That horrifying crash down near Stratford a couple of days ago has actually got some people calling for the banning of fifteen-passenger vans.
So, would two eight-passenger vans be any safer?
Statistically, there'd be twice as many opportunities for a collision.
It seems the driver of this van failed to stop at an intersection, and was Tee-boned by a flatbed transport truck.
The miracle here is that anybody survived.
There is some speculation that the driver of the westbound van might not have seen the stop sign due to glare from the late afternoon sun. We will probably never know this for a fact, but for sure that does happen - it did not so long ago in another terrible crash not far from where I live.
There are of course alternatives to simple stop signs - the addition of rumble strips in the road surface which alert drivers to an upcoming stop is a fairly cheap option with good 'return on investment'.
And may I switch into my 'roundabout rant' now?
It may be too expensive to convert every intersection in the province into a roundabout.
But every time a new intersection is built or major reconstruction work is being done on one, the 'default option' should always be a roundabout.
Because there's no way you can get Tee-boned at a roundabout, and Tee-bones are among the most difficult types of crash to survive, because there's so little 'crush space' in the sides of a vehicle to absorb the impact energy.
I mean, we can't afford to convert every railroad crossing into a 'grade separation' bridge or tunnel either, but especially in more heavily-populated areas, nobody could get away with building a 'level' railroad crossing any more.
And we kill a lot more people at road intersections than we do at railway crossings.
How does any municipality, or the province, get away with making any intersection anything BUT a roundabout? Does somebody have to start suing somebody? It's darn-near negligence.
The thing that stuns me about crashes like this is the incredible timing that's involved.
At Volvo's crash test facility in Gothenberg Sweden where they TRY to crash two cars into one another, an error of a fraction of a second in sending one car down the track can mean the cars miss each other entirely.
And Hollywood action movie directors spend weeks and hundreds of thousands of dollars for stunt drivers and coordinators, trying to set up crashes like this.
Yet out on the roads, we collectively manage to do it every single day...
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