It was bound to happen sooner or later. I just didn't know what would come first - wrecking with another car, getting smashed by a bus or getting involved in a crash with a motorcycle.
The car crash already happened (I'm sure many of you remember my post on that
).
I've come close so many times to being sandwiched between two colectivos, or run off the road, or pushed into oncoming traffic. There's nothing like driving through a moving steel canyon, surrounded on four sides by the behemoths - or maybe more like the feeling of a man running beneath the feet of a herd of brontosaurs and trying not to get stepped on. I've managed to avoid that one so far (my desk is real wood - I'm knocking like crazy!).
But motorcycles here are nuts. Aside from the fact that they cannot do as much damage to other people and things as a car or bus under most circumstances, they pose a big threat to safety on busy city roads, in my opinion.
They come out of nowhere, weaving through traffic. Usually rush hour traffic, because they float along nicely under moving traffic conditions. But even then, they tend to weave through lines of cars stopped at lights (even lines one or two cars long), squeezing through spaces that you wouldn't have thought they'd fit without at least scratching something, all to get right in the front of all cars and get through the light the second after (and many times a few seconds before) the light changes.
Cars, under most circumstances, have a certain set of properties like turning radii, acceleration profiles, stopping lengths, etc, that even in the traffic here makes things absolutely predictable within a certain range of actions and the laws of physics. For example, a car one lane over to the right, sitting still, will not suddenly slide ten feet to the left and hit your car. You know when you're sitting still that you don't have to worry about that car until it starts moving.
Motorcycles have the same basic properties, but their values are so different from that of cars in most properties, while maintaining in most cases the shared properties of speed and acceleration more or less equal on most city streets. The others, like turning radius and maneuverability, can turn them into weapons that can be deadly to someone, most usually the motorcyclist or pedestrians.
And they can do damage to cars.
Today (well, yesterday now), I was taking my sister-in-law to a class around 5:30 in the afternoon. I hate this class - it starts at 6:00 and goes until 8:00. It's near the Wendys on Cabildo, about three kilometers from where I live near San Martin Plaza. I have to leave an hour early to get there. And at 8:00, on the way back, the traffic is only half cleared up. At 5:30, I'd already been on the road for twenty minutes (I have leeway in my schedule, I'd left ten minutes late and still had a couple of minutes loose time just in case, besides, it's Argentina - five minutes late wouldn't count).
I came up to the roundabout cum stoplight at Sarmiento and Libertador, having come from the one at Alcorta and Sarmiento, and was trying to pass through, across Libertador to get to Santa Fe. The traffic at this point was not heavy - it breaks up a bit sometimes through Sarmiento before really bad rush hour hits. I was in front of the right lane of traffic, approaching the intersection. There were cars in all lanes across to my left, their front ends about at the middle of my car.
The light turned yellow. I was going less than 50, but a bit more than 45. The other cars around me started to slow down and I hesitated about a second to think about going through the yellow - I was going through, it would take a few seconds for traffic to my left get started from Libertador and cross the roundabout, but those on the right side (my side) who would be going across to the left, would probably start as I got there. I didn't want to push it (be a not-uncommon Argentine driver), so I slowed down too. I managed to stop right behind the crosswalk without screeching my tires.
About three seconds later, we felt a huge shudder and heard a huge crash. I looked in my left sport mirror and didn't immediately see anything, until I looked out my left window and saw a motorcycle laying on it's side perpendicular between my car and the car to my left, the front wheel about even with my backdoor (I drive a 5-door '99 Megane). Yes, there was enough space between my car and the other car that the back wheel of the bike didn't even come close to hitting the other car as it hit my left rear end and torqued around from the impact and inertia.
I'm not sure where he came from - I never saw him and I'm an observant driver. My father used to play games with me when he was teaching me to drive and any time I drove with him - still does - related to "name the cars around you."
Under the motorcycle was a man, trying to get out from under the bike.
I told my sister-in-law to stay put and opened my door, got out. A jogger who was about to cross Sarmiento had run over almost immediately and we both got to the bike and picked it up off the guy. It was a relatively small 125cc Yamaha. As we put the bike on its stand and made sure it was stable, I looked down at the guy. He was getting up and obviously favoring his left leg. The jogger, who was closer, reached out to steady the guy.
We both noticed the blood that began to seep out of his pant leg above his ankle, as it began to seep out of his socks over his shoe and run into the pavement.
That freaked us out.
We got the guy over to the curb (blocked from traffic for about a meter or more away from the curb by a bike trail - concrete stops on the right of street marking off the lane) and sat him down.
Another motorcyclist had stopped, bike to the curb, and brought the wrecked bike to the curb as well.
