Wrong-Way Drivers

This is actually going to be one of the tougher articles to write for me, and that is because there is no for sure, straight-up answer that will work every time this is encountered. And it’s encountered a lot. Just in the metro Phoenix area, there have been 245 incidents of wrong way drivers since 2014 according to the local Fox affiliate. And if you take a quick look at your calendar, that is 245 incidents of people driving the wrong way on a road in about a year. It is absolutely ridiculous that so many people can make such a boneheaded mistake. Let’s see what we can do about it to keep you safe.

The first thing I’m going to recommend is what I always recommend, and that is to make sure you are driving in a way that is focused and concentrated.  And remember, focus and concentration on the road isn’t just seeing the road, but being able to anticipate what can happen on the road. A driver with focus can potentially spot a wrong way driver before they are a menace. So first thing, make sure you are looking far ahead on the road you are on, that you are spotting changes in the flow of traffic and you can tell what they mean for you, and that you aren’t distracted while driving by people, music, phones or billboards as much as humanly possible. Having said that, I know that being 100% focused is pretty much impossible, but do your best to make sure that what you are concentrating on is the road and what is going on there, not anything else.

What’s next? Well this is where it gets tricky. If you remember your high school physics, two objects going towards each other at speed reach the same point pretty quickly, and this is even more true when we are talking highway or freeway speeds (speeds of 55 miles per hour or more).  The reason it gets tricky here is that it is very likely that you won’t spot the wrong way driver until it’s too late to do something about it. Your brain is not going to register headlights coming in your direction on your side of the road as a wrong way driver until it processes all other possibilities, and this is going to depend in large part on your driving experience. What I believe happens to most people in these situations is that they possibly recognize that there is a wrong way driver, but by the time they take action, it’s too late to avoid a collision or they happen to try and get to the same side of the road as the wrong way driver. You have seen this multiple times. How many times have you bumped into someone (physically, not with our car), and then you try to go around them, but both of you chose the same side, then you try again, and both of you choose the opposite side? I know it’s happened to me more times than I can count. The same thing can happen while driving, but there, the consequences of bumping into someone are much more severe.

One possible solution is to pull to your right and get off the road if you see a wrong way driver.  I say this because it will be the opposite instinctive reaction of the wrong way driver. That driver, if he or she comes to their senses and tries to get off the road they are going the wrong way on, will pull to their right to get off, because that is what everyone is told to do if they have an issue with their car. For you though, that wrong way driver’s right is your left, so avoid the left lanes, and get as far right as possible. Drivers are almost branded into believing that the left lanes are sacrosanct avenues for speed and passing, and are not to be touched upon pain of death unless you are going really fast. Most drivers don’t drive in the left lanes, and it’s likely a wrong way driver won’t as well, so that could give you an advantage. So solution number one: pull off to your right as far as possible if you notice a wrong way driver. Once you do that, call the police and report the wrong way driver so no one gets hurt by them. It’s not a foolproof solution, because we all know that people do still drive in the left lanes, even if traffic laws tell them not to, but it is the best solution if solutions are limited.

There is one even better solution, and that is to limit the time you are on the road during the night. I cannot think of a single wrong way driver incident that I’ve ever heard of that took place during the daytime. Normally, they all seem to happen sometime between midnight and dawn. If you aren’t on the roads during this time, you can’t get into an accident. It’s as simple as that. Having said that, I know that there are times where you run out of baby formula and have to go to the store at 2 A.M. or you work a second shift job that lets out at 1230 in the morning.  You have no choice but to drive during the night. If that’s the case with you, be extra vigilant with your driving. Try to avoid running errands when you get off work. Get home as soon as possible, don’t take the long way home, get off the roads as soon as possible so you can’t be another victim of a wrong way driver.

