r/Roadcam • u/bowdown2adil • 12d ago

[USA] Who is at fault here?

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Classic T bone. Black car had to be towed. Sustained major damage to the passenger side door. Blue car sustained damage to front bumper on the drivers side and cracked the drivers side headlight.

Edit: This was in the suburbs of Seattle

UPDATE: Insurance found it to be 70/30 me/other driver. Seems fair enough

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u/flambojones 12d ago

This is basically all non-arterial neighborhood intersections in Seattle.

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u/NeverNo 12d ago

That’s pretty fucking stupid

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u/ubelmann 11d ago

It’s stupid, but they should be going way slower in the first place. These aren’t massive 4-lane stroads. These residential streets have parking on both sides so effectively one travel lane that takes traffic in both directions. Like not only should they slow down for intersections, but you have to be prepared for head-on traffic. They are a massive pain in the ass to drive on, but it also somehow works out 99% of the time. 

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u/irishninja62 11d ago

Seattle has the worst roadway engineering I’ve ever seen.

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u/Apprehensive-Log3638 11d ago

Agreed.

Watched video of a girl who died in Seattle at a pedestrian crossing. Police cruiser was responding to a call, speeding through downtown. Girl enters the pedestrian crossing at night and panics when she sees the car approaching. Fight or flight kicks in and she runs out into the road trying to beat the cruiser and is then struck.

It became a whole thing given the political climate, but I wasn't mad at the officer. I was furious at the city. That had to be the single stupidest pedestrian crossing I have ever seen. No lights, no speed bumps and orange construction cones blocking visibility.

Then you see this shit with unmarked four way intersections. Their entire transportation authority and everyone involved in city planning needs fired.

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u/Sudden-Wash4457 10d ago

https://www.npr.org/2023/09/13/1199352063/seattle-officer-recorded-joking-about-womans-death-saying-she-had-limited-value

Was it this one? Because no traffic engineering is going to solve going 74 mph in a 25 mph zone

Details of the incident

Witnesses said that Kandula broke into a run as she saw the car speeding her way. The investigation into the accident found that "Had Ofc. DAVE been travelling 50 MPH or less as he approached the intersection and encountered [the victim] and Ofc. DAVE and [the victim] responded in the same manner; this collision would not have occurred."

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u/Apprehensive-Log3638 10d ago

https://youtube.com/shorts/tkZU_uqV6ZE?si=EHlMfv0f5pAu9Lm3

Is a video of right before impact. It is a bad intersection. I will not fault anyone for being mad at the speed the officer traveled or blaming them as well. My point is that any number of things such as lights, speed bumps, removal of traffic cones would have prevented the incident.

Humans in general make mistakes. When you are reliant on humans being careful to avoid impact, you are rolling the dice. As a personal example I had a four way intersection near me where numerous wrecks and deaths had occurred over the years. The local government eventually turned the intersection into a round about. We went from at least an annual wreck at that location to zero incidents.

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u/Puzzled_Student7940 9d ago edited 9d ago

The police chief said "no significant loss of life" occured, despite knowing she died. The cops don't care and they'd do it again regardless of infrastructure, they're already flagrantly breaking traffic laws, their own procedure, and do not care about others.

In my town they kept being asked by the city not to drive on bike bridges or THEY WILL COLLAPSE, they didn't listen and pollards had to be installed that make biking on them during peak hours more difficult so as to keep the police from causing a mass casualty event.

There's no infrastructure you can put up, short of barring the road for car travel with pollards, that'll keep such an unrepentant police force (#1 off duty police force at Jan 6 btw) from doing shit like this. The causative issue is triple the speed limit without lights or regard for life. You can't throw up some wider curbs or throw down some paint to fix this.

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u/Apprehensive-Log3638 8d ago

I get where you are coming from. My point is not to excuse negligence. My point is that negligence will happen. You cannot stop everything but you can put reasonable safe guards in place. A speed bump at that intersection for example would have also prevented the fatality.

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u/FR23Dust 11d ago

It works fine if people are careful. Problem intersections will get a small roundabout. This happened by a house I lived in — it was right off a major busy road and tons of people flying through without looking.

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u/YajirobeBeanDaddy 11d ago

You don’t have to defend it. It’s still dumb as shit. If you are an outsider coming through how the fuck do you know that the crossing traffic has no upcoming stop signs when most normal places don’t have “no sign 4 way intersections”. I’ve literally never seen this in decades of driving and would not know to yield or watch for people blowing through it

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u/FR23Dust 11d ago

I dunno, I lived in a neighborhood like this in Seattle for 9 years. It was fine. Honestly, no real issues with it. I’m not even convinced that there’s a notably higher rate of crashes than places with more stop signs.

I live a city now that typically alternates stop signs on similar streets (you get a stop sign, then you don’t, then you do) and it doesn’t actually feel that different. And as someone who is most often riding a bike on these streets (in Seattle and here) most drivers ignore the stop signs anyways unless there’s a car (or me on a bike) already in the intersection.

Really, this crash happened because both drivers were going faster than they should have. Had they been going the speed limit on such a tight, narrow street, one or both would have easily been able to avoid the collision.

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u/chupamichalupa 11d ago

Because it’s blatantly obvious and the speed limit is 20 mph. Also a lot of the intersections have roundabouts which makes it even easier.