The jogger and I were looking at the guy's leg as he pulled his pant leg up. He was wearing some kind of wool wrap around his ankles. He explained something about keeping his ankles from getting torn up, things would have been a lot worse without that, he said. We could see a cut on the front side of his shin, to the outside of the shine bone, above his ankle, in the fleshy part. It was seeping, not squirting, and it had already slowed down quite a bit, probably as the guy's heart rate slowed down a bit. The jogger called out to the other motorcyclist and asked if he had a bungee cord. The jogger began to make a tourniquet with the bungee cord to slow the bleeding - I don't know that it was necessary at that point, but as long as they paid attention to it it would be ok.
The other motorcyclist got out his cellphone and called 911. An ambulance was on the way.
Seeing that the guy was being attended to, I realized my car was still blocking traffic on the right. I started to go move it when the shakes hit me. I had to stop for a minute with weak knees. Then I started worrying about my sister-in-law (not physically - she just didn't know what was going on beyond the fact we'd had a wreck and was probably worried) and moved forward, got back into the car. As I moved it to the side and parked it, I explained what happened briefly and told her to stay there, everything was cool, let me handle it.
I was shaking in small vibrations pretty good at that point, but trying not to let her see how freaked out I was. That blood had really hit me pretty hard. When I'd first seen it, I'd thought pretty bad.
By this time, the jogger had taken off. I guess he didn't want to stay around for the aftermath, but I thank him for helping with the injured guy. I realized belatedly that he'd led the actions immediately after the accident. I realized I'd heard him asking me to help get the bike off the guy (I was moving in that direction when I left the car anyway, just slowly, almost like a dream), told me we needed to get him to the curb when we were supporting him, little things that at that moment were a bit fuzzy to me. I wish I could have thanked him, but he was already gone when I left the car.
By the time I got back to the guy (we were a few meters behind my car) sitting on the curb, the bleeding had pretty much stopped. He'd taken a cloth from somewhere and tied it around the cut, and had taken off the tourniquet. The other motorcyclist was standing in front of him, bending over and looking at the blood.
I touched the wounded guy on the shoulder and asked him if he was alright.
Both guys answered at that moment. The wounded guy said "I'm okay, but it's starting to hurt."
The other guy starting shouting at me "What the hell were you doing? Why did you stop? The light was yellow! You made him crash!"
I was a bit surprised. But not too. I was also angry.
"Don't you guys know what a yellow light means? It doesn't mean speed up to get to the other side, it means it's time to stop! Everyone else stopped except you! You motorcyclists are crazy and you're just looking to get hurt!" I felt bad after I'd said it. I was directing my anger at the guy who'd made the dumb statement, but there was a guy sitting on the ground with blood around him also.
Then the question.
"You're not from here, are you? Where are you from?"
Damn I hate that.
"What difference does that make? I live here just like you, that's all that matters. And obviously I know more about traffic laws than you since I know that yellow means stop, not go!"
"Well, I figure you're a foreigner and maybe you don't understand the traffic laws here."
"Tell you what - let's wait for the police to get here and we'll ask them what the law says."
"Ok, that's right, you don't leave, they'll be here in a minute."
I walked back to the car and let my sister-in-law know what was going on, lit up a cigarette (don't even go there, I know) and realized I'd stopped shaking.
A couple of minutes later, a young lady cop, about late twenties or so, came walking up, bullet-proof vest, PFA emblem, clipboard in her hands. her car was parked about 5 meters down the street from us. I walked up as she was asking both guys what happened. Or both guys were answering her anyway.
To their credit, they told the truth. I think they honestly thought it was OK to go through a yellow light.
At this moment her partner walked up. Older gentleman, maybe 50 or a little more.
The lady cop questions the "victim" alone this time, as to what happened. After he described accurately, again, what happened, he picked up the theme of his compatriot motorcyclist (from before the cops' arrival) and added it was my fault for having stopped. He couldn't avoid me, he said, and wasn't expecting me to stop.
She says "Wait a minute, the light was yellow and you didn't understand what that meant?" She actually went off on him a little, raised her voice a bit and started saying how dangerously motorcyclists drive. They were lucky they didn't get hit more often. They need to study the laws a bit better if they think that's the way to drive.
Then the lady cop asked the wounded guy if he wanted to press charges. I heard her mention that in the case of a wound during a traffic accident, it could be considered a crime. I wondered why she was asking him instead of me about pressing charges. After all, in my first accident, it was the other guy's fault and the cop had asked me if I wanted to press charges. And what was this about a crime?
Turns out it was my turn to be ignorant of a certain aspect of the Argentine vehicle code of law.
