Vehicle driving the wrong way in Chicago causes high-speed crash, killing occupants (Image: CBS)
We’ve heard of accidents involving drivers driving the wrong way on the right side of the road. But the most recent high-profile case of a car driving the wrong way on the left has been captured in dramatic pictures, on YouTube at least.
The victim was an 80-year-old woman driving a Honda Accord on the CTA Red Line when a piece of metal from the seat scraped her arm. It was enough to bring her to a stop in a collision with a train.
“What you are seeing is a car driving the wrong way,” said Chicago Police Supt. Eddie Johnson, who is on the scene. “There is a significant piece of metal in the rearview mirror that struck me.”
The footage, by user and amateur video maker Jai Morshed, may be the most compelling evidence yet that humans can be unpredictable. That’s because in the video, as Morshed points out in his video description, the front of the car is still facing the train after it crosses into the woman’s lane.
Morshed doesn’t claim to have been there at the time of the crash, but his video is the latest in a series of high-profile incidents to highlight how careless, sometimes deadly, road usage can become. There were at least six videos showing drivers driving the wrong way or in the wrong lane, including the latest, the very first to appear on YouTube, by a California man who had just been released from prison less than an hour before the crash.
Many people are still unaware of the risks posed by humans driving the wrong way on the left, especially on roads with poor visibility. But it’s clear that the dangers are there, and they have become more apparent in the last few years as more people in the United States drive.
The danger is particularly severe in states with very large and well-used car lanes. When you drive the wrong way on a country road, for example, the left-hand lane can suddenly disappear.
So it makes sense to give drivers some information about the potential dangers they face as they share the road with vehicles that travel in directions they didn’t intend.
Most of us think of roads as being straight and well-marked. There’s certainly a straight