Have you ever been in a driving situation that you later deemed as being a close call ? Close calls are usually (but not always) characterized by reckless driving in which you are the driver or you are the victim of someone else s poor driving habits. In those situations, however, there are no injuries to report, unless having an irregular heart rate counts.
Usually when you are getting into your vehicle and are about to get on the roadways, it isn t so much your driving that you will have to worry about. Rather, it is how other people drive that you will have to be on the lookout and really pay attention. Often times, however, we aren t quite as vigilant as we perhaps should be. Maybe we ve taken our attention off of the road for a split second so that we can fiddle around with the radio station or fix our rear view mirror. Perhaps we are so engrossed in conversation, either with someone in our vehicle or with someone on the phone, that we aren t as careful as we could be. Other times, maybe we have children and we are trying to hard to multitask between keeping an eye on what they are doing in the back seat versus what the other drivers are doing on the road. Whatever it is, we need to realize that when we are the driver behind the wheel of a moving vehicle, our eyes need to be around us searching, anticipating just in case we have to make a snap decision, a quick maneuver in order to avoid a collision.
My own story begins when I was on a road trip home to New York. I m used to going it alone, having made the drive from North Carolina several dozens of times. But this time, I decided to leave in the middle of the night just after 12 a.m., in order to avoid the traffic. It was raining, and it was also early Saturday morning. Unbeknown to me, I had failed to realize that this would be prime time for drunk drivers to be out and about. I was only two hours into my trip, in Virginia, and there was no one on the Interstate except for me and a tractor trailer truck that had just passed me in the right lane. Suddenly, I noticed that there was a small car several miles back. I didn t think anything of it, but when I glanced up only a few moments later, they were significantly closer, which meant that they had to have been flying down the road. I instantly realized that they were driving way too fast for the conditions, and despite the fact that there was no one else really on the Interstate, I slowed down in my lane significantly to really allow them to go past me on my left. Up ahead to my right was the truck. As soon as the tiny car sped past me on my left, a millisecond later, they hydroplaned and spun out, slamming against the guard wall and bouncing back, right across my lane and into the tractor trailer that was to my right.
If I hadn t slowed down when I did, there is absolutely no doubt that I would ve been struck, and struck pretty badly. The point of this story is that when you are driving, no matter how good of a driver you are or how in control of your vehicle you are, it doesn t mean anything if you don t exercise good judgment.
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