We have pretty much all had this experience at some time or other in some form. You are driving along a narrow road that has just one lane of traffic each way. The direction you are traveling in is jammed with very slow-moving traffic while the other lane for cars going in the opposite direction is empty. What do you do? If you are a normal person and not a jerk, you put it down to the vagaries of life and continue to crawl along.
But every so often there will be someone who thinks, “Hey, I can get to my destination much faster by shifting to the other lane!” and they will zip past you. In this video we what can happen as the driver of such a car is forced to go slowly in reverse down a narrow winding mountain road when faced with oncoming traffic, as any idiot could have predicted would happen. (If you cannot see the embedded video, click here.)
Now here’s the question: Would you create space to allow her to get back in your lane or would you let her continue the humiliating reversing?
I must admit I would be torn between wanting to let that driver learn a valuable lesson by suffering for her act of irresponsibility, and feeling sorry for the line of people blocked by her who, through no fault of their own, are now forced to crawl because of it.
Can’t see it. Can’t see it on the Boing Boing page either.
Is there a specific video title embedded in the media itself? What about a hosting server (youtube?)?
It seems to have disappeared. It was originally on imgur and the link was “//imgur.com/jSvKk0Q” rel=”nofollow”
Yeah, it wasn’t there when I looked, either. The evanescence of hyperlinks is a problem.
—
BTW, the
relattribute of the anchor tag (which is put in by this local platform) is part of the anchor tag, not of the hyperlink. The valuenofollowis a request that webtrawlers should not follow that link, but carries no compulsion.I assume this is it: https://youtu.be/qQpnJbBVNqg
I also haven’t seen the video in the OP, but can relate (as I know I’ve done before, so apologies if this is a repeat) my own story about a similar-ish incident. Isle of Sky (Scotland). Narrow single-track road on a steep hillside, with passing places at the top-ish and bottom-ish of the hill. I’m the only one visible, so climb to almost the top-ish passing place. Another car appears over the crest of the hill, and stops, blocking my entrance to the to the top-ish passing place. Stalemate. I didn’t get out of the car and explain to eejit if they would reverse uphill perhaps ten metres I could then pull into the passing place and allow them to overtake, my memory (now) is they did not seem like someone who would or could do that. End result is I reversed, downhill, to the bottom-ish passing place, with the eejit only metres away the entire SCARY reversal. Feckhead did, as I now recall, wave “Thanks!” as I eventually pulled over. What has since made me furious about the incident is discovering the UK has the same-ish rule as California (where I learned to drive): The car going uphill has the right-of-away, i.e., the car going downhill is the one which should reverse (uphill) to a safe passing area.
blf, where I got my license (South Australia), it was made very clear that there is no such thing as “right of way”; rather, there is a requirement to “give way”.
(You might naively think they are the same thing, but they’re not)
hyphenman @#4,
No that was not it but it captures the same phenomenon. The one I saw was on a winding road on a mountain side with a steep drop on one side. In this video, the person does not even know how to reverse, whereas the driver on the mountain road could at least do that.