The Ohio Department of Transportation is working to remind motorists to quit stopping in the middle of the highway.
ODOT says that they are issuing the reminder in the wake of multiple crashes caused by motorists that don’t want to miss their exit. Recently, a truck hauling watermelons had to make a sudden stop for a motorist slowly crossing multiple lanes of traffic just to take an exit they nearly missed. That accident caused the watermelons to spill across the roadway, resulting in traffic backups.
“Luckily that truck driver was paying attention and was able to bring their truck to a stop. Had he not that could have ended very tragically, when you look at where that car was and the angle he would have hit it. If he hadn’t been aware of the situation that very easily could have been a tragedy,” said ODOT press secretary Matt Bruning.
Two accidents this past spring also happened because a motorist didn‘t want to miss their exit. One of those four wheelers stopped briefly on the shoulder before cutting across multiple lanes of traffic. The other motorist stopped their van in the middle of the highway so they could reach their exit. That incident caused a chain reaction crash, but the motorist in the van kept going. They were eventually caught, reported NBC4i.
“These are things that are easily avoided. Just because you happen to be in the wrong lane and you don’t have enough time to get over to your exit, again, just go to the next one. That’s how we avoid these kinds of situations,” Bruning said.
“It’s frustrating because we try to engineer the roads to be as safe as we can, vehicle manufacturers obvious try to manufacture their vehicles to be as safe as we can. The one thing we can’t directly impact is the driver behavior and we’re trying to do that through education,” he continued.
“We just need people to pay attention and drive responsibly and that’s not a hard ask,” Bruning said. “That’s an easy fix and it doesn’t cost anything but it could save lives and that’s what we’re trying to do here.”
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