Drivers Accident Quotes

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Conner Lassiter. Scheduled to be unwound the 21st of November-until you went AWOL. You caused an accident that killed a bus driver, left dozens of others injured, and shut down an interstate highway for hours. Then, on top of it, you took a hostage AND shot a Juvey-cop with his own tranq gun." ..."He's the Akron AWOL?!
Neal Shusterman (Unwind (Unwind, #1))
You're a rotten driver,' I protested. 'Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn't to drive at all.' 'I am careful.' 'No, you're not.' 'Well, other people are,' she said lightly. 'What's that got to do with it?' 'They'll keep out of my way,' she insisted. 'It takes two to make an accident.' 'Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.' 'I hope I never will,' she answered. 'I hate careless people. That's why I like you.' Her grey, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
On that walk around the building, two sets of cops coming out stopped to tell our guys to hustle us inside so they could head back out on the road. Accidents everywhere. A pileup on each of two major roads. “Welcome to winter,” one said. “When fifty percent of drivers should have their licenses temporarily suspended.
Kelley Armstrong (Dangerous (Darkest Powers, #0.75))
Faster is fatal, slower is safe.
Amit Kalantri (Wealth of Words)
Sometimes we’re on a collision course, and we just don’t know it. Whether it’s by accident or by design, there’s not a thing we can do about it. A woman in Paris was on her way to go shopping, but she had forgotten her coat - went back to get it. When she had gotten her coat, the phone had rung, so she’d stopped to answer it; talked for a couple of minutes. While the woman was on the phone, Daisy was rehearsing for a performance at the Paris Opera House. And while she was rehearsing, the woman, off the phone now, had gone outside to get a taxi. Now a taxi driver had dropped off a fare earlier and had stopped to get a cup of coffee. And all the while, Daisy was rehearsing. And this cab driver, who dropped off the earlier fare; who’d stopped to get the cup of coffee, had picked up the lady who was going to shopping, and had missed getting an earlier cab. The taxi had to stop for a man crossing the street, who had left for work five minutes later than he normally did, because he forgot to set off his alarm. While that man, late for work, was crossing the street, Daisy had finished rehearsing, and was taking a shower. And while Daisy was showering, the taxi was waiting outside a boutique for the woman to pick up a package, which hadn’t been wrapped yet, because the girl who was supposed to wrap it had broken up with her boyfriend the night before, and forgot. When the package was wrapped, the woman, who was back in the cab, was blocked by a delivery truck, all the while Daisy was getting dressed. The delivery truck pulled away and the taxi was able to move, while Daisy, the last to be dressed, waited for one of her friends, who had broken a shoelace. While the taxi was stopped, waiting for a traffic light, Daisy and her friend came out the back of the theater. And if only one thing had happened differently: if that shoelace hadn’t broken; or that delivery truck had moved moments earlier; or that package had been wrapped and ready, because the girl hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend; or that man had set his alarm and got up five minutes earlier; or that taxi driver hadn’t stopped for a cup of coffee; or that woman had remembered her coat, and got into an earlier cab, Daisy and her friend would’ve crossed the street, and the taxi would’ve driven by. But life being what it is - a series of intersecting lives and incidents, out of anyone’s control - that taxi did not go by, and that driver was momentarily distracted, and that taxi hit Daisy, and her leg was crushed.
Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Screenplay)
In the rearview mirror, he caught Blue’s eyes by accident. Strangely enough, he saw his own thoughts reflected in her face: excitement and consternation. Casually, out of view of Ronan, making sure Adam was still sleeping, Gansey dangled his hand between the driver’s seat and the door. Palm up, fingers stretched back to Blue. This was not allowed. He knew it was not allowed, by rules he himself had set. He would not permit himself to play favorites between Adam and Ronan; he and Blue couldn’t play favorites in this way, either. She would not see the gesture, anyway. She would ignore it if she did. His heart hummed. Blue touched his fingertips. Just this — He pinched her fingers lightly, just for a moment, and then he withdrew his hand and put it back on the wheel. His chest felt warm. This was not allowed. Ronan had not seen; Adam was still sleeping. The only casualty was his pulse. “Your exit, dick!” Ronan snapped. Or Dick. It could have been either, really. Gansey steered in a hurry. Adam blinked awake. Ronan swore. Gansey’s heart restarted. Eyes on the road, Gansey.
Maggie Stiefvater (Blue Lily, Lily Blue (The Raven Cycle, #3))
More than 90 percent of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking alcohol and driving, somebody texting a message while driving, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31 percent of fatal crashes in the United States involved alcohol abuse, 30 percent involved speeding, and 21 percent involved distracted drivers.7 Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.
Daniel Goleman (Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence)
You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn't drive at all." "I am careful." "No you're not." "Well, other people are," she said lightly. "What's that got to do with it?" "They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
The steering wheel is turned by the driver, not the indicator, or the road sign.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
small changes at a lower level of organization can lead to emergent changes at a higher level. A typical example is the effect of that one truck driver’s braking response, in Hitler’s nearly fatal traffic accident of 1930, on the lives of a hundred million people who were killed or wounded in World War II.
Jared Diamond (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (20th Anniversary Edition))
Some people create war and misery, some create wealth and money, and some create ideas and art. But we all create our own deaths, fashioned out of our lives. Nobody will remember how you died, if nobody remembers how you lived. Forgoing freak accidents, we all choose how we die by how we live. Suicide, old age, AIDS, Cirrhosis of the liver, our deaths tell of how we lived. And even in a freak accident, if we are worth remembering, our lives will overshadow our deaths. If Henry Ford had gotten run over by a Mercedes, people would still remember him as the driver of the hit and run that changed history with his automobile assembly lines.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
Some car accidents are caused by the ignorance or disbelief of the fact that a driver’s eyes and mind can be thousands of kilometres apart.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
He repeated that the texting driver faces a sixfold crash risk, whereas a driver talking on the phone faced a four-times increase in likelihood of a crash, which he said was roughly equivalent to someone who is legally drunk. A drunk driver and a person on a phone were equally likely to crash, whereas “we’re seeing the risk factor for accidents when someone is texting exceeds the level when people are legally drunk.
Matt Richtel (A Deadly Wandering: A Mystery, a Landmark Investigation, and the Astonishing Science of Attention in the Digital Age)
Human drivers in the United States suffer roughly one fatal accident per one hundred million miles traveled, which sets a high bar. Autonomous vehicles, to be accepted, will need to be much better than that: perhaps one fatal accident per billion miles, or twenty-five thousand years of driving forty hours per week.
Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
In a moment of crisis we don't act out of reasoned judgment but on our conditioned reflexes. We may be able to send men to the moon, but we'd better remember we're still closely related to Pavlov's dog. Think about driving a car: only the beginning driver thinks as he performs each action; the seasoned driver's body works kinesthetically . . .A driver prevents an accident because of his conditioned reflexes; hands and feet respond more quickly than thought. I'm convinced the same thing is true in all other kinds of crisis, too. We react to our conditioning built up of every single decision we've made all our lives; who we have used as our mirrors, as our points of reference. If our slow and reasoned decisions are generally wise, those which have to be made quickly are apt to be wise, too. If our reasoned decisions are foolish, so will be those of the sudden situation.
Madeleine L'Engle (A Circle of Quiet (Crosswicks Journals, #1))
Mathematicians still don’t understand the ball our hands made, or how your electrocuted grandparents made it possible for you to light my cigarettes with your eyes. It isn’t as simple as me climbing into the window to leave six ounces of orange juice and a doughnut by the bed, or me becoming the sand you dug your toes in, on the beach, when you wished to hide them from the sun and the fixed eyes of strangers, and your breath broke in waves over my earlobe, splashing through my head, spilling out over the opposite lobe, and my first poems under your door in the unshaven light of dawn: Your eyes remind me of a brick wall about to be hammered by a drunk driver. I’m that driver. All night I’ve swallowed you in the bar. Once I kissed the scar, stretching its sealed eyelid along your inner arm, dried raining strands of hair, full of pheromones, discovered all your idiosyncratic passageways, so I’d know where to run when the cops came. Your body is the country I’ll never return to. The man in charge of what crosses my mind will lose fingernails, for not turning you away at the border. But at this moment when sweat tingles from me, and blame is as meaningless as shooting up a cow with milk, I realise my kisses filled the halls of your body with smoke, and the lies came like a season. Most drunks don’t die in accidents they orchestrate, and I swallowed a hand grenade that never stops exploding.
Jeffrey McDaniel
An ambulance took four hours to reach a car accident and take the injured driver to hospital. He could have died in that time and he was lucky to live. I found myself practicing first aid skills I only knew from theory and courses, then later having to assume a level of responsibility I hadn't expected.