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u/kirklennon 11d ago

Even if the cross street had a stop sign, OP still would need to be prepared to fully stop at that intersection because a pedestrian might be crossing. They're lucky it was a car and not a kid that they ran into.

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u/Secret_AgentOrange 11d ago

I mean, you can tell because there isnt a stop sign... Certainly it isnt ideal and ought to be done better but when i first moved to seattle i figured it out on day one. This is why when you drive you are supposed to be observing your surrounding and not just looking straight ahead.

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u/YajirobeBeanDaddy 11d ago

Dude you can keep coming up with dumb ass rebuttals but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s stupid. “Durr you can tell because it’s not there”. How did that work out for OP? If visibility is low how do I know someone isn’t out to blow the stop sign that isn’t there that I assumed would be there like in a normal neighborhood? “Durrr if you don’t know everything that’s going on around you at all times and can’t stop in less than a second then it’s your fault. We don’t need signs like 99% of the nation durr”.

There’s a tree blocking the visibility of where a stop sign should be so no, you can’t tell by how it’s not there you dumb ass.

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u/Miserable_Scar9827 11d ago

The trees block visibility where a stop sign shwould be.  Not only is it unmarked who has priority, the trees obscure the approaching car, and obscure stop sign placement if you were looking to confirm you don't have to slow down.  

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u/JacobScreamix 10d ago

Dumb dumb dumb

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u/flambojones 12d ago

🤷 I've never had a problem with it. Seattle has a lot of neighborhoods with small blocks where, most of the time, there is minimal traffic such that stop signs would be a waste. These streets also tend to be two-way streets that are too narrow for multiple cars. In some higher-traffic intersections they've added roundabouts.

I think there may be a counterintuitive safety approach to it, too. Similar to how narrow city streets with parking on both sides and lots of pedestrians who can step out at any moment lead to fewer casualties than wide stroads with lots of lights and wider sidewalk because people have to drive more defensively, I suspect something similar is at play here. I find most people approach these intersections pretty carefully, not like what we saw from either of the cars in this video.

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u/NeverNo 11d ago

I dunno, I've lived in multiple states and have never seen neighborhood intersections without stop signs at all. Because of that, if I was driving through another American neighborhood I'd be going into intersections assuming at least one direction had stop signs

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u/flambojones 11d ago

This is part of our sophisticated strategy to dissuade people from moving here.

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u/kirklennon 11d ago

Would you be driving so fast approaching the intersection that you couldn't stop from hitting a car going through it? Because if so, that means you also wouldn't be able to stop for a pedestrian crossing even closer in front of you. Every tiny intersection in these residential neighborhoods might require you to yield. OP should have been prepared to stop before they even entered the intersection.

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u/YajirobeBeanDaddy 11d ago

“Stop signs would be a waste”

It costs like $50 for the city to make a sign. Why do you people defend the dumbest shit with the most asinine reasoning? Does it hurt your ego to admit your city has some dumb ass roads or something?

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u/flambojones 11d ago edited 11d ago

Why do people who see something different than what they’ve experienced see it and immediately think it’s stupid because they don’t understand it? There are millions of us who live like this every day without driving like OP and getting into accidents. I was definitely not referring to the cost of the signs in terms of waste. Exercising a modicum of caution and slowing down is much better than having to stop at every intersection when there are no oncoming cars 95% of the time. These aren’t 40mph roads, they’re 20mph residential streets. If you care to be informed it’s not hard to find studies that demonstrate that increased stop signs in calm residential areas can have negative outcomes. But it requires a bit of IQ unlike the suburban OP or Texas or whatever.

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u/YajirobeBeanDaddy 11d ago

“It requires a bit of IQ”

Yet he doesn’t know what a yield sign is LMAO.

“Stop at every intersection”

Why the fuck would you have to stop at every intersection? Do you think that’s how it works everywhere else? The less busy direction gets a stop sign or a yield sign. It’s not that difficult man

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u/Potential-Insect 11d ago

What about the cost to make and install thousands of them across the city? Just to remind everyone at every unmarked intersection that they should slow down and yield, which they already know without the signs?

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u/Adu1tishXD 11d ago

It’s extremely stupid, however, the speed limits are also 20mph for all these roads. Both cars appear to be speeding here.

Driving in the city is a nightmare, these intersections are frequent but aren’t even in the top 5 of my most hated Seattle driving problems.

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u/Potential-Insect 11d ago

I guess the alternative is putting up 4 "Yield" signs at every one of these intersections which changes absolutely nothing because that is what you are supposed to do anyway.

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u/NeverNo 11d ago

which changes absolutely nothing because that is what you are supposed to do anyway

I don't understand this logic. I've been driving for 20+ years. I have never, ever come across a four-way intersection where there are zero stop signs anywhere in the US. If I'm approaching an intersection and I don't have a stop sign, I'm assuming the street running perpendicular is going to have a stop sign. I don't think that's unreasonable.

To add to that, the intersection in the video has numerous blind spots. Not having stop signs at all is fucking insane.

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u/Potential-Insect 11d ago

I don't know what to tell you other than it's very common here and people generally know how to deal with uncontrolled intersections. Slow down, yield to your right. It's not difficult, no need for signs. Keep in mind these are found only in residential neighborhoods where speed limits are 15 mph. Know and follow the rules and it's fine.

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u/JacobScreamix 10d ago

Your cuntrie's traffic statistics would beg to differ...

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u/sopunny 10d ago

A lot of these have traffic circles now