I was making a left turn onto Delmar from DeBalivere today. Nothing outrageous about that, right? Well luckily, as I was making the turn, out of the corner of my eye I saw someone who was clearly going to ignore their red light and fly through the intersection at about 40 mph. This person was going east and I was going north, just for reference. Somehow my brain processed that I needed to slam on the brakes, and my car screetched to a stop. The crazed minivan did indeed fly through the intersection and miss the front of my car by about 2 feet.
Even though I was fine, this whole thing was terrifying, and I was shaking the entire rest of the drive. Had I been going a little faster, or had I left the house a little earlier, or if my breaks weren’t quite as good as they are, I could, at the very least, have a very damaged car, or at worst, be dead. The minivan would have slammed right into the driver’s side door if I would have been 10 feet further forward. At 20 mph, which is about how fast I was entering the turn, I would have covered 10 feet in less than a second. That’s how close things were.
Very scary. Very scary indeed. Maybe the subway wasn’t so awful…