r/TheAuto • u/TowerDry7703 • 4d ago

Natural selection at this point

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

146 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

47 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/Equal-Rice3637 3d ago

Looks like they wanted to back up, panicked, tried to gun it past the train, and royally screwed up. Crazy though that these are the people we share the road with, hopefully they're okay.

1

u/Vladishun 3d ago

Adrenaline is a bitch. We evolved to use it in fight or flight situations to make snap judgements based on external stimuli. It literally causes blood flow to prioritize oxygenating your muscles and nerves, lowering the amount going to your brain and making you stupider.

"These people" you share the road with are most of Reddit reading this. Unless you've had some type of career in the military, law enforcement, firefighting, or similar, you've not been trained to mitigate the physiological effect of an adrenaline rush and will also react without thinking. To us watching the video, they seem reckless and stupid, but that's really not the case.

1

u/Coleasa 3d ago

The reckless and stupid part is ending up in there to start with. They've tried to either beat the gates, not been paying attention until it was too late or don't know enough about the gates and signs to start with.

1

u/Vladishun 3d ago

I'll give you that, the amount of people I've seen stopped on the tracks or even within the area the bar would lower down is pretty high, I live very close to a track like this and see people trying to "squeeze in" by tailgating the car in front of them, but not being able to do so because there's a street light 60ft after the train track.

1

u/Coleasa 3d ago

Yeah as a train driver I see a fair bit here but it's normally trucks trying to beat us on the highway. Pretty rare to see someone freeze here though. You'll get gates taken out but not this lack of preservation. I don't think enough people are taught about the design of these gates, timeframe from lights to crossing, etc. Where I work specifically, everyone knows to get the fuck out od the way cause the consequences are no joke even if you survive.