Do seconds actually matter?
Life has a limited time span, so the obvious answer would be yes, but is it?
Last week, I was riding from work to the Metro Station along 7th pausing for the regular exercise of someone gunning it across a red light.
I have to assume this is going to happen because as a vulnerable road user, I could be right, but I could also be dead.
The video doesn’t show everything, but piecing everything together, you could probably figure out what happened:
If you believed the car made the light legally, you may think the driver of the truck was at fault, but in reality, the car driver ran through the white buffered area next to the left turn only lane and was trying to sneak in through a no drive zone on the other side of 7th.
Forgetting the argument of who’s to blame here, let’s think about what the driver might have saved.
From one point of view, you could say he saved thirty seconds by not having to wait for the signal to change.
In reality, traffic is so deep at that hour, he probably would have been stuck behind the same car ahead of him either way.
Then factor in another half hour on the phone collectively speaking to the insurance company on the matter.
His car insurance rates are going to go up, so I’ll be generous in saying an hour of his salary every week will go towards paying for this increase.
In other words, trying to save a couple seconds might end up costing you a week’s worth of vacation time.
Yes, driving puts you into an anxiety laced atmosphere, but it should be simple to to fight the urge.
Saving a few seconds has rarely affected my life, but showing up super late being caught in post collision traffic has.
I hope people have to stop finding out the hard way…