Collective Responsibility

The change in weather was already apparent this morning. Much nastier edge to the wind on the High Level bridge. Just as I walked into the parking lot that serves my work building and others around Jasper and 109, one solitary drop of rain fell from the sky and landed on my nose.

None of its brethren in the sky joined it. At least not before I was safely indoors.

There was an ambulance trying to navigate its way through the 109 street traffic. It brought to mind an incident that occured over the weekend.

There I was, on the High Level bridge (again!), only in my car this time. Traffic had slowed to a crawl, which seemed odd. Traffic rarely crawls at 6pm on a Sunday. I eventually realized that there must have been an accident. I saw the flashing lights of an ambulance about 50 metres behind me.

Thereupon followed five minutes of the most awkward and sometime inept vehicular repositioning that I've ever seen. The rule of thumb for a situation like this is the following: all cars move to the right, and thereby free up a lane for the ambulance. This, however, does not always work well in pratice.

At one point, nothing stood between the ambulance and its destination save for two cars. One of them contained two women in their early twenties. For thirty seconds or so, their car simply sat there. They turned around. They looked back at the road ahead. They seemed shocked, stunned, clueless as to what to do next. I shouted at them but of course, that was silly, because my windows were closed and they would never have heard me.

Eventually... eventually they figured it out.

Driving has long fascinated me as one of the best examples of individualism's violent (literally sometimes) collision with the notion of collective responsibility. On one side, there is the great empowerment of having a powerful machine at your disposal that can take you almost anywhere. No schedules to keep, no bus stops to wait at, no strange passengers to divert your attention. On the other side, however, there is the knowledge that if you don't adhere to some pretty strict rules of collective responsibility, you could die. If you try to race the light as it changes to red, you might just collide with someone else racing out of the starting blocks as the light for them changes to green.

Edmonton has the worst vehicular accident rate of any city in Canada. Period. Year after year.

The curmudgeon in me says that it's yet another example of our limited sense of collective responsibility. Every man is a hero inside his Ford F150. That is, until his untimely demise - his face lacerated by the broken glass of his windshield.

In happier news, I stand to make a healthy profit when I sell my car prior to my move to Montreal. It appears that my Golf is worth about $20,000. Next task is finding a buyer.