Demelza Carlton (Maid for the Rock Star (Romance Island Resort, #1))
He had also been married to an English girl who was killed in a car accident, a fact to mention because he was the driver. His sorrow was complete; it was as if he had been dipped into a tragic rue. This loss permeated every pore and organ cell, left him, indeed, a complete man, all of one piece, one whole tincture of loss. He spoke in a gentle voice and listened to every word that everyone said, as if words were as much of a comfort as warm clothing. While he sipped his one beer and I had three,
Norman Mailer (Harlot's Ghost)
The chances of the driver’s mind being on the road are usually way too low when on a highway.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
The road looked as if no one had traveled on it in months. "It's not much farther," the grandmother said and just as she said it, a horrible thought came to her. The thought was so embarrassing that she turned red in the face and her eyes dilated and her feet jumped up, upsetting her valise in the corner. The instant the valise moved, the newspaper top she had over the basket under it rose with a snarl and Pitty Sing, the cat, sprang onto Bailey's shoulder. The children were thrown to the floor and their mother, clutching the baby, was thrown out the door onto the ground; the old lady was thrown into the front seat. The car turned over once and landed right-side-up in a gulch off the side of the road. Bailey remained in the driver's seat with the cat gray-striped with a broad white face and an orange nose clinging to his neck like a caterpillar. As soon as the children saw they could move their arms and legs, they scrambled out of the car, shouting, "We've had an ACCIDENT!" The grandmother was curled up under the dashboard, hoping she was injured so that Bailey's wrath would not come down on her all at once. The horrible thought she had had before the accident was that the house she had remembered so vividly was not in Georgia but in Tennessee.
Flannery O'Connor (A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories)
Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times - something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed. When the Mahotomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age.
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
Sex," the driver said, "Has no one ever told you about it?" I took the New York Times from my carry-on bag and pretended to read, an act that apparently explained it all. "Ohhh," the driver said, "I understand. You do not like pussy. You like the dick. Is that it?" I brought the paper close to my face, and he stuck his arm through the little window and slapped the back of his seat. "David," he said, "David, listen to me when I am talking to you. I asked do you like the dick?" "I just work," I told him. "I work, and then I go home, and then I work some more." I was trying to set a good example, trying to be the person I'd imagined him to be, but it was a lost cause. "I fucky-fuck every day," he boasted. "Two women. I have a wife and another girl for the weekend. Two kind of pussy. Are you sure you no like to fucky-fuck?" If forced to, I can live with the word "pussy," but "fucky-fuck" was making me carsick. "That is not a real word," I told him. "You can say fuck, but fucky-fuck is just nonsense. Nobody talks that way. You will never get ahead with that kind of language." Traffic thickened because of an accident, and, as we slowed to a stop, the driver ran his tongue over his lips. "Fucky-fuck," he repeated. "I fucky-fucky-fucky fuck.
David Sedaris (When You Are Engulfed in Flames)
The God of the Bible is not an ambulance driver who shows up after the wreck and hops out and thinks, Okay, let’s do some triage here. The God of the Bible does not show up after the accident and try to fix it. That’s not what He does.
Matt Chandler (To Live Is Christ to Die Is Gain)
I’ve noticed that ‘news’ is not what’s happened. It’s what’s happened on camera. If a herd of tigers runs amok in a remote Indian village, it’s not news. If a gang of wide-eyed rebels slaughters the inhabitants of a faraway African village, it’s not news. But if it’s a bit windy in America, it is news. Because in America everything that happens is recorded. I find myself wondering if last week’s Israeli raid on a Turkish ship in a flotilla carrying aid to Gaza would have had the coverage it did if the battle hadn’t been captured on film. And likewise the racing driver who broke a leg after crashing in the Indy 500. It only became a big deal because we could watch the accident from several angles in slow motion.
Jeremy Clarkson (Is It Really Too Much To Ask? (World According to Clarkson, #5))
Sebastian Thrun, previously the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and now the head of Google’s autonomous car lab, feels the benefits will be significant. “There are nearly 50 million auto accidents worldwide each year, with over 1.2 million needless deaths. AI applications such as automatic breaking or lane guidance will keep drivers from injuring themselves when falling asleep at the wheel. This is where artificial intelligence can help save lives every day.
Peter H. Diamandis (Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think)
It made no difference to me. Dishonesty in a woman is a thing you never blame deeply—I was casually sorry, and then I forgot. It was on that same house party that we had a curious conversation about driving a car. It started because she passed so close to some workmen that our fender flicked a button on one man’s coat. “You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.” “I am careful.” “No, you’re not.” “Well, other people are,” she said lightly. “What’s that got to do with it?” “They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.” “Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.” “I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.” Her gray, sun-strained eyes stared straight ahead, but she had deliberately shifted our relations, and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires, and I knew that first I had to get myself definitely out of that tangle back home. I’d been writing letters once a week and signing them: “Love, Nick,” and all I could think of was how, when that certain girl played tennis, a faint mustache of perspiration appeared on her upper lip. Nevertheless there was a vague understanding that had to be tactfully broken off before I was free. Every one suspects himself of at least one of the cardinal virtues, and this is mine: I am one of the few honest people that I have ever known.
F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby)
Secondary structural dissociation involves one ANP and more than one EP. Examples of secondary structural dissociation are complex PTSD, complex forms of acute stress disorder, complex dissociative amnesia, complex somatoform disorders, some forms of trauma-relayed personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified (DDNOS).. Secondary structural dissociation is characterized by divideness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EPs that are devoted to flight, fight or freeze, total submission, and so on. (Van der Hart et al., 2004). Gail, a patient of mine, does not have a personality disorder, but describes herself as a "changed person." She survived a horrific car accident that killed several others, and in which she was the driver. Someone not knowing her history might see her as a relatively normal, somewhat anxious and stiff person (ANP). It would not occur to this observer that only a year before, Gail had been a different person: fun-loving, spontaneous, flexible, and untroubled by frightening nightmares and constant anxiety. Fortunately, Gail has been willing to pay attention to her EPs; she has been able to put the process of integration in motion; and she has been able to heal. p134
Elizabeth F. Howell (The Dissociative Mind)
The Lush hadn’t driven in almost a decade - ever since she got in an accident that shook her so badly she refused to get behind the wheel. As you can imagine, someone nicknamed The Lush wouldn’t make a good DD anyway. I’d known her about a year before ever seeing her sober.
Kate Madison (Spilled Perfume: A Memoir (Spilled Perfume #1))
car seat-belts. The vast majority of the time they served no real purpose. Even bad drivers could go years between accidents. But when an accident finally did occur—in that precise instant—a seat-belt became the only thing standing between a chance for life and a grisly death.
Douglas E. Richards (Quantum Lens)
It is important to understand that responsibility is not the same as blame. While blame determines who is at fault for something, responsibility determines who is committed to improving things. Thinking back to my accident, while the drunk driver was at fault for the crash, I was responsible for improving my life—for making my circumstances what I wanted them to be. It really doesn’t matter who is at fault—all that matters is that you and I are committed to leaving the past in the past and making our lives exactly the way we want them to be, starting today.
Hal Elrod (The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life: Before 8AM)
He jerked a thumb in the direction of the baby on the stretcher, who had put his fingers in his mouth and stopped yelling. ‘That was the driver. Before the accident he was thirty-one. By the time we got here he was eight – in a few hours he’ll be nothing more than a damp patch on the blanket.
Jasper Fforde (The Eyre Affair (Thursday Next #1))
Digital technologies will no more solve the so-called ‘crisis in education’ than airbags will stop drivers from having accidents.  What digital technologies can do, however, is to dramatically accelerate the changes in behaviours, values, and actions, which then transform the way we learn and our capacity to learn.
David Price (Open: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future)
Make for yourself a world you can believe in. It sounds simple, I know. But it’s not. Listen, there are a million worlds you could make for yourself. Everyone you know has a completely different one—the woman in 5G, that cab driver over there, you. Sure, there are overlaps, but only in the details. Some people make their worlds around what they think reality is like. They convince themselves that they had nothing to do with their worlds’ creations or continuations. Some make their worlds without knowing it. Their universes are just sesame seeds and three-day weekends and dial tones and skinned knees and physics and driftwood and emerald earrings and books dropped in bathtubs and holes in guitars and plastic and empathy and hardwood and heavy water and high black stockings and the history of the Vikings and brass and obsolescence and burnt hair and collapsed souffles and the impossibility of not falling in love in an art museum with the person standing next to you looking at the same painting and all the other things that just happen and are. But you want to make for yourself a world that is deliberately and meticulously personalized. A theater for your life, if I could put it like that. Don’t live an accident. Don’t call a knife a knife. Live a life that has never been lived before, in which everything you experience is yours and only yours. Make accidents on purpose. Call a knife a name by which only you will recognize it. Now I’m not a very smart man, but I’m not a dumb one, either. So listen: If you can manage what I’ve told you, as I was never able to, you will give your life meaning.
Jonathan Safran Foer (A Convergence of Birds: Original Fiction and Poetry Inspired by Joseph Cornell)
Motorcyclists, like pilots, put the priority on avoiding accidents rather than attempting to survive accidents. The energy is focused on doing everything right, rather than on surviving the crash. That’s a significant difference that motor vehicle safety experts in the U.S. seem unable to grasp. The NHTSA approach has always focused on crash padding, rather than on driver skill.
David L. Hough (More Proficient Motorcycling: Mastering the Ride)
A total of 105 patrol officers died on the job in 2012. Less half of those (51) died as the result of violence, and another 48 died in traffic accidents. Between 1961 and 2012, 3,847 cops were murdered and 2,946 died in accidents—averaging about 75 murders and 58 fatal accidents in a typical year. Naturally it is not to be lost sight of that these numbers represent human lives, not widgets or sacks of potatoes. But let’s also remember that there were 4,383 fatal work injuries in 2012. As dangerous professions go, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, policing is not even in the top ten. In terms of total fatalities, more truck drivers are killed than any other kind of worker (741 in 2012). A better measure of occupational risk, however, is the rate of work-related deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2012, for example, it was 17.4 for truck drivers. At 15.0 deaths per 100,000, policing is slightly less dangerous than being a maintenance worker (15.7) and slightly more dangerous than supervising the gardener (14.7). The highest rate of fatalities is among loggers at 127.8 per 100,000, just ahead of fishers at 117.0. The rate for all occupations, taken together, is 3.2 per 100,000 workers. Where are the headlines, the memorials, the honor guards, and the sorrowful renderings of Taps for these workers? Where are the mayoral speeches, the newspaper editorials, the sober reflections that these brave men and women died, and that others risk their lives daily, so that we might continue to enjoy the benefits of modern society?
