Predictably enough, if you don’t pull over onto the emergency stopping lane after bringing your car to a complete halt on the motorway, bad things are going to happen.
Visibility is a very important thing in traffic. Sometimes, it’s easy to overlook considering how good drivers have become in scanning the roads using their plethora of mirrors and on-board gadgets. But there are instances when your reaction time is tested and your frontal visibility impaired by a larger vehicle which suddenly veers onto the other lane.
Say hello to your “Kodak Moment”, as some would put it. This guy clearly dropped the ball and reacted too late, but what would you have done? The obvious answer is to swerve just like the small truck because in theory, there was plenty of time to react.
But what about this particular scenario? What the driver did was perhaps painfully human. He did not pay full attention to what was happening ahead of him and that can happen to just about anyone. Your eyes are drawn somewhere else for a split second – that’s all it takes.
If that’s the case, deciding whether to follow that truck and steer left is a slightly more difficult internal process. You’re in a situation where you don’t anticipate the variables, which means that you’re left with limited reaction and attention span.
While this crash was easily avoidable and the driver should have reacted as soon as he saw the truck slow down (again, plenty of time), once you find yourself thrown in the middle of that situation, making a decision becomes way harder than it looks.
Still, the moral of the story is to just pull over to the shoulder of the road so that you don’t put anyone’s life at risk.