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Originally Posted by treadmark You should thank you stars, glad that you had a quick reflex. |
Yes, I have been repeatedly told that I should thank my stars, as also comments such as
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...would have ended up in an hospital or worse... (No offence intended) and you would be collecting your car insurance money (Total loss) or your relatives, your health insurance (I don't want to explain this. No offence intended towards you, only towards the truck driver), and the truck driver(s) won't be even seeing your face, enjoying some bxxxx.
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If I were you, I would have slowed down and got behind the slower truck. It was very very risky.
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I'd not have overtaken the truck by closely following the other truck., instead I'd have waited for the truck to complete its overtaking manoeuver.
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Originally Posted by reignofchaos Please do not tailgate like that and you'll never need to swerve. Keep at least 2 seconds of gap between you and the truck in front. You are cutting it way too close. |
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Originally Posted by suresh_gs That was a close shave.
...The message is clear. One has to be ultra careful while trying to overtake trucks. |
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Originally Posted by Travelling_Monk At about 0:26 seconds into this video, you can notice that the oncoming truck is clearly visible through the gap between the two trucks. Honestly, I wouldn't dare to overtake in this situation, rather I would wait for the truck in the rightmost lane to finish his maneuver before proceeding and make it sure to maintain a safe amount of distance all this while. Highway driving needs a lot of patience and quick reflexes combined with good anticipation skills... |
As I mentioned in the beginning, this is a teaching video that I use when conducting Low Risk Safe Driver Training (let me assure you and everyone else that I am not in any manner soliciting custom or trying to monetize what I do, through this forum).
This video was from a time when I did presumption-based driving (before I received my training). I've survived crash-free for 20 years of driving, but close shaves such as these happened once or twice a year. I was not happy about it, so I underwent specialized training in Australia which I hoped would eliminate whatever risky behaviour I had on the road. That's when I learnt about the different types of driving:
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Originally Posted by SS-Traveller Question is, how do we drive? Check the list below, and see where you fit in.
1. Reflex-based / reactive driving: You see an obstacle on the road, you react. Between seeing and reacting, there may not be enough time to avoid the obstacle. Your risk of a crash remains high.
2. Presumption-based driving: Apart from depending on your reflexes, you also assume that the other road user is careless, preoccupied or simply demented. You presume that he will do something crazy every time, and are glad when he does not. Sometimes, he might do something you cannot imagine him to be capable of doing. Case in point, the video I posted on the previous page. I presumed the truck was swerving to avoid an obstacle, but never imagined that 2 trucks would be coming head-on on the wrong side of the road.
3. Evidence-based driving: This is what I learnt, and am trained as a trainer to teach, 2 months ago. Apart from depending on my reflexes as well as presuming another road user might do something crazy, I now look for evidence about whether a situation is safe or not. It took a bit of getting used to learning and adapting the technique, but now these close shaves have not happened in the last 2 months - and I find I am also faster than before from point A to point B. |
With evidence-based driving, you would notice (and I missed noticing then), the truck being overtaken suddenly tucking into the back of the 3-wheeler and braking hard (no trucker ever does that without REALLY good reason). I presumed that the overtaken truck was being ultra-polite, and the overtaking truck would go through safely - this being a divided road with no chance of oncoming traffic - and I can follow him, while continuing to presume that if there is any obstruction, he will cut in to the left, and I'll follow him to the left too (which I did).
Today, after being trained, I would notice the brake lights of the overtaken truck come on, try to think like that truck driver, and come up with the conclusion based on his unusual behaviour that he is simply positioning himself in a safe location due to something he can see ahead (and I cannot) - and hence I'd have braked and pulled in behind the truck being overtaken, not accelerated out behind the truck that was overtaking. This has nothing to do with the few-milliseconds-glimpse of the oncoming trucks at 0:26, as someone mentioned - in real life, your brain would not register that glimpse, nor would your eyes focus that far away.
There are hundreds of such small bits of evidence that one needs to look for (and be trained to look for) while driving, to minimize risk while driving. And that's what I learnt during my training, have been practising over and over and over, and that's what I now do - train people to drive safer.
Of course, with presumption based driving you are safer than with reactive / reflex-based driving, but such close calls (as you see on the video) still happen occasionally. It's very easy for armchair critics to say "You were driving in a very risky manner", as I have been told by many, here and on the video page itself. What matters is, can we interpret that video and turn it into a learning exercise for the future? I hope the explanation about evidence-based driving that the video conveys is now clear to critics of the video. Yes I know that the manoeuvre was risky, but at that time I did not know about evidence-based driving. Today, I do, and as a result my driving pattern has changed for the better (and hopefully, of those whom I've trained too).