Almost Killed: A Tale of Two Provinces

Four days ago in Ottawa I was walking down the street by my place (sidewalk, daytime, clear, residential, 40 kph) and I came to a four-way-stop intersection I’m crossing and a motorist was going straight through the intersection and he came pretty close to me. I was about one metre from his driver side door. He totally saw me at the last second, cleared the intersection and immediately stopped, then turned around caught up to me and apologized.

Respect.

Just now in St. Albert AB, I was walking to get my coffee and I had to cross a road (dark, minimal street lights, marked crosswalk, flashing lights, 40 kph on the street, 60 kph on the road). I’m crossing in the green and he’s turning right from a feeder street. It’s 6:45 AM so not a lot of traffic. It’s dark so I’m being very careful.

I was in his target lane and he saw me at the last second and abruptly slammed the brakes. A tiny squeak from the tires of his stupid truck. A classic case of “motorist turning right and only worried about the car traffic in his target lane”. His phone beeps at that moment: I’m fucking dead.

That’s why (after almost killing me) his response to my “Dude, wtf” expression as we passed each other was so odious. He stopped, rolled down his window and said “Seriously, f-off”

No respect.

There’s so much I could write about this situation. The black, urban motorist acknowledging his mistake and apologizing. The (sort of) rural driver prioritizing his feelings over the fact that he almost murdered someone via negligence and NOT apologizing. That I was wearing a black jacket would have kept this a-hole out of prison with his drivers license still valid, burdened with only a small fine and the hassle of having to go to court.

Truck vs. car. Black vs. white. Urban vs. rural. ON vs. AB. Motorist vs. pedestrian. Left vs. right.

In October 2023 the Richmond BC Police released a PSA for this EXACT scenario. It’s so awful it’s *almost* funny. The community notes, my God.

On some level I can understand what’s going on here. I’ve been in many a discussion where I make a bad comparison. The problem here is that the bad comparison

• cost at LEAST $15,000 of public money
• survived multiple levels of review by management
• no one recognized the problem
• or when it was pointed out it was ignored

It wasn’t a poorly thought out tweet, conceived and published in under ten seconds by an unpaid intern at some local police service.

It was a video production with a script and budget and meetings and discussions and approvals. The core idea of the video was based around a fundamental concept of their profession (a profession that yields an enormous amount of power in society) made by trained members of a country’s NATIONAL police service. The problem with the video was so obvious it identified by untrained civilians about six seconds after it was uploaded.

And the video is still up!

This whole thing suggests to me that the people charged managing an important aspect of our society – safety from crime – a) don’t seem to know what a crime is and b) appear to be incapable of admitting (or at least correcting) when they make a mistake. And the stakes here are super low! How do they behave when they make bigger mistakes?

The only good thing I can see about the Richmond BC police keeping this video up is that it’s a place where people can go and see a real-world reminder that the hero-worship our society bestows upon cops might not be warranted. And also as a manifestation of that famous Dril tweet.

Five months ago back on May 18, my new best friend here in Alberta was hit by a truck that was turning right. Tossed ten feet (three meters) off his mobility scooter. Ken was 100% in the right. The motorist was taking the turn way too fast, didn’t stop immediately after the crash, and then claimed to the cops that Ken was crossing against the light. There were fifteen witnesses. What a moron.

This is all to say that it’s experiences like that that convince me that it’s time for us to get rid of ANY kind of rolling righthand turn and to put to bed this reactionary impulse to claim the victim when one is clearly in the wrong.