Kristian Williams (Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America)
Kassian arched a brow at Boyd as they made the short walk to Boyd's house. "You have no idea at all? I'm looking for an SUV of some kind although I'd prefer another truck. I can't drive those tiny ass cars they make now. I feel like if I get in an accident I'll be crushed instantly." "That's why I want one that's fast and easy to handle," Boyd said wryly. "To get out of the way of you crazy SUV drivers.
Ais (Afterimage (In the Company of Shadows, #2))
Firstly, contrary to popular leftist dogma, speed does not cause accidents. In our towns and cities cyclists, pedestrians and elderly drivers cause accidents. On the country roads it is cyclists and dangerous drivers and on the motorways it is dangerous driving which causes accidents, obviously the faster a vehicle is travelling the greater the damage which will result from an accident however that is just a consequence rather than the cause.
Joe Cater (Titanic Britain: 50 Years of the Left-Wing Liberal Iceberg)
If I don’t buy groceries today, it’s scrambled eggs for dinner tonight. Again. Margot’s car is fixed and sitting in the driveway, where it’s been sitting for the past few weeks. I could go to the store if I wanted to. I do want to. But I don’t want to drive. If I was a nervous driver before, the accident has only made me worse. What business do I have behind the wheel of a car? What if I hurt someone? What if I hurt Kitty? They shouldn’t just give out driver’s licenses so easily. I mean, a car is a really dangerous thing. It’s practically a weapon.
Jenny Han (To All the Boys I've Loved Before (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #1))
I trudge toward the porch, entertaining the idea of running the other way. But technically, I shouldn't be in any trouble. It wasn't my car. I'm not the one who got a ticket. Samantha Forza did. And the picture on Samantha Forza's driver's license looks a lot like Rayna. She told Officer Downing that she swerved to keep from hitting a camel, which Officer Downing graciously interpreted as a deer after she described it as "a hairy animal with four legs and a horn." Since no one formed a search party to look for either a camel or a unicorn, I figured we were in the clear. But from Mom's expression, I'm miles from clear. "Hi," I say as I reach the steps. "We'll see about that," she says, grabbing my face and shining a pen light in my eyes. I slap it away. "Really? You're checking my pupils? Really?" "Hal said you looked hazy," she says, clipping the pen back on the neckline of her scrubs. "Hal? Who's Hal?" "Hal is the paramedic who took your signature when you declined medical treatment. He radioed in to the hospital after he left you." "Oh. Well, then Hal would have noticed I was just in an accident, so I might have been a little out of it. Doesn't mean I was high." So it wasn't small-town gossip, it was small-county gossip. Good ole Hal's probably transported hundreds of patients to my mom in the ER two towns over. She scowls. "Why didn't you call me? Who is Samantha?" I sigh and push past her. There's no reason to have this conversation on the porch. She follows me into the house. "She's Galen's sister. I didn't call because I didn't have a signal on my cell. We were on a dead road." "Where was Galen? Why were you driving his car?" "He was home. We were just taking it for a drive. He didn't want to come." Technically, all these statements are true, so they sound believable when I say them. Mom snorts and secures the dead bolt on the front door. "Probably because he knows his sister is life threatening behind the wheel." "Probably.
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
Talking on a cell phone makes us four times as likely to have an accident—the same as a driver who has a blood alcohol content of .08 percent, which qualifies as intoxicated in most states. The risk is equal for drivers holding their phones to their ears and for those speaking through a hands-free device. In both cases, researchers suggest, the drivers generate mental images of the unseen person at the other end of the line, which conflicts with their capacity for spatial processing. “It’s not that your hands aren’t on the wheel,” says David Strayer, the director of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah, “it’s that your mind is not on the road.
Tony Schwartz (Be Excellent at Anything: The Four Keys To Transforming the Way We Work and Live)
So there is little doubt that financial incentives work well, even if the outcome is undesirable. Consider a 2011 traffic accident in the Chinese city of Foshan. A two-year-old girl, walking through an outdoor market, was hit by a van. The driver stopped as the girl’s body slid beneath the vehicle. But he didn’t get out to help. After a pause, he drove away, running over the body again. The girl later died. The driver eventually turned himself in to the police. A recording that was widely reported to be a phone call with the driver was broadcast on the news. “If she is dead,” he explained, “I may pay only about 20,000 yuan”—roughly $3,200. “But if she is injured, it may cost me hundreds of thousands yuan.
Steven D. Levitt (Think Like a Freak)
On 28 June 1914 the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, a heartland of the South Slavs. Philosophers refer to ‘the inevitable accident’, and this was a very accidental one. Some young Serb terrorists had planned to murder him as he paid a state visit. They had bungled the job, throwing a bomb that missed, and one of them had repaired to a café in a side street to sort himself out. The Archduke drove to the headquarters of the governor-general, Potiorek (where he was met by little girls performing folklore), and berated him (the two men were old enemies, as the Archduke had prevented the neurasthenic Potiorek from succeeding an elderly admirer as Chief of the General Staff). The Archduke went off in a rage, to visit in hospital an officer wounded by the earlier bomb. His automobile moved off again, a Count Harrach standing on the running board. Its driver turned left after crossing a bridge over Sarajevo’s river. It was the wrong street, and the driver was told to stop and reverse. In reverse gear such automobiles sometimes stalled, and this one did so - Count Harrach on the wrong side, away from the café where one of the assassination team was calming his nerves. Now, slowly, his target drove up and stopped. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, fired. He was seventeen, a romantic schooled in nationalism and terrorism, and part of a team that stretches from the Russian Nihilists of the middle of the nineteenth century, exemplified especially in Dostoyevsky’s prophetic The Possessed and Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Austria did not execute adolescents and Princip was young enough to survive. He was imprisoned and died in April 1918. Before he died, a prison psychiatrist asked him if he had any regrets that his deed had caused a world war and the death of millions. He answered: if I had not done it, the Germans would have found another excuse.
Norman Stone (World War One: A Short History)
Johnny, you can’t drive in this weather. I absolutely forbid it,” Stormy says. “Grandma, it’ll be fine,” John says. “I’m a good driver.” Stormy delivers a stinging smack on his arm. “I told you never to call me Grandma! Just Stormy. The answer is no. I’m putting my foot down. The both of you will stay at Belleview tonight. It’s far too dangerous.” She sends me a stern look. “Lara Jean, you call your father right now and tell him I won’t allow you out in this weather.” “He can come get us,” I suggest. “And have that poor widower get into a car accident on the way here? No. I won’t have it. Give me your phone. I’ll call him myself.” “But--there’s school tomorrow,” I say. “Cancelled,” Stormy says with a smile. “They just announced it on the TV.” I protest, “I don’t have any of my things! No toothbrush, or pajamas, or anything!” She puts her arm around me. “Lie back and let Stormy take care of everything. Don’t you worry your pretty little head.” So that is how it came to be that John Ambrose McClaren and I are spending the night together at a retirement home.
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
self-driving vehicles could provide people with much better transportation services, and in particular reduce mortality from traffic accidents. Today close to 1.25 million people are killed annually in traffic accidents (twice the number killed by war, crime, and terrorism combined).6 More than 90 percent of these accidents are caused by very human errors: somebody drinking alcohol and driving, somebody texting a message while driving, somebody falling asleep at the wheel, somebody daydreaming instead of paying attention to the road. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimated in 2012 that 31 percent of fatal crashes in the United States involved alcohol abuse, 30 percent involved speeding, and 21 percent involved distracted drivers.7 Self-driving vehicles will never do any of these things. Though they suffer from their own problems and limitations, and though some accidents are inevitable, replacing all human drivers by computers is expected to reduce deaths and injuries on the road by about 90 percent.8 In other words, switching to autonomous vehicles is likely to save the lives of one million people every year.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
And then he heard it. A loud crash. The Number 22 bus had pulled away from the stop, and another driver in a car trying to get around to turn had collided into the side of the transit vehicle. Finally, Daryl had the nerve to do what every like-minded criminal in Baltimore knows they must. Run and get on the bus for insurance claims. Get a “suitcase,” as some of the old-timer grifters still called phony neck injuries, marrying the word “suit” as in law with “case” as in court. “Suitcase,” the all-purpose secret word for fraud. Amazingly, his erection still held. It was a little painful going up those first bus steps, but so what, it felt even sexier doing a second scam before he’d completely gotten away with the first one. The lucky few passengers on board were already going into their cries of “whiplash,” holding their necks and moaning out loud. He limped to an empty seat and held his knee as if it had been painfully slammed in the impact. Even the bus driver was faking injuries as he called into his dispatcher to report the accident, exaggerating the speed he had been going to make it sound worse. Daryl knew he was surrounded by fellow swindlers and felt, for the first time, part of a community.
