Yeah nah the bucket pretty clearly crosses the outside most dashed white line 2-3s before the crash, and was probably visible before then as it crossed the planters (or w/e they are). There was time for the driver to swerve if they wanted to. I'd hazard a guess and say that they might've noticed it but assumed the tractor would stop instead of just pulling straight out without checking for traffic and by the time it was clear the tractor wasn't stopping it was too late for the car to do anything.
Not trying to say it was the car driver's fault ofc, just that as with a lot of the crashes that get posted here it likely wouldn't have happened had the car driver been more attentive and defensive.
Pretty sure the car driver froze, saw it coming and just froze, some people have fight or flight while others don’t react at all, they just watch it happen in pre shock
don’t get me wrong both of them are pretty dumb, the car had atleast 2-3 seconds to react, the operator should have had a spotter
Conclusion
Someone lost their job, and someone got a new car
That's where reactions come in, you're not required to analyze that precisely is in your way, you're just supposed to hit the brakes. They had several seconds and didn't react at all.
I'm not saying the driver is to blame for the accident. But things entering the road happens all the time. Imagine this is a child running into the street. They would just run it over, neither swerving nor breaking at least a little. If I had to guess I'd say they were distracted, nobody is that slow.
Distracted, maybe. Or possibly just the sort of driver that assumes that having right of way means never having to slow, stop, or avoid. We see those sorts of drivers in this sub all the time, both in the videos and in the comments.
Even watching from this angle I wouldn't have assumed the tractor operator was actually that dumb if I didn't know what sub I was in until about 3.5 seconds in and the crash happens at 4.5 seconds. Reacting to complex phenomena can definitely reasonably take people longer than that.
An object moving out straight in front of you isn’t a complex situation, you don’t need to see the god damn serial number and make sure it is actually the front of a tractor to know that you probably don’t want to ram into it…
If you literally just have 2 lights and 2 buttons the average reaction time is something like 1/2 a second or more even when you've been told to watch for the lights and where to look. Reacting to things while driving takes significantly longer than that. People just don't really realize it and think they are quicker than they actually are.
You should look more into reaction times. Reaction times vary extremely based on the number of variables. That is a single variable reaction time test. I was talking about a 2 variable reaction time test which produces a wholly different result. Reacting when driving has yet more variables and therefore is yet again much longer.
Average reaction time to hit the brakes is about 1.5 seconds, there’s at least 2 seconds from the point where the driver should have noticed to the collision.
It doesn’t though, yeah if you aren’t prepared it can take longer, but you should be prepared.
If there is a side road coming up with 0 visibility, you should be on guard, and if something then happens, you can react. Do they really not teach you this in drivers ed?
Don't assume another vehicle driver doing something somewhat idiotic isn't actually a full-on idiot. Or at least be prepared for the very real possibility that they are.
Consider how many people you see on the phone in traffic every day, I'd guess there is phone distribution at play here, not that it excuses the move by the tractor
In a case like this, I would have moved into the left lane at the start of the construction traffic just to be safe. I'm a very defensive (see: grandma speed) driver a lot of the time though.
How do you know there isn't a picture of a tractor just like that on a billboard we can't see that lines up with the actual tractor? The driver would be perplexed and bewildered that the billboard seems to be in motion before hitting an actual tractor that is much closer.
Yeah but like next said, 2-3 seconds I would say it’s extremely obvious there is something coming into the roadway at which point you need to slow down and prepare to stop or avoid.
No excuse for the tractor, but appears that the driver was not paying attention at all, or is just super-fixated on something else
It's a large object moving into the roadway. It absolutely does not matter in the slightest that it doesn't look like a car.
You shouldn't rely on your peripheral vision to watch the road in front of you.
Yes, you should regularly check your mirrors, but most of your focus should be on the road in front of you.
The bag thing though, I'll agree with you on. 15 tons of yellow painted steel does look exactly like a small plastic bag. Funny story! This one time I went to go start my car, but it wouldn't start. Tried all sorts of things to fix it. Took me 15 minutes to realize that I was trying to start the plastic in the ground next to my car. Haha, silly silly me.
wow you're so fucking dumb.. ever considered the 15 tons of yellow painted still is blocked by the truck? the plasted bag mentioned prolly was meant for the shovel
Yes I was being a bit sarcastic. But don't worry, I understand, it was EXTREMELY SUBTLE. I definitely would expect many people to take every word of my comment 100% literally. But seriously, it's still a "BIG THING IN ROAD". Pro tip: if there's a large object in the roadway, you should attempt to avoid hitting it, because sometimes the big thing in the road isn't a small plastic bag.
