Darwinism on the Road

This Blog Post was originally published on the platform "writelier" (formerly "co-writers" and "200wordsaday"). Sadly the blogging platform was discontinued. I downloaded all my blog posts and prepared them to be republish them here.

As I was browsing Reddit today I stumbled upon a great comment on /r/IdiotsInCars.

You can find the original post here and the mentioned comment here.

I have written about driving a few weeks back. The particular comment let me think about it again. I am going to quote the main part that made me think about the said article:

"[...] There's a great deal of our population that should have Darwin'd themselves into an early grave, yet continue living solely because of others' vigilance. Then they go on driving in the same fashion, likely oblivious to the what happened. [...]"

I didn't see many car accidents in my paramedic lifetime, but I have encountered enormous amounts of situations described in this quote.

As Ambulance driver I have to look way more on the other cars than I have to on the one I'm driving. Often people drive like they won their driving licence (/r/IdiotsInCars) is probably the best example for it.

But let me tell you one thing, as soon as you (as Ambulance vehicle) show up behind such a driver, with sirens and lights on, they start to do some really strange things. All of them happen unexpectedly.

To give you a small insight, I had the following situations happen to me:

- An Emergency Break - If I hadn't kept distance I would have crashed the ambulance right into the breaking car.

- Acceleration - Sometimes while still behind them or worse, while overtaking them.

- Driving so far to the right, they almost hit the guard rail or bounding stakes.