 What do you do when you witness a near-accident, something that might well have caused an accident but didn't, yet?
You probably conclude that there's nothing you can
do. We face this every day when we get behind the wheel and
witness close calls and hazards that are almost always gone before we
can react. Too often, when an accident occurs, it might have been
averted if the dangerous, careless or illegal behaviour that caused it
had been reported earlier.
On a not atypical day this week, during one 45-minute early-rush-hour
drive, I witnessed the following:
-
Two
vehicles making lane-changes blind because they hadn't
bothered to scrape
or defrost their windows.
- A guy (all alone) in his SUV watching a movie
on his
DVD player while he was driving (I am not making this up!)
- A cement mixer and a semi-trailer from
two of
our community's biggest employers driving on no-truck routes,
slowing
traffic, gouging up the roads and prompting death-defying passing
maneuvers on
curves from cars trying to get by.
- A truck from one of Canada's "most admired
companies" pulling onto the expressway with huge sheets of
ice flying off
its roof, causing cars behind it to veer off in all directions and
nearly causing two accidents.
- A tailgater in the left lane of the
expressway
traveling at least 140 km and flashing his lights at cars ahead.
- A hugely
overloaded and unstable truck two lanes over, incapable of going more
than half
the expressway speed limit, weaving, its licence plate obscured with mud and wear, piled
high with
wooden pallets and other wood sticking dangerously out the rear,
unflagged.
None
of these actually caused an accident, at least not that I saw. So what
to do? The traffic news radio stations don't want to hear it. It's not
enough to warrant a 911 call.
I asked a couple of people I knew what they would do. They told me that they had been told:
- The
problem must be reported to the authority responsible for the
particular road -- but who knows who that is and what their phone
number is (and what their non-emergency office hours are, which is of
course never when these incidents occur)?
- You are generally discouraged from phoning in such information to the police; you have to report it in person to prove you're not a crank -- but by the time you can deliver your report to a police station, it's too late.
- You need a licence plate number and
driver details, even for trucks with lots of signage, for your report
to be accepted -- but with all the salt, many licence plates are
illegible, and trying to see who's driving a big truck is often
impossible or dangerous.
Our community has a unique program called RoadWatch
that provides a citizen report form for dangerous, careless and
aggressive driving, which requires you to hand-deliver or (once they
get to know you) fax in the form to the local police, regardless of who
has jurisdiction on the road. But I suspect they don't want to see
reports that occurred once you crossed the municipal border, and if
anyone knows where the closest police station is to every point in
their travels it's time they got a life.
So this is better than
nothing, and I plan to use it, but it's a local solution and far from
perfect. My guess is if I turned in five reports in one day like the
day I described above, I'd quickly be blacklisted.
We need
something better. How would you design it? It needs to be simple and
quick (i.e. something like a four-digit cellphone speed dial number),
and there needs to be a way to get it out to others in the area so they
can avoid and/or confirm the hazard, potentially reducing accidents and
giving the police multiple reports to get the offenders off the road.
It needs a mechanism to avoid abuse. And it needs to work across
jurisdictions. It doesn't even necessarily have to involve the police
directly (though they would probably benefit from monitoring it) -- it
could just as easily be a peer to peer solution.
Any imaginative ideas?
|
MADE IN CANADA
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