I asked the lady cop's partner why she was asking him this. He explained to me that in a case of a wound at an accident scene, if the lesser-sized vehicle's occupant is injured, it could be a crime against the driver of the larger vehicle.
I was dumbfounded.
At this point, the guy on the ground says "Yes, I want to press charges."
Oh crap.
The lady cop explains to the guy the same things I had explained to me in my other accident with the car (which was bigger than mine, by the way - and I was wounded, by the driver's son punching me), that if he presses charges both vehicles will be impounded, both of us will have to go down to the police station and wait hours while the reports are filled out, etc.
But one item was added, that I don't remember the cops saying at my first accident:
"..and the gentleman who was driving the car will spend some time in jail."
Now I was starting to get a little worried. I couldn't believe that I, who had been completely stationary for three seconds before I was hit, who had enough space on the side to fit probably three or four bikes in, but had had been hit by an idiot anyway, was going to go to JAIL?! In Argentina?! WTF??!!
The older guy smiled when I looked at him. While the lady cop was talking to the "victim", he starts telling me not to worry. It's just a formality if the guy presses charges. You'll spend a couple of more hours at the station while some additional paperwork is filled out, nothing more. If you go to court, the judge will most likely find in your favor, it's pretty clear what happened.
I wasn't sure if I could believe him, completely.
Then he speaks up and says to the other guy "Make sure you know what you're doing. If you press charges and it's found it was obviously your fault, it might not go all that good for you. There are witnesses who saw what happened, and there are traffic cameras here that will tell exactly what happened as well. Make sure you think you're doing the right thing."
I was quite relieved when I saw the guy's face consider this. I realized it would be terribly foolish of him to do this, just a second after he did.
"Oh no, he said, I didn't mean that. I want to file a report through insurance is what I meant."
So we exchanged information calmly, the cops left and the ambulance still hadn't come (heh). My sister-in-law was sitting in the car calmly, waiting for this particular piece of life to be over so we could move forward. I apologized to the other guys for getting a little hot while we were waiting for the ambulance/cops to get there. They didn't say anything. I told the guy I was sorry that this had happened to him, and they both shrugged their shoulders and said "ah, what're you gonna do? It happens." They told me it was ok, I didn't have to hang around and waste any more time on this.
I got in my car and we took off. We decided to skip class and head on back home. My car was now short the plastic tail light on the left side (broken) and a pretty scratched up rear fender.
The car crash already happened (I'm sure many of you remember my post on that
).I've come close so many times to being sandwiched between two colectivos, or run off the road, or pushed into oncoming traffic. There's nothing like driving through a moving steel canyon, surrounded on four sides by the behemoths - or maybe more like the feeling of a man running beneath the feet of a herd of brontosaurs and trying not to get stepped on. I've managed to avoid that one so far (my desk is real wood - I'm knocking like crazy!).
But motorcycles here are nuts. Aside from the fact that they cannot do as much damage to other people and things as a car or bus under most circumstances, they pose a big threat to safety on busy city roads, in my opinion.
They come out of nowhere, weaving through traffic. Usually rush hour traffic, because they float along nicely under moving traffic conditions. But even then, they tend to weave through lines of cars stopped at lights (even lines one or two cars long), squeezing through spaces that you wouldn't have thought they'd fit without at least scratching something, all to get right in the front of all cars and get through the light the second after (and many times a few seconds before) the light changes.
Cars, under most circumstances, have a certain set of properties like turning radii, acceleration profiles, stopping lengths, etc, that even in the traffic here makes things absolutely predictable within a certain range of actions and the laws of physics. For example, a car one lane over to the right, sitting still, will not suddenly slide ten feet to the left and hit your car. You know when you're sitting still that you don't have to worry about that car until it starts moving.
Motorcycles have the same basic properties, but their values are so different from that of cars in most properties, while maintaining in most cases the shared properties of speed and acceleration more or less equal on most city streets. The others, like turning radius and maneuverability, can turn them into weapons that can be deadly to someone, most usually the motorcyclist or pedestrians.
And they can do damage to cars.
Today (well, yesterday now), I was taking my sister-in-law to a class around 5:30 in the afternoon. I hate this class - it starts at 6:00 and goes until 8:00. It's near the Wendys on Cabildo, about three kilometers from where I live near San Martin Plaza. I have to leave an hour early to get there. And at 8:00, on the way back, the traffic is only half cleared up. At 5:30, I'd already been on the road for twenty minutes (I have leeway in my schedule, I'd left ten minutes late and still had a couple of minutes loose time just in case, besides, it's Argentina - five minutes late wouldn't count).
