Narrow Street Ruins Beautiful Afternoon


FTLComm - Winnipeg
July 12, 1999


A truly wonderful afternoon in Winnipeg, clear skies, warm sunlight and dry pavement. A great day to drive down a pleasant neighbourhood. But Sunday afternoon for the occupants of this car and the North bound Mercedes Benz it was a bust.


For an incident like this to happen somebody had to have been either not paying attention or making some incorrect assumptions. Driving conditions were ideal and yet two cars were able to crash into one another for apparently no reason.
Of course there would be a reason for this incident but for it to have occurred it required that a blunder take place. This residential area of Winnipeg has very narrow streets with parking only on one side. In this picture the police car a witness's car and those involved in the crash are parked along the right side of the street but under normal driving conditions this lane would be used for North bound traffic The distance from the parked car on the left of the street as we look North and the cub on the right side
is more then sufficiently wide enough to permit traffic to proceed in both directions with out crashing into one another. For as you can see with vehicles parked on each side of the street there is enough room for a car to proceed up the middle.
I encountered a Taxi yesterday on a similar street and the taxi driver who as we all know is the landlord and soul owner of all streets refused to move over to the right side of the street, I had to come to a complete halt to avoid paint and body part removal. The Mercedes Benz still has right of way but there was enough room for safe passage.

The good part of this was that no one was injured. The smaller car looks like a right off to me and the Benz will need a few thousand dollars from insurance to be on the road again but aside from that and the trauma both parties experienced only material objects were damaged
The safety standards of today's vehicles are on the job and bent metal and broken glass can all be replaced.