Now let’s put the shoe on the other foot. What do you do if YOU are the wrong way driver? How would you know? Well first off, pay attention to the road signs. If you are driving at night, you should see signs that are very bright because road signs are made to reflect headlights. This is especially true of freeways, where most wrong-way driver incidents seem to occur. If the signs you see all look like they have been turned backwards towards you, that’s a good sign that you are on the wrong side of the road. Pull over to your right immediately and call the police. Another good indicator are the reflectors on the road. Reflectors on freeways are designed to reflect red if a driver approaches them going the wrong way. If you see nothing but bright red reflectors shining back at you as you drive, you are going the wrong way. The picture above this paragraph shows what the wrong way reflectors look like if you were to drive the wrong way. Notice how they look like a car's stop lights. That should give you a good indication that you something is wrong and that you need to stop.  Pull over to your right, and call the police. Other things that can clue you in to being on the wrong side of the road are off ramps, rest stops, and road signs. On the vast majority of roads, these things are on the right side of the road. Some road signs and off ramps are on the left side of the road, but the majority are found on the right. If you notice that the bulk of these things are on the left side as you drive down, you’re on the wrong side of the road. Pull over and call the police.

Now, why do I suggest you call the police if you notice that you’re on the wrong side of the road and pull over? It’s because you will need some help going in the right direction. You should NOT just make a quick U-turn in the middle of the freeway to get yourself in the right direction- It could be catastrophic because you could be broadsided by multiple cars. Remember, if you were driving the wrong way and pulled over to your right, you are on the left side of the road facing the direction of traffic. A U-turn would have to be done turning into traffic, and that would not be expected of regular drivers, and could be as bad as driving the wrong way. A police officer can stop or slow traffic so that you can make a safe U-turn and get headed back in the right direction.

Wrong way drivers are a very tough problem to solve. They are incredibly dangerous, and incredibly hard to spot, which makes being focused while driving even more important. Remember, if you spot one, get as far off to the right as possible, and call the police. An even better solution though is to not be on the road in the early morning hours when a lot of wrong-way incidents seem to happen. While these suggestions aren’t foolproof, they can help you survive if you spot a wrong way driver. Until next time…

Slip Sliding Away....

There is a new kind of criminal around, and they are called sliders. These sliders are called that because of the slippery way they slide into someone's car to grab a purse, remove it from the car, and take off before the owner of the purse is even aware of what's going on. So female drivers, this video is particularly focused on you, but not just you. Sliders could conceivably open a door to take a purse, a cell phone, a laptop bag, basically anything of value. Take a look at the video below:

As you can see, these guys are good. They prey on unsuspecting people who are busy pumping gas, checking texts, or just daydreaming as they pump gas into their car. Here is how you avoid becoming the next slider victim.

First off, you must be focused and pay attention when you are fueling. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security by the monotony of waiting for the tank to fill. While most people are daydreaming at the pump, other people are driving through the gas station unsafely, they are coming close to hitting cars, and still others could be planning robberies. If you are fueling obliviously, you won't see any of this, and your chances of being the next victim go up tremendously. So first thing, be focused and aware of your surroundings. If something looks out of place, don't dismiss it out of politeness. Pay attention. These criminals thrive off of the obliviousness of customers paying attention to texts and daydreaming while fueling rather than paying attention to what's going around them. If you are a person who pays attention, you might be able to see a slider coming, and save yourself, and possibly others, the pain and hassle of a theft.

The next thing you can do to protect yourself from sliders is to keep all of your doors locked. Yes, I said all. What I normally do when I fuel up is I take the keys out of the car, lock all the doors while I'm outside fueling, and keep the car locked up until I'm done. This has a few advantages. First off, it secures all of your belongings. Next, it keeps you from accidentally starting the car or moving away while fueling. Lastly, it secures you from having someone get in your car while you aren't looking. This can be a hard thing to do with automatic door locks, which unlock all the doors at one time if you choose to have the car do that. You will have to remember to press the lock button again on either the car door or the fob to lock everything up once you're out. It's easy to overlook, but if everyone of those victims (with the exception of the one whose window was rolled down) had done just this simple step, most of those thefts would not have happened because the slider isn't going to waste time picking a lock or smashing a window, as it exposes them too much.  If you have a young child in the car, I would adjust this to maybe locking up the entire car except the door by the child, or lock the door and roll the window down next to the child so you can talk to the child while you fuel the car. 

