Detroit Driving

Last week Detroit had another fire make the news, only this one was a sign of the state’s is resilience, not its decay.

On Wednesday evening, July 15, an inexperienced driver entered a curve too fast on I-75. His small car slid sideways into a passing gasoline hauler, causing it to jackknife. A following semi stopped short of the accident, just before the tanker exploded and melted the steel overpass at Nine Mile Road.

Witnesses took pictures of the orange inferno where the street ended in an abyss. Others captured the black or brown smoke that billowed out over their neighborhoods. Men at the scene commented on hearing the steel squeal as it softened in the heat.

By Friday, most of the destroyed overpass was demolished, and core tests had been taken of the pavement. The state reopened the road Monday, for the 130,000 vehicles that use it each day.

I’m living in a part of the country where people would still have beeb trying to locate some cranes when Michigan traffic was flowing again. There they know it will take several months to rebuild the overpass; here it probably would never happen. After all, the estimated population of the state capital is not much ove half the number of vehicles that drive under that overpass in Hazel Park in a single day.

Apart from the ability of Michigan and its bureaucracy to respond so quickly to an emergency, the thing I found remarkable was the quick reactions of the people involved. The two truckers stopped semis with little injury to themselves, then fled from danger as quickly as they could. The man running a gas station at the overpass heard the explosions and immediate closed down the pumps and shut the station.

There are no time to think, only seconds to take necessary physical actions to contain the disaster. They were men who understood their world and its dangers, and instinctively knew what to do.

The man who caused the accident still doesn’t understand what happened, doesn’t realize he’s lucky to be alive. He’s a 27-year-old graduate student who just got his probationary license in May. No matter his intelligence, he missed the crucial experience of growing up riding in a car and hadn’t yet driven enough to know how you sense when you’re moving too fast into a curve.

I discovered the importance of childhood perception training when a friend from the Bronx asked me to be his observing driver while he practiced for a driver’s license in Philadelphia. After a few minutes on the Schuylkill Expressway, I asked him to please get on the surface streets. There I discovered he had no idea where to look for traffic lights. They simply hadn’t mattered on the subway.

I’m not a great driver. As a child I was near sighted and never learned to judge speed or space. As an adult, I overcompensate, leave too much room between me and the vehicle in front, rarely pass. I still pay little attention to my rear view mirror, but continually watch the people in front and beside me.

Here there are people who don’t even realize they have limitations. Several years ago, I was the only one on my section of a two-lane road in mid-morning. A women pulled up to my bumper, and rode there before passing. There was no need to get so close at the speed we were going.

A few miles later I came upon an accident. Some car, probably the same one that made me nervous, pulled out to pass in an area with small dips. When she saw an oncoming car, she pulled back into her lane, nicking the bumper of the truck ahead and sending it into the path of the oncoming van. People in both vehicles died, while she was untouched, unaware of the consequences of misjudging space and speed.

I don’t know how long she’d been driving. It may not have mattered. Another part of the cultural experience of riding in a car in Michigan where traffic is heavy is you absorb an awareness that there are things you must learn. Those experiences are the ones that lead to the ability to respond to crises the way men did outside Detroit.

And, only in Detroit would people notice the steel crying.