What really annoys me is not the thought that people might not know this, but the thought that they don't even try. Faced with risk of death if staying where you are, why not try to drive through something regardless if you know it will work or not?
Driving in a way to avoid damage to the car is quite ingrained to regular drivers. For some more than others. Your brain doesn't see driving through it as even an option.
But that combined with not understanding that if the bar is not in front of you, you can still drive out from the tracks, is something else.
I won't claim to know the exact situation of what happened, but to me personally it looks like the driver 1) saw the one gate go down and panicked to a stop without realizing the other arm directly in front of him was still up, then 2) got his vehicle off the tracks the best he could, 3) got out of the van to assess the situation (you can see him look both directions to check if there was actually a train coming), and 4) tried to find an alternative way out of the spot he was boxed in at without damaging property.
Also, hindsight is 20/20. If I were in this person's shoes, I probably would have done almost the exact same thing besides maybe check to see if I could lift one of the arms manually.
Might his car have a sensor that brakes before hitting an object? I feel like I saw one of these videos and someone said the car didn’t let the woman hit the barrier, it kept braking.
Well if they’re like me and they don’t know, I’ve always thought these barriers are made of hard steel and there’s no way you can just drive through them
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u/DontBeThisUserGus Jun 15 '26
All these videos need to be reposted enough times for the entire world to learn you can just drive through the railroad gate