The next thing I would do is get in the habit of not leaving my purse (or phone, or laptop bag, or tablet) out for the world to see. I would take my purse and put it behind the driver's seat any time I left the vehicle. This is even more important if you can't lock all the doors for whatever reason. Remember, these sliders are not after confrontation as the person in the video stated: they are after your valuables. Just like with a car or a house, the more difficult and time consuming you make getting your goods, the more likely a thief is going to look elsewhere for an easier target. Placing your valualbes where it's harder to get to will make you less attractive as a target.

Another possibility if you want to be as safe as possible from sliders is to carry the purse with you, although I wouldn't recommend that because you are then a target for purse snatchers. My advice is to leave the purse in the car. What I recommend is that you pull up to the gas pump with all the doors already locked (which is how you should be driving all the time anyways, but that's another article). Then, after stopping and turning off the engine, take out the card or cash you need for the gas, place the purse behind the driver's seat, get out of the car, close the door, lock the car up, making sure the keys are in your hand, and then fuel up. Do not display the money or the card: keep it in your pocket or out of sight any way you can. If this means that you have to bring your purse inside the store to pay so that you are not displaying money, then do so, but return it to the car and lock it up before you start fueling.  The number one tip for not getting robbed is to not display to a potential thief that you have anything on you worth robbing. One stumbling block for this strategy could be keys.  If your key chain is too large because of knick knacks or other things on it to allow you to quickly and efficiently take the keys out, consider taking some of the knick knacks off the key chain, or possibly attaching them to things like separate mail keys or other keys that you don't carry with you, but keep in the house. That way you keep your knick knacks, but they aren't preventing you from being secure in any way.

Near the end of the video, you saw people catch on to the sliders and attempt to confront them, but most were too late to do anything. If you catch a slider or see one, should you tackle them or try to apprehend them in any way? ABSOLUTELY NOT! These people are criminals, and even though the crimes committed in the video are not life threatening, they will in all likelihood not think twice if they had to drag you down the road or run you over to escape  to avoid going to prison. As you saw in the videos, most gas stations have excellent cameras. What you should do is try to make a mental note of the license plate and color and make of the car, and get this to police  if you are the victim of sliders or witness a slider theft. A good option is to get to your phone right away, and use the voice memo to record everything you can remember about the car, then play it back for police when they arrive. Above all though, don't be a hero apart from remembering some information and calling police. They are much better equipped than most people reading this blog to handle this kind of event.

If you remove yourself as a target, you will be less likely to be targeted for theft. You do this by keeping your doors locked, keeping your purse or valuables in a location that is hard for thieves to get to, and by being focused and aware of things that are out of place while you fuel up. This notion of slider theft is only going to get more pronounced the more media attention is given to it due to copy cat criminals, so if slides haven't hit your area yet, you can bet they soon will. If you fuel up your car in a focused way and remember to lock all your doors and place your belongings where they aren't easily accessible when you are out of the car, your chances of being a victim go down tremendously. Until next time...

Respect the Water

I found the above video today on Facebook. It shows someone driving along a rainy California highway, when all of a sudden water takes over the roadway, inexorably making it's way towards the car. The driver, seeing this, smartly puts his or her car in reverse, and backs away from the water, until he or she sees a place to turn around and get out of there, which they eventually do.

I have to say the comments for the above video, taken from KSL TV 5's Facebook page, were very interesting. Most people laughed this video off, basically saying it's no big deal and implying that the water wasn't very high, and should have been easily driven through. What was clear from that video was the absolute ignorance of the people commenting on the video, and the intelligence of whoever was driving that day. Here is what to do if you ever find yourself in that situation.

First off, a bit about flash floods. Flash floods, which is what was going on in this video, are floods that occur very quickly because of a large amount of rain has fallen nearby. The ground is unable to absorb the amount of rain that has fallen, and the valleys or washes that the rain would normally go through are not large enough to handle that much water. As a result, the water level rises very rapidly, and goes by very quickly, so that what was dry land a minute ago, can be a raging torrent five minutes later. People in the canyonlands of the American Southwest die regularly as a result of flash floods. If you doubt the danger of them, or have never heard of them, let me show you a couple of things. The first are some  pictures I took of Lower Antelope Canyon, which is a canyon near Page, Arizona.