I came up to the roundabout cum stoplight at Sarmiento and Libertador, having come from the one at Alcorta and Sarmiento, and was trying to pass through, across Libertador to get to Santa Fe. The traffic at this point was not heavy - it breaks up a bit sometimes through Sarmiento before really bad rush hour hits. I was in front of the right lane of traffic, approaching the intersection. There were cars in all lanes across to my left, their front ends about at the middle of my car.
The light turned yellow. I was going less than 50, but a bit more than 45. The other cars around me started to slow down and I hesitated about a second to think about going through the yellow - I was going through, it would take a few seconds for traffic to my left get started from Libertador and cross the roundabout, but those on the right side (my side) who would be going across to the left, would probably start as I got there. I didn't want to push it (be a not-uncommon Argentine driver), so I slowed down too. I managed to stop right behind the crosswalk without screeching my tires.
About three seconds later, we felt a huge shudder and heard a huge crash. I looked in my left sport mirror and didn't immediately see anything, until I looked out my left window and saw a motorcycle laying on it's side perpendicular between my car and the car to my left, the front wheel about even with my backdoor (I drive a 5-door '99 Megane). Yes, there was enough space between my car and the other car that the back wheel of the bike didn't even come close to hitting the other car as it hit my left rear end and torqued around from the impact and inertia.
I'm not sure where he came from - I never saw him and I'm an observant driver. My father used to play games with me when he was teaching me to drive and any time I drove with him - still does - related to "name the cars around you."
Under the motorcycle was a man, trying to get out from under the bike.
I told my sister-in-law to stay put and opened my door, got out. A jogger who was about to cross Sarmiento had run over almost immediately and we both got to the bike and picked it up off the guy. It was a relatively small 125cc Yamaha. As we put the bike on its stand and made sure it was stable, I looked down at the guy. He was getting up and obviously favoring his left leg. The jogger, who was closer, reached out to steady the guy.
We both noticed the blood that began to seep out of his pant leg above his ankle, as it began to seep out of his socks over his shoe and run into the pavement.
That freaked us out.
We got the guy over to the curb (blocked from traffic for about a meter or more away from the curb by a bike trail - concrete stops on the right of street marking off the lane) and sat him down.
Another motorcyclist had stopped, bike to the curb, and brought the wrecked bike to the curb as well.
The jogger and I were looking at the guy's leg as he pulled his pant leg up. He was wearing some kind of wool wrap around his ankles. He explained something about keeping his ankles from getting torn up, things would have been a lot worse without that, he said. We could see a cut on the front side of his shin, to the outside of the shine bone, above his ankle, in the fleshy part. It was seeping, not squirting, and it had already slowed down quite a bit, probably as the guy's heart rate slowed down a bit. The jogger called out to the other motorcyclist and asked if he had a bungee cord. The jogger began to make a tourniquet with the bungee cord to slow the bleeding - I don't know that it was necessary at that point, but as long as they paid attention to it it would be ok.
The other motorcyclist got out his cellphone and called 911. An ambulance was on the way.
Seeing that the guy was being attended to, I realized my car was still blocking traffic on the right. I started to go move it when the shakes hit me. I had to stop for a minute with weak knees. Then I started worrying about my sister-in-law (not physically - she just didn't know what was going on beyond the fact we'd had a wreck and was probably worried) and moved forward, got back into the car. As I moved it to the side and parked it, I explained what happened briefly and told her to stay there, everything was cool, let me handle it.
I was shaking in small vibrations pretty good at that point, but trying not to let her see how freaked out I was. That blood had really hit me pretty hard. When I'd first seen it, I'd thought pretty bad.
By this time, the jogger had taken off. I guess he didn't want to stay around for the aftermath, but I thank him for helping with the injured guy. I realized belatedly that he'd led the actions immediately after the accident. I realized I'd heard him asking me to help get the bike off the guy (I was moving in that direction when I left the car anyway, just slowly, almost like a dream), told me we needed to get him to the curb when we were supporting him, little things that at that moment were a bit fuzzy to me. I wish I could have thanked him, but he was already gone when I left the car.
By the time I got back to the guy (we were a few meters behind my car) sitting on the curb, the bleeding had pretty much stopped. He'd taken a cloth from somewhere and tied it around the cut, and had taken off the tourniquet. The other motorcyclist was standing in front of him, bending over and looking at the blood.
I touched the wounded guy on the shoulder and asked him if he was alright.
Both guys answered at that moment. The wounded guy said "I'm okay, but it's starting to hurt."
The other guy starting shouting at me "What the hell were you doing? Why did you stop? The light was yellow! You made him crash!"
I was a bit surprised. But not too. I was also angry.