John Waters (Liarmouth: A Feel-Bad Romance)
Tata's car trips, always with a driver at the wheel, typically lasted five or six days. Tata would visit different regions of Karnataka to give talks, preside over functions, participate in literary events and always drop in on his friends. If he was in southern Karnataka, he would invariably visit us at Mysore. Tata was incredibly punctual, following a schedule that he sent me well in advance. As Tata grew older, I kept telling him to avoid these longer trips. One day in late 1987, when Tata did not reach our home from Tumakuru at 7 p.m. as he had promised, we were worried that the car may have broken down, or worse, met with an accident. In those pre-cellphone days, we could not check on him. Finally, much to our relief, Tata turned up an hour late. Looking apologetic, he explained, 'Just as I finished my talk, a man approached me with the manuscript of a story he had written, seeking my comments. I could not refuse because he was so old (thumba mudukaru).' I asked Tata to guess how old the aspiring writer was. 'The poor man was at least seventy' came the reply. Prathibha and I both burst out laughing, looking at the expression on his face when I asked him his own age. Tata was so full of life force that he never realised that he was eighty-five.
Ullas K Karanth (Growing Up Karanth)
He stared down at her for a moment, wanting to heal every cut on her soft skin. But he couldn’t, not yet. He needed to get her, and her car, far from this place so neither he nor Kate would be implicated in any way with the gruesome murder site. It also meant he would have to drive. In all his years, he had never driven an automobile. The closest he had come was watching various assistants through the years as they chauffeured him. He wasn’t sure he could even remember how to start the car, but right now he had no choice. Grudgingly, he got into the driver’s seat, and finding the lever underneath, he pushed it back so he sat comfortably behind the wheel. After trying three different keys, he found one that slipped into the ignition. From what he had seen over the past hundred years, driving was not a complex operation, and he was an immortal with reflexes far more keen than a human man. How difficult could it be? He turned the key and nearly jerked the wheel off the steering column when the car surprised him by lurching forward. The car went silent. The engine wasn’t running. What was he doing wrong? He stared at the gearshift, wondering if he should move it. His frustration reared up, but his agitation would not make the car drive itself. He had to keep a cool head. Not knowing what else to try, he pushed one of the pedals at his feet to the floor and turned the key again. This time the car didn’t move, and it roared to life. Grasping the gearshift, he jammed it into the first position and glanced over at Kate. Why couldn’t she have owned a car with an automatic transmission? Shaking his head, he put some pressure on the gas pedal and slowly released the clutch. Thankfully the car rolled a few feet, but without warning it jumped forward. He pressed the clutch back to the floor before the engine lost power again. Calisto slammed his hand against the wheel, muttering under his breath in Spanish. At this rate it would take him all night to drive her home. The faded yellow convertible pitched forward again, threatening to stall as he continued out of the parking lot, thankful it was late. The streets were fairly empty. At least he wouldn’t get into an accident with another car. Her car staggered ahead, lurching each time he tried to release the clutch, bouncing and jostling them both until Kate finally stirred and woke up. § “Are we out of gas or something?” Calisto watched her with a tight smile. “Not exactly.” Kate winced in pain when she laughed. “You can’t drive a stickshift, can you?” “Does it show?” Calisto pulled over, finally allowing the engine to stall. She nodded her head slowly to avoid more pain. “Just a little. What happened?” “You don’t remember?” “I remember being mugged. And I remember seeing you, but everything after that is blank.” She watched his eyes as Calisto reached over to brush her hair back from her face, and his touch sent shivers through her body. This wasn’t how she had hoped she would run into him, but she learned a long time ago fate didn’t always work out the way you expected.
Lisa Kessler (Night Walker (Night, #1))
what was good for survival and reproduction in the African savannah a million years ago does not necessarily make for responsible behavior on twenty-first-century motorways. Distracted, angry, and anxious human drivers kill more than a million people in traffic accidents every year. We can send all our philosophers, prophets, and priests to preach ethics to these drivers, but on the road, mammalian emotions and savannah instincts will still take over. Consequently, seminarians in a rush will ignore people in distress, and drivers in a crisis will run over hapless pedestrians. This disjunction between the seminary and the road is one of the biggest practical problems in ethics. Immanuel Kant, John Stuart Mill, and John Rawls can sit in some cozy university hall and discuss theoretical ethical problems for days—but would their conclusions actually be implemented by stressed-out drivers caught in a split-second emergency? Perhaps Michael Schumacher—the Formula One champion who is sometimes hailed as the best driver in history—had the ability to think about philosophy while racing a car, but most of us aren’t Schumacher. Computer algorithms, however, have not been shaped by natural selection, and they have neither emotions nor gut instincts. Therefore in moments of crisis they could follow ethical guidelines much better than humans—provided we find a way to code ethics in precise numbers and statistics. If we could teach Kant, Mill, and Rawls to write code, they would be able to program the self-driving car in their cozy laboratory and be certain that the car would follow their commandments on the highway. In effect, every car would be driven by Michael Schumacher and Immanuel Kant rolled into one.
Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
sure what happened after the accident was client-protected,” he told Mazzone. By their silence, “Markham and Gargan were taking the big fall to protect Ted Kennedy.” Paul Redmond doubted the lawyer-client issue would even arise at the inquest. “People were walking around Boston whaling the bee-jesus out of Paul Markham and Joe Gargan for not reporting the accident—that was so unfair. Here were two guys, good lawyers and fine men, made to look like stooges or worse by the press.” Gargan had told him he could not have reported an accident in which a driver faced a possible manslaughter charge, Redmond said. “It’s no secret Joe was a dear friend. When I left the U.S. Attorney’s office, Paul Markham took my spot.” A week before the inquest, Redmond bumped into Gargan in the elevator of the building in which both had law offices. The Boiler Room girls were “upstairs,” Redmond said. “They haven’t seen you in a long time. I think they’d like to say hello.” Gargan went straight to Redmond’s office for “a nice reunion, a pleasant chat. Very friendly.” There was no discussion about the inquest. Gargan did not want to become involved in the preparation of anybody else’s testimony. As one of two persons at the party who wasn’t “a bit bombed,” Gargan’s memory of the occasion was “clear as a bell.” So it was Gargan’s description of the party that, along with the Senator’s two public versions of the accident, would provide the scenario for inquest testimony. If Gargan testified to the Senator’s attempt to cover up his involvement in the accident as the reason he had failed to report it until the next day, he could blow the entire lid off the case. But that prospect became moot when a writ of certiorari was filed on Tuesday, September 2, asking the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court to determine whether “errors of law” had been made in Judge Boyle’s ruling on the conduct of the scheduled inquest in re: Mary Jo Kopechne. Justice Paul Reardon scheduled a hearing for three o’clock. Notified an appeal had been filed,
Leo Damore (Chappaquiddick: Power, Privilege, and the Ted Kennedy Cover-Up)
Finding herself on the way to the village center again, she pulled over, intending to negotiate a three-point turn. The cottage was slightly out of the village, so she needed to get back onto the opposite side of the road and go back up the hill. Glancing over Hannah’s instructions again, she swung the car to the right—straight into the path of a motorcyclist. What happened next seemed to happen in slow motion. The rider tried to stop but couldn’t do so in time, although he did manage to avoid hitting her car. As he turned his handlebars hard to the right, his tires lost grip on the wet road and he flew off, sliding some way before coming to a halt. Layla sat motionless in her car, paralyzed temporarily by the shock. At last she managed to galvanize herself into action and fumbled for the door handle, her shaking hands making it hard to get a grip. When the door finally opened, another dilemma hit. What if she couldn’t stand? Her legs felt like jelly, surely they wouldn’t support her. Forcing herself upward, she was relieved to discover they held firm. Once she was sure they would continue to do so, she bolted over to where the biker lay, placed one hand on his soaking leather-clad shoulder and said, “Are you okay?” “No, I’m not bloody okay!” he replied, a pair of bright blue eyes meeting hers as he lifted his visor. “I’m a bit bruised and battered as it goes.” Despite his belligerent words, relief flooded through her: he wasn’t dead! “Oh, I’m so glad,” she said, letting out a huge sigh. “Glad?” he said, sitting up now and brushing the mud and leaves off his left arm. “Charming.” “Oh, no, no,” she stuttered, realizing what she’d just said. “I’m not glad that I knocked you over. I’m glad you’re alive.” “Only just, I think,” he replied, needing a helping hand to stand up. “Can I give you a lift somewhere, take you to the nearest hospital?” “The nearest hospital? That would be in Bodmin, I think, about fifteen miles from here. I don’t fancy driving fifteen miles with you behind the wheel.” Feeling a little indignant now, Layla replied, “I’m actually a very good driver, thank you. You’re the first accident I’ve ever had.” “Lucky me,” he replied sarcastically.
Shani Struthers
Here, for example, is a hypothetical: A football team is going to an away game when one of their vans breaks down. So they ask the mother of one of the players if they can borrow her van to transport them. Sure, she says, but I’m not going to drive. And so she asks the assistant coach to drive the team for her. But then, as they’re driving along, something horrible happens: the van skids off the road and flips over; everyone inside dies. There is no criminal case here. The road was slippery, the driver wasn’t intoxicated. It was an accident. But then the parents of the team, the mothers and fathers of the dead players, sue the owner of the van. It was her van, they argue, but more important, it was she who appointed the driver of her van. He was only her agent, and therefore, it is she who bears the responsibility. So: What happens? Should the plaintiffs win their suit? Students don’t like this case. I don’t teach it that often—its extremity makes it more flashy than it is instructive, I believe—but whenever I did, I would always hear a voice in the auditorium say, “But it’s not fair!” And as annoying as that word is—fair—it is important that students never forget the concept. “Fair” is never an answer, I would tell them. But it is always a consideration. He never mentioned whether something was fair, however. Fairness itself seemed to hold little interest for him, which I found fascinating, as people, especially young people, are very interested in what’s fair. Fairness is a concept taught to nice children: it is the governing principle of kindergartens and summer camps and playgrounds and soccer fields. Jacob, back when he was able to go to school and learn things and think and speak, knew what fairness was and that it was important, something to be valued. Fairness is for happy people, for people who have been lucky enough to have lived a life defined more by certainties than by ambiguities. Right and wrong, however, are for—well, not unhappy people, maybe, but scarred people; scared people. Or am I just thinking this now? “So were the plaintiffs successful?” I asked. That year, his first year, I had in fact taught that case. “Yes,” he said, and he explained why: he knew instinctively why they would have been. And then, right on cue, I heard the tiny “But it’s not fair!” from the back of the room, and before I could begin my first lecture of the season—“fair” is never an answer, etc., etc.—he said, quietly, “But it’s right.
