This is the third day in a row there’s been a serious, traffic-stopping accident on Route 315 South in Columbus. What you see above is the crash that added an extra fifty minutes to my commute. At first glance it’s just another incidence of somebody barrel-rolling a full-sized pickup truck over a Jersey barrier. But it has to be more complicated than that.
This is the so-called “hospital curve” on Route 315. It curves around — wait for it — Riverside Methodist Hospital. During rush hour, it’s typically either stop-and-go or very slow-moving. So while I’d believe that a truck could jump and flip over the barrier during the afternoon or evening, in the morning there shouldn’t be any way for it for to have enough momentum for the maneuver.
Unless, of course, the truck was going north and it managed to both flip and spin before landing upside-down on the concrete.
I’m giving a lot of thought to this, because it happened at about 8:35 this morning. If I hadn’t overslept a bit, I’d have been somewhere in the vicinity at the time. How was this a single-vehicle accident in the middle of a jam-packed eight-lane freeway? Sometimes it’s just better not to think about it any more.
Looks like a typical day on I-95 here in Fairfield County Connecticut. Since this happens frequently when it is a beautiful sunny day, I can only attribute it to “clear air turbulence.”
Yeah the curves in West Hartford CT on I-84 result in weekly crashes as well.
These micro penis guys who install lifts and levels on their trucks so that they can crawl around mall parking lots are a serious problem. They fundamentally change the dynamics of their vehicles in ways that allow incidents like this to happen. How this is legal can only be answered by the almighty SEMA lobby.
While I wouldn’t recommend unsafe suspension modifications, the notion that men compensate for small penises with the vehicles they drive and how they drive them is quite possibly the single most hackneyed cliche in the automotive world. If it isn’t the worst cliche, it’s right up there with go-kart handling and breaks the laws of physics. Sometimes a cigar is just a pickup truck.
Considering that it’s been the wishes/needs/desires of female consumers that have shaped much of the automotive market for the past 20 (see Jack’s TTAC post on the rise of the crossover), I wonder just for what women who drive SUVs and crossovers are compensating.
Oh, right. Women like SUVs because of the high seating position, room for kids, and practical vehicle utility. Men like SUVs because small penis.
Considering men are so consumed by the size of their genitals, it’s surprising that they took their minds off considering how inadequately they’ve been endowed long enough to create the modern world.
Do you even know what an aftermarket lift or level is?
Reading your response on women and CUVs - two things that I clearly did not mention - I don’t think so.
Thanks Ronnie. I’ve had many “penis compensation” vehicles, imo the cliche is more likely to be the opposite. High testosterone guys like to signal as much in some way. Beta whiners come up with lame cliches to feel better about themselves.
Oh how I hated my commute from Westerville to Grandview for the couple of years I had to do it. The hospital curve southbound in the morning was indeed a pain but entirely surpassed in the evenings by the God-awful 315/270/23 exchange. I haven’t made that drive in over a decade now. Were they ever able to figure out a way to make that exchange less of a cluster?
Short answer: no.
Long answer: it’s being rebuilt.
Longer answer: it’s being rebuilt, badly.
Ha! Why am I not surprised ODOT is screwing it up?
They could screw up a wet dream, to use the old phrase.
Aren’t there alternate routes on surface streets around Columbus? I rarely drive in the ditches during rush hour around Detroit. If I have to get downtown, Woodward, with traffic lights synchronized to 35 mph traffic, is much faster than a backed up Lodge or I-75.
That’s a question I have about autonomous cars. Will an autonomous car know that traffic backing up in a particular place means it’s time to take an alternate route, and will it’s software let it cross three lanes of rush hour traffic to get to the exit?
In general, I think autonomous cars are going to introduce some inefficiencies. I’m pretty sure that government standards won’t allow autonomous cars to exceed the speed limit when driverless, so we’ll get places slower.
Well, for me, it’s a choice between a likely 28-minute morning commute via 315S with a possibility of delays up to an hour or so… or a guaranteed 55 minutes on the surface streets, which are all heavily stoplighted.
Even longer answer: It’s being rebuilt more or less perpetually.
I’m so sick of sitting in jams caused by total dickheads that should never have a license in the first place
what do you expect? we treat driving as a right (when it’s a privilege) and sit by and do nothing when people modify their cars to be unsafe. Because freedom or something.
Jack,
In your experience as an instructor, is there a driving school you would recommend over the others? As in, BMW, Porsche, Skip Barber, etc?
For an absolute novice with no experience whatsoever? I’d try the Skip Barber street-car schools first, but the dedicated BMW and Porsche facilities are also fine.
Short story:
One time I’m sitting in traffic on some divided highway when I noticed odd movements in my periphery. I look across the median, and at the moment that I do, there is an Explorer Sport-Trac in the passing lane, moving with the flow of traffic, backwards. It then executes a pretty nice J-turn within its lane and continues on its way as if nothing happened. No one got hit, or even slowed down all that much from what I saw. I wish I’d seen the beginning of that situation.
Slightly longer story: driving up from DE near the PHL airport, midafternoon weekday. Wife riding shotgun, number one son in the backseat.
