"RoseGarden" - - - - - - - from - nscave

I have written many times about traffic safety, about drivers, snow removal procedures and the fact that I do the best I can following the rules due to my heavy vehicle instructor background. Our province recently passed a law making talking on a cell phone while driving illegal. I am all for traffic safety when it works.

Today I witnessed the worst I have seen in many miles of road use. An event by a person that should definitely know better, a person that without question should be setting the example, a driver that should know without any doubt that what they were doing was illegal.

A mistake of one person shouldn't reflect on the whole. Yet this one event lessened my faith in authority to a degree I never experienced before.

I was exiting a high speed highway via a single lane off ramp that has a sharp curve to the right. It was a blind curve with trees that you cannot see around. Fortunately I drive a large SUV that allows a high viewpoint, and I had reduced my speed to a reasonable level. 

What am I upset about? Suddenly I meet a federal police car reversing towards me down the ramp in the centre of the lane. Yes it had all the flashing LED lights on the roof, in the back windows and the fancy strobe tail lights. That doesn't mean much when it is reversing towards you and you are on a curve traveling at 50 kmph towards it and can not see it until a car length away. Because I am always expecting the unusual, I was ready and avoided a crash by going around the offending police vehicle.

The pavement was wet and I could see by the tracks the driver had backed from the very beginning of the ramp to more than its half way point where we had met on the curve. Why? I don't know. There was an older gentleman walking along the ditch of the off ramp as if looking for bottles or something, and his car was parked in the triangle area at the top of the ramp. Maybe he was parked illegally, but not doing anything as illegal as the reversing flashing sedan.

At any rate if you - or I got caught doing that, we would be charged, fined and lose points off our licence with no argument. If there was a collision there would be an argument as to who was doing what.

I used to carry a camera in my vehicle at all times. I will be doing that again. I could start my own series: "You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet!"

-=One Day At A Time=-

This work by NSCAVE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License