I’m all outta bubblegum.
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I said he could have been MORE proactive, not that he wasn’t proactive at all. And being proactive in itself doesn’t necessarily help, one has to be effective. Ive been in this type of situation before and one of the best things you can do is walk up the road a bit and get drivers to slow down well before they arrive at the scene of danger.
He got locked into the mindset of laying the blame on the Comcast guy (despite the fact the cars that were sliding were mainly going to fast for the conditions) and also the need to film the Comcast guy to prove his point.
To be really helpful you need to put aside the pettiness , put down the camera and do something that helps the situation. Like walk 50 yards up the road and get approaching drivers to slow down.
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That can also be counter productive. Just walking to hill and waving his arms at the crest in snowy conditions could have caused accidents. This was not a case of a broken down car ahead and no other signalling options.
The right thing to do was to try to solve the problem at it’s root: to get Comcast either off the road or fix their demonstrably dangerous and inadequate signage and lane control - which the videographer attempted to do, even if less diplomatically than others might have managed. Do you have any sound reason to believe that the Comcast tech who defended his position would have done any more if asked a different way?
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This is consistent with my expectations.
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He tried to get the Comcast guy off the road and it wasn’t working. He didnt try walking 50 yards up the road and warning drivers. You dont just wave your arms around. I’ve been in this kind of situation and warning drivers works well
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He set out additional cones of his own, for goodness sake, and did more to try to improve safety at the scene than anyone and you still seem to be blaming him for Comcast’s negligence for his lack of perfection. Not getting it.
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Except that’s really not the case here. These idiots would have wrecked anyway. (Only slightly snarky.)
Did he put his camera down? he was more interested in filming than helping
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He did both. And in the long run, his video of Comcast’s negligence will have more effect than if he had turned off his camera. You still seem to be blaming the only person who worked to make the situation safer.
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Indeed. But drivers have the SAME responsibility - to be prepared for other vehicles (including, but not limited to, service and repair trucks) to be stopped dead in the middle of a roadway with emergency blinkers going, even though that’s not ideal.
As a Southern Californian, I don’t often drive on icy slushy roads, but when I’ve had occasion to do so, I’ve noticed that other vehicles are sometimes unexpectedly stopped in traffic lanes with no warning but blinkers.
In fact, I’d say that was a pretty common occurrence - and often, the vehicle in question is a big service truck of some kind, out trying to get a job done in weather that keeps sane people at home.
Sometimes they were servicing things. Sometimes they were stuck. Sometimes they were just dead from mechanical failure.
But in a NON-ideal world, where people and machines do what they will, not necessarily what they should — including Comcast repair trucks — if my only possible response to encountering an unexpectedly stopped vehicle in a traffic lane is to lose control of my vehicle and slide off the road into a ditch, then it’s entirely my own damn fault.
Stopped vehicles with no warning but flashers are a COMMON AND WELL-KNOWN HAZARD in in icy, slushy weather, and anyone who drives in a manner that doesn’t allow for that is doing it wrong, and is entirely to blame for any unhappy outcome that results from their irresponsible lack of care.
The only people with a real case against Comcast here are the responsible drivers who stopped in time, only to be rear-ended by idiots. Comcast failed in its duty to take adequate measures to protect innocent passersby from being endangered by entirely-forseeable idiots.
They don’t owe the idiots anything.
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Slippery slope argument. I could argue that knowing that idiots will drive too fast, and that my being in front of them will cause them to try and overtake dangerously, by your argument means I have created a hazard. So either I should drive like a lunatic too, or stay off the road.
Over here it is an offence [note spelling] to drive too fast for the conditions. The drivers who went off the road could be prosecuted for careless driving. IANAL but commercial experience suggests that there would be an investigation by H&SE if anyone got hurt, and the cable company might be fined for a failure of safety training. The argument to counter that would be that in those conditions broken down trucks are not uncommon and drivers should be prepared for such a hazard. It will be interesting if someone can follow up this case and find out if Comcast does get sued. I suspect, given that insurance companies don’t like spending money on lawyers except in large cases, they’ll simply tell the drivers that their insurance is void because they were not driving safely for the conditions.
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The black pickup driver would probably not have wrecked if the truck hadn’t been there. And the other cars that went off the road most likely did so because the drivers sucked at driving in icy conditions, not because they were going too fast–if they’d been going to fast, they wouldn’t have gone into the ditch where they did.
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This is why I completely don’t buy his excuse in that regard. If the truck weren’t there, there wouldn’t be cars careening off the road endangering him.
But yeah, dicks all around. The cars are driving too fast for conditions, and it wouldn’t friggin’ kill the cable guy to put some warning visible on the other side of the hill.
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It’s absolutely true that drivers should be prepared for such hazards. However, you operating a car safely on a roadway is not equivalent to someone blocking a roadway in order to do work. Similarly, you having a vehicle break down in the road is not the same as you parking a vehicle in the road in the same place. In the latter case, you have deliberately created a hazard; in the former, you did so unintentionally. In either case, you are still obliged to warn drivers and, as you say, they are still obliged to take into account the possibility of a stopped vehicle in the road.
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I have to know:
Was this intentional, or just fortuitous?
ETA: Well, there’s my payback for being a ninja yesterday.
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I used to live in Jackson, WY and they used dirt on top of the snow. Since we got so much, they never paved; everyone just knew how to drive on it. Every new snowfall, they’d just put more dirt on top.
Spring was called mud season there.
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Yup, that’s how it is in Vermont too, on the back roads. But I live in the big city (pop. 10,000) so we have paved roads, and they get salt. 
I didn’t know the Comcast drivers are the ones that decide how many go to a job, when a job gets done, or if the conditions are even safe to do a job.
It is Comcast’s fault, but not because a barely skilled tech - there is a whole corporation forcing his hand and if he wants to keep his job his options are very limited.