A white Ford Ranger with a bumper sticker “Helping to Keep the Fleet Afloat” is gaining on me, weaving in and out of almost, but not quite, bumper to bumper traffic going 70mph on a three lane stretch of road (three in the same direction.)
I am in the middle. The truck pulls a couple of short space insertions to get by me, then when they are in the right lane, with me in the center, our lane gains slightly on them. They fail to notice…hot dog pickup driver swerves into the center lane without looking. His truck bed is completely parallel with the front right fender of my Panther.
I swerve (ESC would have probably caused me to go forward again, into the truck). I debate looking to see if the left lane is open, but realize that if I don’t swerve into it, I will hit the truck at speed, so I pull into the left lane and pray.
The driver behind me was alert, and swerved when I did…there are now three vehicles powersliding at about a thirty degree angle to the flow of traffic, at 70mph, and with no more than about a foot of space on each side of me.
The car behind continues onto the median strip, which has a full lane (thank God!), and I straighten out into the left lane, as the pickup straightens out in the center lane as if nothing happened.
I almost never consider diming out rude drivers, and only dime out impaired drivers if they are clearly three sheets to the wind. But this time I had my wife get on the horn and try to roust up some state highway patrol support. No luck, the truck knew it was probably going to get more than one cellphone call to the police, so it pulled off at the exit for the other, smaller bridge into south Philly, and out of sight.
I thought we were going to buy the farm for an instant, but we got off lucky that day.
When I asked my son, who has recently learned to drive, if he was afraid we might be hurt or killed, his reply was that he wasn’t worried, he figured I knew what I was doing.
Flattery will not get you everywhere with me, but that one convinced me to fork up a special pizza for him later that afternoon.
I have been behind the wheel of a Pontiac from the muscle car era when a wheel blew out on a country road while doing the ton, and never even left the lane, so I wasn’t freaked out by the high speed maneuvering, but when I didn’t have time to even see how much clearance I had to my left, that was one hairy moment. I had some clear space in the rear view on the outside of my car, but couldn’t see what was behind me.
Fortunately the driver behind me (a woman driver, FWIW), was as good a driver as the dweebs in the pickup truck weren’t, or we would likely all have ended up on gurneys.
The Grand Marquis handled perfectly in the slide. And I would not have wanted it to straighten the nose out immediately when I went into the slide, as it would have caused me to t-bone the truck, and likely jack-knife over it. ESC may be better in some circumstances, but I am glad I picked a car without the “smarter than you” features on it.
One time I was driving on 95 in Delaware on a sunny, dry day; the road was perfectly straight and flat as a board. Some jackass coming the other way managed to roll a new Beetle. I saw it happen, guy was trying to weave through the traffic ended up fishtailing into the grassy median and flipped. I have no idea how to make a FWD car fishtail.
Maybe by applying power while going backward, in effect making it a RWD car for as long as the front wheels were in the back?
That is a nasty stretch of road, as my other note also indicates.
There was also a case of a nice elderly black couple who used to own a soul food restaurant near the Comm. Barry bridge who were killed on that stretch years ago, when someone lost control and flipped over the median right into their path.
I really ought to use 295 more and 95 less.
If you want to do a bit of investigative reporting, check to see if the accident report says whether or not the driver was wearing a seatbelt.
The reason I suggest that is there’s a theory that a surprisingly high proportion of single-vehicle accidents, especially the kind that involve sudden abutment involvement, are suicide.
(I’m too lazy to dig out the citations, but a literature search will find the hints).
sounds as bad as the older freeways in Detroit. There are several urban freeways in the city which are woefully inadequate for the traffic they’re carrying now. The Lodge (M-10,) the Southfield (M-39,) and the Edsel Ford (I-94) freeways are just archaic. no left shoulder, and most of the on-ramps are short and “blind” (you can’t see the flow of traffic until the last possible moment.) The lack of a left shoulder is killer on these roads; if there’s an accident or breakdown in the left lane, well that will just snarl traffic for hours.
whoever decided the Edsel Ford freeway should have become part of the interstate system should be dug up and shot.
My knee-jerk reaction, based on how they handle these kind of things out here in CA, would be to install tattle-tale radar signs to get some of the traffic slowed down in advance. How to implement them in that setting, is an open question. Bias toward the #1 lane, I guess…
Columbus traffic can be a horror show. About fifteen years ago I saw a woman on 71S (at N. Broadway) do three 360’s at highway speed in the lane right next to mine. I saw her face. It was surreal.
I go to work most days before 04;30 so I miss the worst of L.A.’s commuter mess but even so there was an overturned truck (about the size of the fire trucks in the photo) on the SB Harbor freeway this morning , idiots doing whatever the hell it is they do best I guess .
-Nate
they may have been not paying attention & hit stopped traffic….ramped up after rear ending someone?
….that, or playing with a Battlestar Galactica toy while driving & it went off in his mouth
Or they could have experienced sudden tire failure. I once witnessed a G35 coupe blow a rear tire and spin across three lanes of I95 and go airborne spinning up the jersey barrier. I could easily see how a higher truck could wind up backwards on top of that barrier.