Birds on the Road

My wife used to like to tell of how, when she was learning to drive -- and later -- she would immediately start clamping on the brakes and even stop whenever she saw birds standing on the road -- until she realized that invariably the bird would take quick flight well before her car had any chance to hit it.

Up in a densely populated, wealthy Northern Virginia county, a man made the news a day or two ago when he saw three full-grown Canada Geese and about eight smaller ones getting ready to edge onto one of the very busy highways near the Dulles International Airport, and, despite the fact that it was also rush hour, he stopped his car in the fast lane, got out, and hustled the little flock across his set of two lanes and then across the median and across the other two lanes, too, going in the opposite direction, all the while stopping the onrushing traffic with arm signals and his presence, and according to a state trooper who saw it, several collisons were narrowly averted, as we might expect.

Despite the fact that, as in all the states, the Virginia legislators have had time over the years to outlaw nearly everything short of breathing hard , the judge found that somehow this particular situation had been overlooked. Therefore he let off the good samaritan with only having to pay court costs, though when the perp went to the window to pay the $68, the clerk told him to forget it.

Lawyers watching this noted that while there are laws forbidding pedestrians from interfering with the orderly passage of motor traffic, there are also laws against killing Canada Geese, a protected species.

The catch, however, is that it is hard-wired into motorists' instincts not to hit things that they suddenly see crossing the road if the things are living, or lying in the road if they're large enough and inanimate, and so the driver's right foot starts slamming on the brake no matter what, and there's usually no time at all to deliberate about this anyway, till much later, after all has sometimes not turned out for the best.

This dillemma has been strongly on my mind lately, because a young neighbor lady who until recently worked at a big ski resort high in the mountains in a distant part of this county, swerved not long ago to avoid hitting a deer -- a frequent occurrence around here -- and she went off the road and down a slope, badly damaging her car and hurting herself, though more lightly. Then, scarcely a week later, and on nearly the same stretch of road, another young lady who is the girl friend of the first woman's brother, had exactly the same thing happen, and she ended up with enough insurance reimbursement that she could buy another car, though oddly she wasn't herself hurt. And on top of that I saw a film just the other day in which a driver swerves to avoid hitting a squirrel looking amazed in the road and ends up smashing head-on into a large tree (which reminds me of a memorable TV commercial that may still be around, showing two squrrels that cause a similar crash that happens off-screen, and they give each other high fives)

As both these accidents happened on the edge of virtual cliffs, that brother is of the opinion that the deer should be hit every time, but as I've said, I don't think humans are built that way.

The problem is time, and the lack of enough of it to make calculations. So the solution must be to allow split-seconds of more time by driving slower, and you know I'm all for that. Unfortunately, however, the big push is to drive fast and ever faster, because the great majority of people in the world are younger and therefore more heedless than I am, and they have the cars to speed with and not good, ol' rusty, superannuated, pokey pickup trucks, the only vehicles that are really worth driving, despite the gas mileage, though that problem is also easily dealt with by coming up with many fewer destinations in mind.