Driven: Intersections, and the relative ease of finding bad driving

Spotting bad driving is easy.Filming it is hard.

It's kind of like moose hunting; you can spend hours in the woods without seeing a thing, then spot two moose on the highway heading home.

We've all seen things on the road that have left us shaking our heads.

• Driven: Get it on tape, says taxi driver who sees too many near-misses

But I can tell you from experience that if you head out with a camera to capture bad driving on video, suddenly it can feel like everyone is a saint behind the wheel.

In both cases, a successful hunt often means being in the right place at the right time.

The handy-dandy dash cam

Having a dashboard camera certainly makes the job easier.

Wilson Carew bought a dash-cam last fall, and almost right away, recorded the near-miss of a lifetime.

"I left Canadian Tire in Mount Pearl, came to a stoplight, three or four vehicles in front of me and we stopped.And I could see up past the side of the vehicle the light turned green.The first two vehicles pulled out into the lane, and at that moment a large school bus came barrelling through the lights."

The video itself is hair-raising.The school bus roars through the red light at top speed, just as a smaller bus turns through the intersection.Carew says there were no children onboard either bus, but he didn't know that at the time.

"A person in a car could have been killed, it could have had children on there... if this is something that happens all the time, I think somebody should do something about it."

The exception or the norm?

So does it happen all the time, or does it just feel that way?

Incidents like this one stick out in our minds, while the endless counter-examples of safe driving that we see every day are quickly forgotten.

Nevertheless, it seems that if you go looking for bad driving, you will eventually find it.

Taxi driver Joe White has a dash-cam in his cab, and he uses it regularly.

In a recent story for our Drivenseries, we featured some of the near-misses and actual crashes that White has recorded in the past year.

And there are certainly a few red light runs in the bunch.

Intersectionstakeout

I decided to take my own camera and set up at a few intersections around St. John's, just to see what sorts of driving issues I could film.

I've tried this before when covering news stories about people using cell phones while driving.And like I said earlier, it's not as easy as it sounds. Sometimes you can spot a dozen people idling at a red light with a phone in their hand, and sometimes it seems impossible to film a single one.

This time, I chose 3 busy intersections and spent about a half hour filming at each.And just like Wilson Carew, I quickly recorded a doozy: a pickup truck brazenly running a red light on Topsail Road.

I also shot at least a dozen drivers speeding up into yellow lights instead of slowing down. And I managed about twodozen shots of drivers with cell phones in hand.

When your quarry is bad driving, that's a pretty successful hunt.

Thetakeaway

I don't know if you can draw many conclusions from stories like mine and Wilson Carew's.

Incidents like these don't necessarily indicate a raging epidemic of bad driving on our streets.

But I do know that there is some very bad driving happening out there.

Head-spinning, gasp-inducing, heart-clutchingbad driving. Is it everywhere, all the time?No. But it's common enough that you can capture it on video, if you're in the right place at the right time.