"Don't you guys know what a yellow light means? It doesn't mean speed up to get to the other side, it means it's time to stop! Everyone else stopped except you! You motorcyclists are crazy and you're just looking to get hurt!" I felt bad after I'd said it. I was directing my anger at the guy who'd made the dumb statement, but there was a guy sitting on the ground with blood around him also.
Then the question.
"You're not from here, are you? Where are you from?"
Damn I hate that.
"What difference does that make? I live here just like you, that's all that matters. And obviously I know more about traffic laws than you since I know that yellow means stop, not go!"
"Well, I figure you're a foreigner and maybe you don't understand the traffic laws here."
"Tell you what - let's wait for the police to get here and we'll ask them what the law says."
"Ok, that's right, you don't leave, they'll be here in a minute."
I walked back to the car and let my sister-in-law know what was going on, lit up a cigarette (don't even go there, I know) and realized I'd stopped shaking.
A couple of minutes later, a young lady cop, about late twenties or so, came walking up, bullet-proof vest, PFA emblem, clipboard in her hands. her car was parked about 5 meters down the street from us. I walked up as she was asking both guys what happened. Or both guys were answering her anyway.
To their credit, they told the truth. I think they honestly thought it was OK to go through a yellow light.
At this moment her partner walked up. Older gentleman, maybe 50 or a little more.
The lady cop questions the "victim" alone this time, as to what happened. After he described accurately, again, what happened, he picked up the theme of his compatriot motorcyclist (from before the cops' arrival) and added it was my fault for having stopped. He couldn't avoid me, he said, and wasn't expecting me to stop.
She says "Wait a minute, the light was yellow and you didn't understand what that meant?" She actually went off on him a little, raised her voice a bit and started saying how dangerously motorcyclists drive. They were lucky they didn't get hit more often. They need to study the laws a bit better if they think that's the way to drive.
Then the lady cop asked the wounded guy if he wanted to press charges. I heard her mention that in the case of a wound during a traffic accident, it could be considered a crime. I wondered why she was asking him instead of me about pressing charges. After all, in my first accident, it was the other guy's fault and the cop had asked me if I wanted to press charges. And what was this about a crime?
Turns out it was my turn to be ignorant of a certain aspect of the Argentine vehicle code of law.
I asked the lady cop's partner why she was asking him this. He explained to me that in a case of a wound at an accident scene, if the lesser-sized vehicle's occupant is injured, it could be a crime against the driver of the larger vehicle.
I was dumbfounded.
At this point, the guy on the ground says "Yes, I want to press charges."
Oh crap.
The lady cop explains to the guy the same things I had explained to me in my other accident with the car (which was bigger than mine, by the way - and I was wounded, by the driver's son punching me), that if he presses charges both vehicles will be impounded, both of us will have to go down to the police station and wait hours while the reports are filled out, etc.
But one item was added, that I don't remember the cops saying at my first accident:
"..and the gentleman who was driving the car will spend some time in jail."
Now I was starting to get a little worried. I couldn't believe that I, who had been completely stationary for three seconds before I was hit, who had enough space on the side to fit probably three or four bikes in, but had had been hit by an idiot anyway, was going to go to JAIL?! In Argentina?! WTF??!!
The older guy smiled when I looked at him. While the lady cop was talking to the "victim", he starts telling me not to worry. It's just a formality if the guy presses charges. You'll spend a couple of more hours at the station while some additional paperwork is filled out, nothing more. If you go to court, the judge will most likely find in your favor, it's pretty clear what happened.
I wasn't sure if I could believe him, completely.
Then he speaks up and says to the other guy "Make sure you know what you're doing. If you press charges and it's found it was obviously your fault, it might not go all that good for you. There are witnesses who saw what happened, and there are traffic cameras here that will tell exactly what happened as well. Make sure you think you're doing the right thing."
I was quite relieved when I saw the guy's face consider this. I realized it would be terribly foolish of him to do this, just a second after he did.
"Oh no, he said, I didn't mean that. I want to file a report through insurance is what I meant."
So we exchanged information calmly, the cops left and the ambulance still hadn't come (heh). My sister-in-law was sitting in the car calmly, waiting for this particular piece of life to be over so we could move forward. I apologized to the other guys for getting a little hot while we were waiting for the ambulance/cops to get there. They didn't say anything. I told the guy I was sorry that this had happened to him, and they both shrugged their shoulders and said "ah, what're you gonna do? It happens." They told me it was ok, I didn't have to hang around and waste any more time on this.
I got in my car and we took off. We decided to skip class and head on back home. My car was now short the plastic tail light on the left side (broken) and a pretty scratched up rear fender.
