My, how times have changed

[Lunchbag]

I will stop if I see a guy physically pushing a dead car out of traffic, but that's it.

Actually, that reminds me that I do occasionally stop.  The last two times were after witnessing an accident, to give my contact info to the person who was hit (both were fine).  I understand that insurance companies sometimes have difficulty establishing fault even when it seems obvious, and a witness statement can help.

In one of those cases though, the best thing I accomplished was to convince the driver that we should not try to push the car out of traffic.  He had been hit by an 18-wheeler who ran a red light and, besides being smashed up, the car wheels were so crooked we could only get ourselves killed trying to push the broken car which at that point had a stream of cars driving around it on both sides.  I think the driver was running on adrenaline and wasn't thinking clearly.

Epilogue - That intersection north of Hollister, CA was so bad they eventually replaced it with a turbo-roundabout, which works great if everyone understands it and picks the correct lane.  Unfortunately, the roundabout actually increased the accident rate.  The problem was not with the roundabout, which was a built according to a smart Scandinavian design.  The problem is that not all Americans are Scandinavian.  Some of them just get confused and gun it.  But the good news is that Caltrans put up a camera so the world can watch the chaos live.