THE WAYSIDE STOP

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 386, 22 November 1932, Page 2

THE WAYSIDE STOP

CAEE SIIOULD BE TAKEN TO LEAYE ROAD CLEAR. COMMON FAULTS. Emergency stops are sometimes a necessity, but those wEo have to makd them should consider where it is saffe to parlc. A eommon error is to pull up on a curve or just over the crest of a Hiil. Of course, legally no one has any right to come fast round the corner or, fbr that matter, over the crest of the hill; but the fact remaihs that the praetiee is universal, and 'the fact that it is illegal does no mahe valid the more stiipid act of ieavihg a car where it is. li'able to promote an accident. The danger does not lie so much in the -fact that the standing car is likely to be run into as the fact that >a vehicle approaching from the other direction may prevent the first car clearing the one left standing without coming into head-on collision with the third. If the disabled car caiinbt be got to a safer place on its power, it should be pushed, even if it is necessary to ask some other car to do th'e pushing. On a bitumen highway no cdr should ever be permitted to come to rest on the bitumen. It is rare, ihdeed, that a convenient place to get right off at the side cannot he found- withiii a reasonahle distance, generally a matter of ohly a few yards:[ It is quite common, nevertheless, to find iiot only that a car has come to rest on the bitumen, but that the driver has got out and is tinkering with it from the same side that traffic must pass. Such drivers run serious risk of being personally run down, no so much because of the car being on the bitumen as because the car prevents the oncoming driver frdin seeing that there is a man beside it. Here again, however, the danger lurks not so much in the fact that a .car from th'e other direction may force a situation that can only end in accident. If attention must be given from the traffic side, it is only the xiiore reason for the car being got as far away as possible from the traffic stream. sr? 1 ' ' j 1