for a medi-vac helicopter, vehicle removal and accident investigation.

Scared me out of several years growth...

[Minflick]

We lived down in Orange County, CA, for a while, years back. Husband worked very close to Leisure World, which at the time was the largest retirement community on the West Coast. Huge thing. Locals called it Seizure World, because on any given day, somebody would be at the wheel and have a stroke, or heart attack and have an accident. Ambulances were dirt common around the perimeter of it. Or, less awful, they'd stop for the red light that was 3 signals ahead, where the one they were AT was still green. We learned quickly to not drive in that neighborhood if it wasn't necessary, it was just too risky and frightening. I'd rather drive in heavy down town traffic than that neck of the woods.

That said, Mom drove about 4-5 years longer than she should have. I wrote the DMV 2 times and they did nothing. It wasn't until I moved her into assisted living after her 2nd hip replacement that I could take her keys and keep them. In that 4-5 year span, she had come to a stop on a 2 lane highway in front of loaded farm big rigs hauling produce [with me and 2 of my children in the car], run her car into the back of an SUV and had no clue where the car came from ["I hit oil, my brakes failed, they cut me off"], crashed the next car into something and had a $3000 repair bill to the front end of the car. I had long quit letting her drive me or my kids around, but I was very glad when we got her off the road!

[paxillated]

That reminds me to do what my mother did, and ask my doctor to tell me when I should stop driving.

My cousin E. always stopped at the bottom of the on-ramp. That's what my uncle taught her to do. My mother (born in 1916), as a teenager, was thrilled to death when Uncle gave her a ride in his brand-new Ford model A convertible. Yep.

And then there was my old aunt K. She never stopped driving; one of my cousins said she got in 12 to 16 accidents a year. Thank God they were minor. She didn't drive on the freeways because they were too scary. Hip, hip, hooray! I'm sure she would have turned left onto the freeway at some point, since she learned to drive long before there were any freeways, so one always turned left to go that way. (My mother and a couple of friends drove from Washington, DC to San Francisco - around 2800 miles, for you Europeans - and most of the way was dirt.)

[wolfie]

(My mother and a couple of friends drove from Washington, DC to San Francisco - around 2800 miles, for you Europeans - and most of the way was dirt.)

Between the 2 World Wars, a junior officer named Eisenhower was assigned the task of taking a motor convoy cross-country to see how feasible it would be in the event that a war made it necessary. After D-Day, a general named Eisenhower saw the extensive hard-surface high-speed Autobahn network in Germany. After WW2, a President named Eisenhower decided that the U.S. needed a similar system, and started the Interstate highway system. Yep, same guy for all 3.

[eltf177]

Yep, we can thank President Eisenhower for the US Interstate System. Which served two purposes:

1) Helped the average US citizen move around the country much more easily, and started the travel boom which continues to this day.

2) Was available to move troops and supplies around the country during the Cold War. As an added bonus sections could be used as runways (the Germans did this, their airfields were bombed out of existence late war and the Luftwaffe used long stretches of the Autobahn for their jets.).

[Chromatix]

Finland and Switzerland also do this. Part of their "credible defence" against potentially *far* superior potential invaders.

In Finland's case, that's *Russia*.

[wolfie]

One I've heard in connection with Switzerland is the (probably apocrophal) conversation between Swiss and German diplomats:

G: You've got a million citizens in your militia? What would you do if we sent a 5 million man army against you?

S: Each of my men would fire five shots and go home.

[Jay 2K Winger]

Finland and Switzerland also do this. Part of their "credible defence" against potentially *far* superior potential invaders.

In Finland's case, that's *Russia*.

In Finland's case, they also had Simo Häyhä, who practically won the Winter War single-handed.

[mjr]

I've seen people get toward the end of an entrance ramp, decide traffic was too slow (especially if there was an accident on the freeway), and back down the ramp...