Excessive speed mitigating factor

Dear editor: Many years ago before I became senile, I used to drive buses in England. Back then it was normal that you first started off learning to drive on the double-deckers and then worked your way up to driving single deckers buses then coaches, and after that the fancy tour buses.

One particular day a driver skidded on some black ice whilst going around a roundabout and came to a crashing stop, he was lucky the bus didn’t flip over. Some of the passengers were injured and he was fired on the spot.

The reason given for his firing was that more than 2,000 other drivers had drove around the same roundabout before him, and after him, without a mishap despite all the black ice.

Which brings me to the Greyhound accident on the Coquihalla Highway on Sunday.

I on the news in horror as the bus spun around and around eventually throwing someone through the windshield before it came to a stop.

Greyhound was very, very incredibly lucky that they didn’t make history that day with all those kids on board. It then got me thinking.

If the driver had to do the same journey over again would he or she have driven a tad slower in parts? I think you will agree it would be a resounding yes. Did he or she not realize it wasn’t the middle of a beautiful summer day on the most notorious highway in British Columbia?

And why when he or she was approaching that location wasn’t there a massive pile up of all the other vehicles driving over the same patch of black ice before them?

The bobby at the scene said the weather was a main factor in the accident and the road snow/plow driver said conditions can change in an instant. But, I am not so sure that was the main reason for the accident.

I believe there was another mitigating factor involved too, one that might have been all too apparent. Speed.

When you are driving down the highway on a terrible snowy icy winters day, how come there are only the odd one or two cars in the ditch?

Think about it!

Don Smithyman Oliver