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comment by cgod
cgod  ·  4463 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ask Hubski: Have you ever been in a car accident when you are the driver?

I have been in at least three accidents when it was my fault, all when I was a dumb teen. No one got hurt. I have been in several accidents when I wasn't at fault.

Two of the accidents where I wasn't at fault were when I stopped on a yellow in Michigan, I believe that yellow means speed up in that state.

One of the accidents when I wasn't at fault involved a guy going over 40 on a 25 mph street when I was backing out. He took the turn and put the pedal to the metal on a residential street filled with parked cars. It cut his wheels in half when he careened over the curb, he didn't have a seat belt on, he was badly injured but I never found out how bad. There was no way to know how fast he was going but the damage to his car and the other cars he flew off into was pretty severe. My car wasn't damaged very badly. I always felt like that accident was kinda my fault, but at the same time there is a reason that residential street has a 25 mile an hour speed limit and there was very little visibility for people coming out of driveways. The whole thing disturbed me more than any of the accidents where I was clearly at fault.





b_b  ·  4463 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I speed a lot on freeways, but almost never on residential streets. Things like that are all too common, and really what can you gain by going 10-20 mph faster for the limited distance on which you normally travel on residential roads? Probably not more than a few seconds. I don't think most people have done the calculation. Obviously, a few seconds of your time isn't worth killing a kid whose basketball inadvertently goes into the street. I wouldn't say that that accident was your fault, because at 25-30 mph you can react to almost anything in time.