Editor:
You have received quite a number of letters about Highway 101 safety, all of which point out genuine concerns.
However, one factor that has not been mentioned so far is user stupidity.
On the afternoon of Friday Jan. 11 at about 2:10 p.m., while driving east toward Gibsons, I was forced to slam on my brakes in order to avoid going headlong directly into the driver’s side door of a car accessing the highway from either Byng or Leek Road.
A line of traffic was heading west, with a small gap between two of the cars in that line. A silver-grey car was waiting to come from the right-hand side (as I am looking at it) to turn west towards Sechelt. I was less than 30 or 40 metres away, when this idiot decided they needed to get into the gap in the line going west.
I was doing about the speed limit and fortunately had enough forward visibility to be aware of this car waiting to get out on the highway. As I said, I slammed on the brakes and missed a collision by no more than a metre. To compound the utter stupidity of this driver’s action, had they waited a little, there was no traffic behind me for quite some distance and the line of traffic going west had only two or three cars behind the gap into which the idiot drove.
Was this person in such a hurry that they had to risk killing not only themselves but another road user, i.e. me, as well?
Our highway is unsafe at the best of times without such dangerous, thoughtless actions that just about wiped me out.
This person will know who they are when they read this letter and I hope they had a sleepless night thinking about their thoughtless stupidity.
Buzz Bennett, Gibsons