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
One evening in April a thirty-two-year-old woman, unconscious and severely injured, was admitted to the hospital in a provincial town south of Copenhagen. She had a concussion and internal bleeding, her legs and arms were broken in several places, and she had deep lesions in her face. A gas station attendant in a neighboring village, beside the bridge over the highway to Copenhagen, had seen her go the wrong way up the exit and drive at high speed into the oncoming traffic. The first three approaching cars managed to maneuver around her, but about 200 meters after the junction she collided head-on with a truck. The Dutch driver was admitted for observation but released the next day. According to his statement he started to brake a good 100 meters before the crash, while the car seemed to actually increase its speed over the last stretch. The front of the vehicle was totally crushed, part of the radiator was stuck between the road and the truck's bumper, and the woman had to be cut free. The spokesman for emergency services said it was a miracle she had survived. On arrival at the hospital the woman was in very critical condition, and it was twenty-four hours before she was out of serious danger. Her eyes were so badly damaged that she lost her sight. Her name was Lucca. Lucca Montale. Despite the name there was nothing particularly Italian about her appearance. She had auburn hair and green eyes in a narrow face with high cheek-bones. She was slim and fairly tall. It turned out she was Danish, born in Copenhagen. Her husband, Andreas Bark, arrived with their small son while she was still on the operating table. The couple's home was an isolated old farmhouse in the woods seven kilometers from the site of the accident. Andreas Bark told the police he had tried to stop his wife from driving. He thought she had just gone out for a breath of air when he heard the car start. By the time he got outside he saw it disappearing along the road. She had been drinking a lot. They had had a marital disagreement. Those were the words he used; he was not questioned further on that point. Early in the morning, when Lucca Montale was moved from the operating room into intensive care, her husband was still in the waiting room with the sleeping boy's head on his lap. He was looking out at the sky and the dark trees when Robert sat down next to him. Andreas Bark went on staring into the gray morning light with an exhausted, absent gaze. He seemed slightly younger than Robert, in his late thirties. He had dark, wavy hair and a prominent chin, his eyes were narrow and deep-set, and he was wearing a shabby leather jacket. Robert rested his hands on his knees in the green cotton trousers and looked down at the perforations in the leather uppers of his white clogs. He realized he had forgotten to take off his plastic cap after the operation. The thin plastic crackled between his hands. Andreas looked at him and Robert straightened up to meet his gaze. The boy woke.
Jens Christian Grøndahl (Lucca)
The bill, AB2293, addresses the insurance coverage during the period when drivers log in to a smartphone app but have not yet been matched with riders. In a well-publicized incident, an UberX driver struck and killed a young girl in San Francisco on New Year's Eve, reportedly while waiting for a ride request. Bill author Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, initially wanted the companies to provide $1 million of commercial coverage during this period. In its final form, the bill requires them to provide $200,000 of coverage, on top of insurance either from the companies or drivers providing $50,000 per person, $100,000 per accident, and $30,000 for property damage. An earlier version required $300,000 per accident.
Anonymous
In October of 1991, on the day I met Steve, it was only by chance that I stopped at his wildlife park at all. I had been sleeping in the backseat of a car on the way back from a barbecue at a friend of a friend’s house. Up front, Lori’s friend knew I was interested in zoos. When he saw a sign for this one, he debated with himself whether he should wake me. Even when he did, I wasn’t sure if this reptile park was going to be much more than a few snakes in little glass tanks. So it was only by chance that I was on that highway at all, and only chance that I stopped. And it was only by chance that Steve conducted the croc show that day. Some days, Wes did the show. Chance. Fate. Destiny. These were words I lived by. I believed my life had been shaped for a special purpose. But with Steve’s death my faith was tested. Was it pure chance that Steve, a man who cheated mortality almost every single day of his adult life, died in such a bizarre accident? During the decade and a half that I knew him, I don’t think a week went by when he didn’t get a bite, blow, or injury of some kind. His knee and shoulder plagued him from years of jumping crocs. As Steve erected a fence at our Brigalow Belt conservation property, a big fence-post driver he was using slipped and landed directly on his head, compressing the fifth disk in his neck. Even injured, he still managed to push on--at the zoo, filming, and doing heavy construction. He went at work like a bull at a gate. He climbed trees with orangutans. He traversed the most remote deserts and the most impossible mountains. He packed his life chock-a-block full with risks of all kinds. “I get called an adrenaline junkie every other minute,” Steve said. “I’m just fine with that.” One crowded hour of glorious life is worth more than an age without a name. I had no regrets for Steve’s glorious life, and I know he couldn’t have lived any other way.
Terri Irwin (Steve & Me)
The sugar content in this cereal’s too high for Willie. You know the doctor said sugar’s bad for him. No wonder he ends up under the teacher’s desk. Can’t you cook him a proper breakfast, Judy? Oatmeal and toast and scrambled eggs, that’s what he needs.” “He’s not going to lift bricks, Harold.” “Mental exercise uses up calories, too--which is why I eat an egg and an English muffin before going to work.” As mom was agreeing that Dad always did eat sensibly, Willie looked up from pouring his juice and saw through the kitchen window that his bus was rounding the corner. Looking down, he saw he’d poured a puddle that was dripping onto the floor. Dad noticed, of course. Dad noticed everything. “Willie, you klutz! Now look what you’ve done.” “I’ve gotta go,” Willie said. “Not before you eat your breakfast.” “Then I’ll miss the bus.” Booboo ambled into the kitchen, wagged a greeting to everyone, and barked to be let out. Willie moved to open the door for him. “Hold it right there!” Dad said. He probably thought Willie meant to leave, too. “You sit down and eat your cereal. After you mop up the juice. QUIET, BOOBOO!” Booboo yipped pathetically as if asking what he’d done wrong. Mom slipped over to the door. “The dog has to go out, Harold,” she said. “Unless you want him to do his business on the floor?” As if on command, Booboo squatted and made a second puddle. “I thought he got up pretty early for him,” Willie said. “I guess he had to go.” Willie’s bus driver waited for him a few seconds and then took off. “I missed my bus,” Willie said. He got the squeegee mop out to clean up both accidents. Dad was holding his head. “Do you have a headache, Dad?” Willie asked.
C.S. Adler (Willie, the Frog Prince)
1.10 Four Kinds of Predictive Validity for Intelligence Tests 1.10.3. Everyday Life The importance of general intelligence in everyday life often is not obvious but it is profound. As Professor Earl Hunt has pointed out, if you are a college-educated person, it is highly likely that most of your friends and acquaintances are as well. When is the last time you invited someone to your home for dinner that was not college-educated? Professor Hunt calls this cognitive segregation and it is powerful in fostering the erroneous belief that everyone has a similar capacity or potential for reasoning about daily problems and issues. Most people with high g cannot easily imagine what daily life is like for a person with low g. [...] Consider some statistics comparing low and high IQ groups (low = 75–90; high = 110–125) on relative risk of several life events. For example, the odds of being a high school dropout are 133 times more likely if you’re in the low group. People in the low group are 10 times more at risk for being a chronic welfare recipient. The risk is 7.5 times greater in the low group for incarceration, and 6.2 times more for living in poverty. Unemployment and even divorce are a bit more likely in the low group. IQ even predicts traffic accidents. In the high IQ group, the death rate from traffic accidents is about 51 per 10,000 drivers, but in the low IQ group, this almost triples to about 147. This may be telling us that people with lower IQ, on average, have a poorer ability to assess risk and may take more chances when driving or performing other activities (Gottfredson, 2002; 2003b).
Richard J. Haier (The Neuroscience of Intelligence (Cambridge Fundamentals of Neuroscience in Psychology))
Hallucination Country by Stewart Stafford A furious tribe of leaves, Chased a logging truck, As forked flames waved, From a burning backyard tree. A half-eaten unicorn in a ditch, A warning from hunters nearby, Slaughtering fairytale creatures, Cryptids were their mint targets. An abandoned Volkswagen car lay, Half-overturned, underbelly exposed, The injured driver, now hitchhiking, With a spree killer or tow-truck driver. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.