Hopefully you can get a glimpse of how deep this canyon is. There are spots, such as the two I photographed above, where the canyon rim has to be close to 80 feet above the floor. That should mean that any water  that flows through there would stay at the bottom right? Not really, check out this video of a flash flood in the very same canyon I took the above photographs in. This flood was about two years before my visit:

Remember, the canyon floor is in some places 80 feet below the rim, yet the water that is running through it in this video is over the top of the rim. Also notice how fast the water is running through the canyon. Flash floods are no joke,  I have heard of stories of people getting caught in canyons just like Antelope Canyon when a flood hits. Sometimes they live, but usually they die. And if you needed another reminder about how fast the water goes, Craig Childs tells the story in his excellent book, A Secret History of Water, that when flash flood victims are found (which they many times aren't), they are completely naked. This isn't because they went skinny dipping, it's because the water literally ripped their clothes off. Hopefully that gives you some indication of the force of the water that can be found in a flash flood.

Ok, so what does this have to do with driving, or the original video? Well, knowing what you now know about flash floods, hopefully you can see why they are no joke, and why you shouldn't try to drive through them. Sure, in the first video, the water wasn't moving too fast in the beginning, and you might think your truck or car can make it though, but remember the hallmark of a flash flood, that first word: flash. They happen quickly, often without any warning at all. So the driver in the first video could have just driven through as he or she might have only seen that the water was only up to about the level of the car's lugnuts when he or she first saw the water. But as NOAA (the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ) reports, it only takes a foot of water to cause most vehicles to float, so the higher the water gets, the more the car and everyone in it are truly just passengers on a ride they don't want to be on. If the water is flowing quickly, they will be swept to wherever it's going, and that could mean pinned against a rock wall as the water rises, pushed over the bridge into a river, or swept away to tumble over and over  being struck by rocks and tree trunks. If you read the last sentence and found yourself wondering if those people would survive that ordeal, the answer is most likely no. The only way to truly assure yourself of survival is to respect flash floods and not enter into any area where there could be one.

The way you avoid the danger of flash floods or flooding in general is to first off be aware that they are possible. You can be miles away from the nearest canyon, like the driver in the first video was, and have a flood take over a road. Know that floods can happen, and don't drive unaware of the area around you. How many people noticed the large brush pile that was pushed up against the right side of the bridge as the driver went past it? That brush pile was put there by flood waters. If you see signs of a high water level, like that, be prepared to take quick action to avoid water and keep yourself safe. You very well might be able to drive past a bridge like that and never have the water enter the road, but being prepared for it means that you will be able to keep yourself, and the people you drive with, safe.

If you do see that water has entered the road, and it's rising, do what the above driver did, and get out of there. True, the water was low when he entered, but it rises quickly, especially if it's still raining. The driver in the first video did the right thing. He backed up until he could find a spot to turn around, then he got as far away as he could from the floodwaters. In case you are tempted to cross a flooded road or a  wash, remember that not only can it very likely cost you thousands of dollars in repair costs (the car's computer is normally located beneath the front passenger seat, if it  gets wet, it needs to be replaced, along with a good chunk of the car's electrical system. That bill will not be small), but if you get stuck and have to be pulled out by police, you will be fined in many states. Here in Arizona, we have something called the Stupid Motorist Law, which is a law which fines drivers who drive through a flooded wash, get stuck, and have to be pulled out by police or fire officials. The fine is very large, and very much not worth the extra time it might take you to wait or find another route.

The bottom line is to drive safely, and respect nature. No matter how large and heavy your vehicle, running water, especially flood waters, are larger and heavier. It is a battle you will most likely lose, so don't fight it. Respect flood waters, and either wait them out or find another way that doesn't take you through a flood. Until next time...