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I live by a road that gets constant traffic at rush hours, but only occasional traffic in the wee hours. The occasional car or truck I hardly notice
But last year I woke with a start at 3AM and tried to figure out what had awakened me. In the distance, I could hear a car driving very irregularly: the noise was quite usual, on-again off-again, of uneven pitch
I thought :wtf:
As I sat up listening over the next twenty or thirty seconds, it became clear from the sound that the driver was driving fast and unevenly. Whoever it was, lost control of the vehicle and crashed into the ditch on the other side of the road just after passing my place. I called 911. Quite a lot of official activity resulted: ambulance, several fire department truckis, half a dozen police cars ...
Never found out what happened. I wasn't about to go get in the way of the emergency guys at 3 or 4AM
I've lived here a while, and I've driven that road a lot. I have a reliable way to estimate other drivers' speeds when I'm driving, and it's common for folk to do 55-60 mph even though the limit's 45. Slower than 45 or faster than 60 are not common. To judge by the tire noise before the accident, that driver was driving strangely and going way faster than 60. But it wasn't the volume that woke me up when the car was half or three-quarters of a mile away: it was the fact that the distant sound simply didn't register as "ordinary"
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