Stewart Stafford
Instead, help your new kitten to associate cars with fun, happy experiences instead of just trips to the vet. The process, called desensitization using classical conditioning, takes patience and time, but works whether your kitty acts scared, sick, or just hyper. Use A Crate. For safety's sake, kittens and cats must ride inside a carrier while in the car. A loose pet becomes a furry projectile in case of an accident. The driver needs to concentrate on the road and traffic, not the bouncy baby on a lap or under the pedals. Even well-behaved cats loose in the car could be injured, because an airbag will crush the crate and pet if on the front seat during an accident. So be sure to crate train the cat before you hit the road. Let Him Explore. Even though he'll be inside a crate, it's helpful for kitty to experience positive things about the car before you start the engine. Cats are sensitive to environment and territory which is why they prefer staying home in familiar surroundings. So once the cat carrier is securely in the closed car, sit beside your cat and open the carrier door. Allow him
Amy Shojai (Complete Kitten Care)
Driving your body under the influence is a cause of car accidents.
Tamerlan Kuzgov
alcohol kills 17.6 times more people than cocaine every year.141 If we look at drunk driving, the statistics are horrific. Every night and weekend one out of ten drivers on the road are intoxicated, and alcohol-related accidents are the leading cause of death among young people.142 Half of all fatal highway accidents are alcohol-related.143 Imagine if a Boeing 747 aircraft carrying five hundred people crashed, killing all its passengers, every eight days. That is how many people die every eight days as a result of drunk driving.
Annie Grace (This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol, Find Freedom, Discover Happiness & Change Your Life)
Progressive tackled risk assessment in a different way, building a massive database with more granular indicators that better predicted the probability of accidents. It used this data to spot the good risks in pools that looked like bad drivers to other insurers. For example, among drivers cited for drinking, those with children were least likely to reoffend; among motorcyclists, Harley owners aged forty-plus were likely to ride their bikes less often. Progressive used information like this to set prices so that even the worst customers could be profitable.
Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
I had almost automatically assumed that freeways would prove to be the deadliest place to drive because of the high speeds involved. But decades’ worth of auto accident data reveal that, in fact, a very high proportion of fatalities occur at intersections. The most common way to be killed, as a driver, is by another car that hits yours from the left, on the driver’s side, having run a red light or traveling at high speed. It’s typically a T-bone or broadside crash, and often the driver who dies is not the one at fault. The good news is that at intersections we have choices. We have agency. We can decide whether and when to drive into the crossroads. This gives us an opportunity to develop specific tactics to try to avoid getting hit in an intersection. We are most concerned about cars coming from our left, toward our driver’s side door, so we should pay special attention to that side. At busy intersections, it makes sense to look left, then right, then left again, in case we missed something the first time. A high school friend who is now a long-haul truck driver agrees: before entering any intersection, even if he has the right of way (i.e., a green light), he always looks left first, then right, specifically to avoid this type of crash. And keep in mind, he’s in a huge truck.
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
Tragedy preceded the verdict when Beulah Melton’s car went off the road and into a bayou on a dark night four days before the trial began. She drowned, but the two children who were with her were rescued, just in time to join their two other siblings as orphans. The drowning was ruled an accident, the sheriff surmising that because Beulah was a new driver, she probably lost control of the car.12 Others believed that someone close to Kimbell intentionally ran her off the road. Regardless, it was clear by the verdict that in the six months since Emmett Till’s killing, things had not changed in the Mississippi Delta.
Devery S. Anderson (Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement)
Among the drivers many accidents, mostly attributable to excessive fatigue, could have been avoided if an analeptic such as Pervitin had been administered.”26 Crystal meth to avoid road accidents? Really?
Norman Ohler (Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich)
There are drivers who have successfully made tactics the key to their approach and exploited them to the full. A mature driver must have an understanding of race tactics, he cannot always follow his nose. This is something that requires experience and the tempering of your aggression: A driver who sees the race like a chess game is easy to spot as he stops getting involved in accidents and aims for points and not just wins. This kind of driving is very effective over a season when aiming for the world title. Choosing the best set-up (a less fast car, but one that will be reliable) or the right time to stop for tyres, and knowing when to relinquish a position when the race situation calls for it are all part of this.
Ayrton Senna (Ayrton Senna's Principles of Race Driving)
When I met him, Don’s New York State driver’s license had been suspended; this happens when you’ve drawn enough speeding tickets, and he was always good at that. He wouldn’t have wanted a car anyway on West 46th Street, but that changed when he moved out to Canarsie. And the day came when the three-year suspension was up, and his license was restored. Whereupon he bought a car, and applied for insurance. And was astonished when the insurance company gave him a safe driver discount because he hadn’t had an accident or a speeding ticket in the past three years. There’s a word for that sort of thing. Westlakean.
Donald E. Westlake (The Getaway Car: A Donald Westlake Nonfiction Miscellany)
51. Do you have a really hard time tolerating frustration? 52. Are you restless without “action” in your life? 53. Do you have a hard time reading a book all the way through? 54. Do you regularly break rules or minor laws rather than put up with the frustration of obeying them? 55. Are you beset by irrational worries? 56. Do you frequently make letter or number reversals? 57. Have you been the driver and at fault in more than four car accidents? 58. Do you handle money erratically? 59. Are you a gung-ho, go-for-it sort of person? 60. Do you find that structure and routine are both rare in your life and soothing when you find them? 61. Have you been divorced more than once? 62. Do you struggle to maintain self-esteem? 63. Do you have poor hand-eye coordination? 64. As a kid, were you a bit of a klutz at sports? 65. Have you changed jobs a lot? 66. Are you a maverick? 67. Are memos virtually impossible for you to read or write? 68. Do you find it almost impossible to keep an updated address book, phone book, or Rolodex? 69. Are you the life of the party one day and hangdog the next? 70. Given an unexpected chunk of free time, do you often find that you don’t use it well or get depressed during it? 71. Are you more creative or imaginative than most people? 72. Is paying attention or staying tuned in a chronic problem for you? 73. Do you work best in short spurts? 74. Do you let the bank balance your checkbook? 75. Are you usually eager to try something new?
Edward M. Hallowell (Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder)
Admittedly, sometimes on the road of life we’re preoccupied with getting to the next destination. We watch for speed traps, get miffed at other drivers, and monitor the vehicle’s performance. Sometimes we get distracted by a billboard, slow down to see the wreckage of someone else’s accident, or take our eyes off the road to watch an eagle swoop over a canyon lake. But our deepest need on
Jay Payleitner (52 Things Husbands Need from Their Wives: What Wives Can Do to Build a Stronger Marriage)
Admittedly, sometimes on the road of life we’re preoccupied with getting to the next destination. We watch for speed traps, get miffed at other drivers, and monitor the vehicle’s performance. Sometimes we get distracted by a billboard, slow down to see the wreckage of someone else’s accident, or take our eyes off the road to watch an eagle swoop over a canyon lake.
Jay Payleitner (52 Things Husbands Need from Their Wives: What Wives Can Do to Build a Stronger Marriage)
Until researchers started measuring the effects of cell-phone distractions under controlled conditions, nobody had any idea how profoundly they can impair a driver. It’s like driving drunk. Recall that large fractions of a second are consumed every time the brain switches tasks. Cell-phone talkers are more wild in their “following distance” behind the vehicle in front of them, a half second slower to hit the brakes in emergencies, and slower to return to normal speed after an emergency. In a half second, a driver going 70 mph travels 51 feet. Given that 80 percent of crashes happen within three seconds of some kind of driver distraction, increasing your amount of task switching increases your risk of an accident. More than 50 percent of the visual cues spotted by attentive drivers are missed by cell-phone talkers. Not surprisingly, they get in more wrecks than anyone except very drunk drivers. Putting on makeup, eating, and rubbernecking at an accident aren’t much better. One study showed that simply reaching for an object while driving a car multiplies the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times.
John Medina (Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School)
Alice insisted the accelerator had got stuck. She thought of herself as a good driver and hated the idea that anyone would think that the problem was her age. The body’s decline creeps like a vine. Day to day, the changes can be imperceptible. You adapt. Then something happens that finally makes it clear that things are no longer the same. The falls didn’t do it. The car accident didn’t do it. Instead, it was a scam that did. Not long after the car accident, Alice
Atul Gawande (Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End)
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DUI
A brick could be used to direct traffic. Use a brick from the scene of the accident, where some driver ran into a brick wall. 

Jarod Kintz (A brick and a blanket walk into a bar)
Terrible accident; body parts was everywhere—-fingers, toes, wings, beaks. Ambulance people tried to scoop him all up, but apparently it ain’t so easy as you might think—telling a chicken from a Chinaman, I mean. Anyways, they got his weight off his driver’s license, picked up a hundred and thirty pounds of pieces and buried ‘em. Now his wife come every year 'bout this time to pay her respects. We don't serve chicken while she's here. Hope you ain't got a taste for it.
R.J. Leahy (Fat Chance)
As they drove back to Greenpoint from Long Island, Drake looked at the other drivers on the Long Island Expressway and realized that anyone could be anyone’s father, that anyone could love anyone under certain circumstances, and that life is a museum of small accidents.
Simon Van Booy
A tractor-trailer overturned on U.S. 129 in Gainesville, Ga., “the poultry capital of the world,” back in January. None of the drivers involved in the accident were hurt, but avian passengers in the trailer were killed, and Sarah Segal has asked the Georgia Department of Transportation for permission to a build a ten-foot-tall tombstone in their honor. The monument would read, “In memory of the dozens of terrified chickens who died as a result of a truck crash. Go Vegan.” It would include an image of a chicken. PETA supports her initiative. Monty Python could not be reached for comment.
