A bad car accident.

[Workingman]

I turned left out of my side road and joined the queue at the lights on red. When they turned green nothing moved so back to red... and again. Then came the sirens from behind from a cop car and an ambulance; another ambulance could be seen coming from the opposite direction. When I eventually got to the lights it was a three car pile-up.

It looked like the car coming in to the main road from the left had failed to stop, amber gambler / run a red, and the car from its right had hit it whilst trying to go round to avoid it and that forced it into an oncoming car. It looks like all three will be written off. It is a 40 MPH A road so you can imagine, thankfully there were only walking wounded - blankets on shoulders sort of thing.

It only takes a second.

[Kaz]

Lucky that nobody was seriously injured, by the sound of it!

[Suff]

Fortunate that one of the vehicles was moving slowly. They test to 40mph but that's a double 20mph head on. Impact of two 40mph vehicles head on is 80mph and nothing is designed to withstand that.

I see a lot of stuff where people simply don't see the red light for whatever reason. Doesn't even need to be an amber gambler, that is often a misnomer as no lights move form red to red/amber until the other light is Red. It would have to be someone jumping the light on red.

Glad nobody was seriously hurt though.

It is one of the things that self driving car software designers talk about. An AI car cannot be distracted. Overloaded, yes, distracted, no.

You can see this on this US youtube link. There is no douvt these people come over a completely red light.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KxgHD9v3y64

[cromwell]

That sounds like it could have been a lot worse.
I'm glad no one was badly hurt.

[TheOstrich]

Bad decision, distraction, whatever - these things happen in a flash.
Sounds like it could have been a whole lot worse.

[JoM]

We’ve had a couple of bad accidents in this area over the weekend. A 32 year old was killed when his car hit a post down one of the lanes at the top end of the village at the weekend and the same day a young couple were critically injured when their car hit a tree on the Chase

[Kaz]

Oh Jo, how sad