Collisions

Virtually every crash scene that I attended during my policing career featured at least one good samaritan. These were people who stopped to help another in a time of need, often at some risk to themselves. This kind of selflessness is encouraged with protection granted by law in British Columbia.

This Dutch Hyundai Velostar advertising video (subtitled in English) could really make you think about which side of the vehicle you exit on. In this case, the Hyundai concept is that you cannot exit on the driver's side because there is no rear passenger door there, forcing passengers to exit on the safe side.

Leslie Plummer was riding her motorcycle on Rutland Road in the vicinity of an intersection near two schools in Kelowna, B.C. Shaun Walter was walking diagonally across Rutland Road passing the front of a large truck which obscured him from Ms. Plummer's sight. Without looking, Mr. Walter walked into the path of Ms. Plummer's motorcycle and was struck. Both were seriously injured in the mishap.

When a vehicle is in yaw it is rotating around a vertical axis through it's center of mass. The long, curved Y shaped marks left by the tires on the pavement were characteristic of this motion. If they were striated and of constantly diminishing radius they were of great interest for collision reconstruction because the vehicle's speed could be determined from them.

Right or wrong, the pedestrian is always the loser in a collision with a motor vehicle. Nowhere in British Columbia is that more apparent than in Vancouver. So far this year, the pedestrian death count has already exceeded that of the entire year of 2010.

I was driving along no.6 in Richmond with a girlfriend and reached into my bag for smokes and an oncoming car came so I swerved a bit to the right and hit a hydro pole because it was so close to the shoulder and I ended up into a ditch. I wasn't speeding, it was a single car collision and nobody got hurt. Needless to say the car was a total loss.

A run off the road crash is generally a single vehicle event that results in a large number of injuries and fatalities for the occupants. While this is American data, it is quite likely that our Canadian experience is very similar, meaning that 95% of our run off the road crashes involve some kind of driver error.

I often ask if anyone has been directly affected by a collision in the past year when I am making a presentation to a group. I can see people thinking about it and then a few hands may tentatively rise. My answer usually surprises them and it may surprise you as well.

An interesting idea from Europe! You can plan your trip to avoid the most dangerous highways and choose to take the ones that are the best at looking after you if a crash does occur. The European Road Safety Atlas shows how to assess your risk by coloring the roads shown in the atlas from green, the most safe to black, the least.

The case of Chang v Alcuaz examines an intersection collision where the drivers approached each other at right angles. Both claim that they were facing a green light when they proceeded into the intersection. It is interesting to see how the judge determines which driver had actually faced a green traffic signal.