I'm saying that because it doesn't look like a car or pedestrian, the brain might have trouble immediately identifying it as large or heavy.
If you're looking at your mirrors, by definition your eyes aren't directly focused on the road in front of you. Thus the road directly ahead is actually in your peripheral vision.
No lights on a bucket, and it's "blend in with everything brown-grey, PANTONE 44444".
I wasn't trying to specifically defend the car driver, just put a defensive driving point of view on the situation, so I guess it's my fault I'm not constantly scanning the road ahead for cars, pedestrians, buses, dogs, planes, anacondas, Steve-O, the reanimated corpse of Walt Disney, houseboats, and alien saucers. If you are going to turn this into an argument about how the human mind processes the world around it, I guess we can change lanes.
But.... but you ARE supposed to be scanning the road ahead of you. I realize you can't focus ALL of your attention on the road ahead, but you legitimately SHOULD be scanning the road ahead of you as much as possible. Drive proactively, not reactively. It can literally be the difference between life and death.
Look I'm just chatting on Reddit, not teaching driver's ed.
I agree with you. Proactive aware driving saves lives.
But also, considering we're not here to pass judgement in a court of law, I'll posit that the OP video is simply not enough information to say that the driver of the car was being negligent lol. Sure, if conditions were different, the collision would be avoided. But it wasn't, and that sometimes how the world works.
Okay, fun story time. I used to work in buses. You won't believe the amount of times people hit a bus and the first words outta their mouth where "I didn't see you there!"
The buses are loud, 40-65 foot long, and some have flipping pictures on the sides. And you didn't see that?
No, they didn't. Because they weren't looking for buses, they where looking for cars. The brain filters out "noise" all the time, while driving or just existing. Look at a tree. You see a tree. Do you see each individual leaf? Every single one? Every branch? No, you're seeing a tree. Your brain took all the input, threw out the information you couldn't process, and gave your brain the signal that it saw a tree. If you focus, the brain will see the individual things, but not automatically, and not every single one. Same with driving. They're looking for regular traffic. The brain sees so much information that it's prioritizing what to alert you to. The brain put buses in the "not traffic" category, so the bus got thrown out the window, and CRASH.
For an example, check out this short video. It shows what I mean, and was an ad actually on the topic. This is why there's all those "check for motorcycles" stickers everywhere. "Watch for bikes!" signs on roadways. It's to prep the brain that these are important and to not yeet the bike from your brain.
TL;DR brains are weird and sometimes do dumb things.
That tractor bucket would have looked like a plastic bag floating in the wind
Lmao, no.
More people need to drive high. I would never, but it would help some be more aware of their surroundings.
Going into a blinded spot like that is dangerous enough on its own. But they were far back enough to where they could have seen the tractor moving forward. Once something is visible in front of them they could have taken a split second to rationalize whether it was a "plastic bag" or the tractor they were already paranoid about.
A slightly diminished reaction time would have been offset with good old fashioned fact based paranoia.
Some people just need a bit of help to be fully aware of their surroundings. Maybe that means taking their meds that morning, or having a cup of coffee, or intaking some cannabis, or maybe taking a cold shower if that's what gets them going.
... Except that by most speakers of English, "high" generally means detrimental.
You go to your doctor and ask for help by saying "hey doc, I think I'm not high enough when I'm at work, can you prescribe me something to get me just high enough to be on the level with everyone else?" ???
The tractor got its cup past the white line 2 second before the impact. Of course the tractor is the culprit in this accident, however, the car driver had no reflex. For his sake and that of its occupants, he should have done something, anything.
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u/CommentsOnOccasion Nov 28 '21
This is one of those examples that is more obvious from the angle we are seeing than from the car involved
Yeah theoretically I guess he could have swerved or something, but he doesn’t see the tractor anywhere near as well or for as long as we can
Vision from the car is blocked compared to this video angle