Anonymous
In China, the transition has been to abrupt that many traffic patterns come directly from pedestrian life - people drive the way they walk. They like to move in packs, and they tailgate whenever possible. They rarely use turn signals. Instead they rely on automobile body language: if a car edges to the left, you can guess that he's about to make a turn. And they are brilliant at improvising. They convert sidewalks into passing lanes, and they'll approach a roundabout in reverse direction if it seems faster. If they miss an exit on a highway, they simply pull onto the shoulder, shift into reverse, and get it right the second time. They curb-sneak in traffic jams, the same way Chinese people do in ticket lines. Tollbooths can be hazardous, because a history of long queues has conditioned people into quickly evaluation options and making snap decisions. When approaching a toll, drivers like to switch lanes at the last possible instant: it's common to see an accident right in front of a booth. Drivers rarely check their rearview mirrors. Windshield wipers are considered a distraction, and so are headlights.
Peter Hessler (Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory)
Now tell me what you’re afraid of.” “Uncle Nathan is right about this tree. It’s got some kind of spirit in it. And it doesn’t want me to leave.” I saw my dad smile and shake his head. “I’m serious, Dad. You can’t send those guys up here again. The tree will try to kill them before it lets them take me down. Didn’t you see it happen?” “I saw a couple of accidents…” “And Ronnie fell yesterday, but somehow I’m able to be up in this tree no problem. I got up here without any ropes or ladders. Don’t you find that mysterious? Uncle Nathan doesn’t. Grandfather doesn’t.” “They are both superstitious, that’s all.” “I know,” I said. “And what about that, Dad? You’ve spouted all your legends and myths at me my whole life, and now you suddenly don’t care about them? That doesn’t make any sense.” He sighed so deeply I could hear it. “I study those legends to get to know our culture, our heritage. I don’t believe that they are literal truths.” “But what about the mermaids?” I pressed. “Remember the big story you told about the singing boat and the killer whale? It was you who told me that maybe the story was wrong and it wasn’t a singing boat; it was a mermaid under the boat.” “I remember, but I had a real mermaid staring me in the face at the time. There isn’t anything like that going on right now.” “I hear whispers coming from the tree. It moves on its own. It is warmer than it should be…” “You’ve been up there too long. You’re delirious.” I grunted at him. “It started before I climbed up! ” Dad rubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t know what you want me to do here.” I turned on the camera and flipped the digital pictures until I found that one with the face. I stuck it in the bucket and lowered it down to my dad and told him to take a look. “Is that as good as a mermaid right in front of you?” He studied the picture a moment and then replied, “I always see faces in the knots of trees. Who doesn’t? I think that’s why so many people create horror stories about them.
D.G. Driver
Neagley knocked on Reacher’s door at eight o’clock the next morning. He was awake. He had showered and dressed. He was ready for coffee. The elevator was like a gilded birdcage on a chain, inside a shaft made of filigreed wrought iron. They heard it coming up to meet them. They stepped in. There was a credit card on the floor. Or a driver’s license. Or something. Face down. Dropped by accident, presumably. Not a Bundesrepublik Deutschland identity card. Wrong color. Neagley bent down and picked it up. She looked at it. She said, “You owe me ten dollars.” It
Lee Child (Night School (Jack Reacher, #21))
Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked.” —Luke 6:35 (NLT) The late-night call to the hospital twisted my stomach into a hard knot. Danny, a strong, passionate college student studying for ministry, had been in an accident. He lay in a medically induced coma, survival uncertain. I was one of his teachers. I rushed to the hospital and joined his friends. Danny’s parents had not yet arrived; they faced an agonizing four-hour drive. As we waited, we pieced together the tragic story. Danny had seen a homeless man begging on the side of the road. He sensed God’s whisper to feed him; the fast-food gift certificates he had in his pocket would be perfect. While turning his car around, he was T-boned by a pickup truck. His girlfriend suffered minor injuries; the other driver wasn’t hurt, but Danny now fought for his life. We waited and prayed and tried to comfort his parents when they arrived. The waiting stretched into days. Danny’s father, however, was not content with waiting. He had a mission. The day after the accident, he drove to the fast-food joint, loaded up with food, drove to that fateful place, and finished the task his son had begun. While his son lay in a coma, Danny’s father fed that same homeless man who would never fathom the cost of his meal; God’s boundless compassion, disguised as fast food. Danny’s recovery was slow but strong. I saw him recently, working on campus. He waved. He'd just gotten married. Danny, by his life and through his family, has become my teacher. Heavenly Father, grant me grace to press through my heartaches to a place of total forgiveness, supernatural love, and abundant life. —Bill Giovannetti Digging Deeper: Jn 15:4; Eph 4:32; Jas 2:8
Guideposts (Daily Guideposts 2014)
Trucks hauling coal that weighs a hundred tons, racing across old, twenty-ton bridges still used by school buses, and absolutely ignoring every rule of the road. If there’s an accident, it’s usually bad. In West Virginia, they’re killing one innocent driver per week. The trucker swears he was doing nothing wrong, his buddy backs him up, there are no other witnesses, so the jury falls in line with Big Coal.
John Grisham (Gray Mountain)
The two left wheels of Tara and Abelard’s carriage lurched off the ground as the driver swung them into the narrow gap between a large driverless wagon and a mounted courier. Tara scrambled to the elevated side of the passenger cabin, eyes wide, and shot an angry look at Abelard when he chortled. The airborne wheels returned to the cobblestones with a bone-jarring thud. Tara’s teeth clapped together so hard her jaw ached. “Is our driver insane?” He brought one finger to his lips. “Don’t let him hear you. Cabbies in Alt Coulumb are touchy, with reason. The Guild has zero tolerance for accidents.” “They fire you if you have a wreck?” “It involves fire, yes. Trust me, there’s no safer place on the road in Alt Coulumb than in a cab.” “Especially when there are cabs on the road,” she noted as they cut off a one-horse hatchback, which careened out of control into a delivery wagon.
Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead (Craft Sequence, #1))
In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs described the ballet that takes place on crowded pavements as people make eye contact and find their way around one another. I felt a similar, if supercharged dynamic coming to life in Paris’s traffic lanes. With cars and bikes and buses mixed together, none of us could be sure what we would find on the road ahead of us. We all had to be awake to the rhythm of asymmetrical flow. In the contained fury of the narrow streets we were forced to choreograph our movements, but with so many other bicycles flooding the streets, cycling in Paris was actually becoming safer. As more people took to bicycles in Vélib”s first year, the number of bike accidents rose, but the number of accidents per capita fell. This phenomenon seems to occur wherever cities see a spike in cycling: the more people bike, the safer the streets get for cyclists, partly because drivers adopt more cautious habits when they expect cyclists on the road. There is safety in numbers.fn7, 15, 16
Charles Montgomery (Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design)
That accident he got into? He was driving drunk, and before the cops came, he put Lia in the driver’s seat.
Kate Stewart (Drive (The Bittersweet Symphony Duet #1))
Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality. The person who practices mindfulness should be no less awake than the driver of a car; if the practitioner isn't awake he will be possessed by dispersion and forgetfulness, just as the drowsy driver is likely to cause a grave accident. Be as awake as a person walking on high stilts-any mis-step could cause the walker to fall. Be like a medieval knight walking weaponless in a forest of swords. Be like a lion, going forward with slow, gentle, and firm steps. Only with this kind of vigilance can you realize total awakening.
Thich Nhat Hanh (The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation)
The same could not be said for the other two guys. The driver had been smashed in the face by the airbag, and then in the back of the head by the other guy, who had been thrown forward from the rear compartment like a spear, right out through the shattering windshield, where he still was, folded at the waist over the crumpled hood, face down. His feet were the nearest part of him. He wasn’t moving. Neither was the driver. Reacher forced open his door against the screech of distorted metal, and he crawled out, and he forced the door shut again after him. There was no traffic behind them. Nothing up ahead either, except dim twinkling headlights, maybe a mile in the distance. Coming toward them. A minute away, at sixty miles an hour. The vehicle the Lincoln had hit was a minivan. A Ford. It was all stoved in on the side. Bent like a banana. It had a banner in the windshield that said No Accidents. The Lincoln itself was a total mess. It was crumpled up like a concertina, all the way back to the windshield. Like a safety ad in a newspaper. Except for the guy draped on top.
Lee Child (Blue Moon (Jack Reacher, #24))
Another situation in which we attend to base rates occurs if people ascribe some causal significance to discrepant rates. When they can see the causal relevance of the base rates, they often incorporate them into their reasoning. For example, the belief that one bus company has more accidents than another because its drivers are more poorly selected and trained will influence mock jurors to take this difference in accident rates into account in evaluating eyewitness testimony; but belief that a bus company has more accidents simply because it is larger will not. Study after study has shown that when these rates are merely statistical as opposed to causal, they tend to be ignored. Exactly the same effect seems to occur in real courtrooms; naked statistical evidence is notoriously unpersuasive.
Reid Hastie (Rational Choice in an Uncertain World: The Psychology of Judgement and Decision Making)
Most travellers here feel that driving in Rome qualifies as an experience that can be added to one’s vita, that everyday autostrada trips are examinations in courage and that the Amalfi coast drive is a definition of hell. “These people really know how to drive,” I remember him saying as he swung our no-power rented Fiat into the passing lane, turn signal blinking. A Maserati zooming forward in the rearview mirror blasted us back to the right lane. Soon he was admiring daring maneuvers. “Did you see that? He had two wheels dangling in thin air!” he marveled. “Sure, they have their share of duffers riding the center lane but most people keep to the rules.” “What rules?” I asked as someone in a tiny car like ours whizzed by going a hundred. Apparently there are speed limits, according to the size of the engine, but I never have seen anyone stopped for speeding in all my summers in Italy. You’re dangerous if you’re going sixty. I’m not sure what the accident rate is; I rarely see one but I imagine many are caused by slow drivers (tourists perhaps?) who incite the cars behind them.
Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun)
as he spoke. “You look great. How do you feel about looking like a completely different person, if you don’t mind my asking?” “I don’t really know. At first I thought it was great, and I suppose I still do. It’s all just so unreal to me still, you know?” I shrugged. “It’s hard to believe. I feel like I’m still in a coma and I’ll wake up any day now.” “I sure hope not,” Carl said. “I don’t want to have to come all this way to collect you again.” I laughed, as lame as his joke was. He always knew how to cheer me up. “Thanks again, Carl.” “You’re welcome,” he replied, shifting gears. I felt my breathing speed up and struggled to keep myself calm. “Narel,” Carl said, startling me, “I know you told me on the phone several times, but mostly I was watching The Real Housewives of Melbourne at the time so I wasn’t really listening. How are you for money? With your accident, I mean. Did work give you time off?” “I did tell you!” I exclaimed, excited to discuss the news in person. “I’ve quit my job.” Carl’s eyebrows shot up when I said that. “I know you said you had that big settlement, but has it come through yet? How are you for money?” It was obvious he was earnestly worried. “Better than ever. As you know, I settled out of court with the other driver from the accident. I told you he was a driver for a big national company. They’ve already paid up. Carl, I don’t think I’m going to have many money troubles from here on.” I beamed at him. “Narel, trust you to downplay something like that. ‘Don’t think you’ll have many money troubles’? Most people would settle for saying ‘I’m filthy stinking rich.’” Carl laughed. “Well, I suppose I am,” I agreed, laughing too. “I could’ve made more money if the case had gone ahead, I guess, but I
Morgana Best (Sweet Revenge (Cocoa Narel Chocolate Shop, #1))
Overtaking is occasionally the showing off of the car’s performance, and is usually the showing of the driver’s impatience.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Drivers often overtake themselves into the premises of an undertaker.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
For decades, research has found that neighborhoods with the highest rates of fatal accidents also have the highest rates of violent crime. In other words, criminals violate traffic laws as routinely as they violate other laws, and those criminals and bad drivers are disproportionately black.
Heather Mac Donald (When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives)
(...) Official figures focus on those who were killed in wars or civil conflict, or who were otherwise targeted. While they record the deaths of journalists in accidents while on a hazardous assignment, they do not record the deaths of journalists who die in traffic accidents because they are trying to reach a story too fast, or working past the point of exhaustion, or because they put their lives in the hands of drivers who do not know an unlit, dangerous road. They do not tell of those who survive but who are so physically and mentally scarred that they are unable to work effectively again. They do not record the impact of death and injury on other journalists who may be reluctant to probe areas that have proved fatal for their colleagues.
IFJ (A Survival Guide for Journalists: Live News)
First, Mr. Treadwell and his wife died in a carbon monoxide accident. Then Dr. Miles Prestone dies of a heart attack. I almost get killed in an accident where the other driver mysteriously disappears, and then I almost get killed again by a real-life hit man during a staged robbery. And now Keith Evans, another of Treadwell’s investors, commits suicide?
Mitty Walters (Breaking Gravity)
Want a ride?" ... One look at the car, & I decided that walking didn't sound so bad, after all. ... "Half the people around here shouldn't even be driving." She said this will no irony whatsoever, despite the fact that her car's black cloth top kept rising and lowering like some kind of strange bird trying to achieve flight. The driver, a young ginger haired guy, took a stab at making it stop, & turned the wipers on instead. "I'm good," I assured her. ... Ronnie panicked & veered sharply to the right, missing the race car but clipping a VW Bug that had stalled out in the middle of the air. It's hood was jacked up, and its owner's butt was hanging over the side. Or, at least, it was until the impact caused the Bug to go spinning in one direction & flung the owner in the other. ...."uh-oh" .... Ronnie glanced at me. "Get in if you're getting!" I'd have refused, considering his grasp on the fundamentals of the road -- or in this case, the air. But traffic was piling up around the accident, pushing more people out of the safe zone. And I was beginning to doubt that most of them even knew how to drive on land.
Karen Chance (Death's Mistress (Dorina Basarab, #2))
Ihung up with Josh, and the switch flipped in my head. Sloan called it my velociraptor brain because it made me fierce and sharp. Something big had to trigger it, and when it did, my compulsive, laser-focused, primal side activated. The one that got me a near perfect score on my SATs and got me through college finals and Mom. The one that made me clean when I was stressed and threatened to launch into full-scale manic OCD if left unchecked—that kicked in. Emotion drained away, the tiredness from staying up all night crying dissipated, and I became my purpose. I didn’t do hysterics. Never had. When in crisis, I became systematic and efficient. And the transition was now complete. I weighed only for a second whether to call Sloan and tell her or go pick her up. I decided to pick her up. She would be too upset to drive properly, but knowing her, she would try anyway. From Josh’s explanation of the situation, Brandon wouldn’t be out of the hospital anytime soon. Sloan wouldn’t leave Brandon, and I wouldn’t leave her. She would need things for the stay. People would need to be called. Arrangements made. I began to compile a list in my head of things to do and things to pack as I quickly but methodically drove to Sloan’s. Phone charger, headphones, blanket, change of clothes for Sloan, toiletries, and her laptop. It took me twenty minutes to get to her house, and I got out of my car ready for a surgical extraction. I stood there, surrounded by the earthy smell of Sloan’s just-watered potted porch flowers. The door opened, and I took in her blissfully ignorant face one more time. “Kristen?” It wasn’t unusual for me to stop by. But she knew me well enough to instantly know something was wrong. “Sloan, Brandon has been in an accident,” I said calmly. “He’s alive, but I need you to get your purse and come with me.” I knew immediately that I’d been right to come get her instead of calling. One look at her and I knew she wouldn’t have been able to put a foot in front of the other. While I mobilized and became strong under stress, she froze and weakened. “What?  ” she breathed. “We have to hurry. Come on.” I pushed past her and systematically executed my checklist. I gave myself a two-minute window to grab what was needed. Her gym bag would be in the laundry room, already filled with toiletries and her headphones. I grabbed that, pulled a sweater from her closet, selected a change of clothes for her, and stuffed her laptop inside the bag. When I came out of the room, she had managed to grab her purse as instructed. She stood by the sofa looking shaken, her eyes moving back and forth like she was trying to figure out what was happening. Her cell phone sat by her easel and I snatched it, pulling the charger from the wall. I grabbed her favorite throw blanket from the sofa and stuffed that in the bag and zipped it. List complete. Then I took her by the elbow, locked her front door, and dragged her to the car. “Wha…what happened? What happened!” she screamed, finally coming out of her shock. I opened up the passenger door and put her in. “Buckle yourself up. I’ll tell you what I know on the way.” When I got around to the driver’s side, she had her phone to her ear. “He’s not answering. He’s not answering! What happened, Kristen?!” I grabbed her face in my hands. “Listen to me. Look at me. He is alive. He was hit on his bike. Josh went on the call. He was unconscious. It was clear he had some broken bones and a possible head injury. He’s at the ER, and I need to get you to the hospital to be with him. But I need you to be calm.” Her brown eyes were terrified, but she nodded. “Right now your job is to call Brandon’s family,” I said firmly. “Relay what I just said to you, calmly. Can you do that for Brandon?” She nodded again. “Yes.” Her hands shook, but she dialed.
Abby Jimenez
He said I must pay special attention in cars. He wasn’t, he assured me, saying that I’d be in an accident but that for two weeks some particular caution was in order, &, he said, all I really needed to do was throw the white light of Alma around any car I entered & then I’d be fine. & when I asked about Alma, he said, Oh, come on, you know Alma well. You two were together first in Egypt & then at Stonehenge, & I nodded though I’ve never been— in this life at least—to Stonehenge; then I said, Shouldn’t I always throw the white light of Alma around a car? & when he said, Well, it wouldn’t hurt, I said, What about around planes, houses? What if I throw the white light of Alma around anyone who might need protection from the reckless speed of driving or the reckless swerve & skid of the world? & the psychic opened his hands & shrugged up his shoulders. So despite your doubt or mine as to why I’d gone there, to a psychic, in—I kid you not—a town of psychics—in the first place, right now, as you read this, let me throw the white light of Alma around you & everyone you pass close to today, beloved or stranger, the grocer, the bus driver, the boy on his longboard, the lady you stand silent beside in the elevator, & also I am throwing it around anyone they care about anywhere in the spin of the world, because, we can agree that these days, everywhere, particular caution is in order &, even if unverifiable, the light of my dear sister Alma, couldn’t hurt.
Victoria Redel
The message for public officials and politicians is clear. If you don’t change the relationship between the citizen and the state to fit with the internet age soon, someone else will take over that relationship, and in ways which are not always predictable. In Los Angeles, around 30% of drivers use Waze, a smartphone app that allows road users to share real-time traffic and road information. It provides information on things like traffic accidents or police traps. Because it has become so popular, Waze has now effectively become part of the city’s transport infrastructure, with the city administration working directly with the company to alert drivers about potential delays. Perhaps that doesn’t sound especially radical – just a good example of public–private data sharing. But Waze is now much more than a transport app. Having become a part of many people’s daily lives, the app has unexpectedly morphed into a broader
Andrew Greenway (Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery (Perspectives))