Children’s safety on China’s roads is a worry, with awareness of the dangers far from acceptable. The country’s truck drivers, however, are an increasingly-professional bunch, as one proved in Jiangsu recently, when his quick reactions narrowly averted several deaths.
It had all the makings of a tragedy. On 10 July, in Nanjing’s neighbouring city of Yangzhou, a dumper truck drove through an intersection on the X202 county road. The light was green, and it being July of 2022, the streets were deserted.
Other than the truck perhaps going a little too fast for some, it was just another very hot day. That all then changed in the blink of an eye.
From behind a street-side shop at the intersection, a young boy runs out and begins to cross the road. But the truck is already in the middle of the intersection. The boy does not notice that he has perhaps just 1 second left to live.
Driver reaction times to a given stimulus or event vary considerably and are dependent on factors such as professionalism, physical fitness and age, while time of day and weather also play a part. About half a second is a good average.
That left another half second for the speeding truck in Yangzhou to get out of the boy’s way. Swerving to the left, the driver manages to barely avoid the boy, while the truck careers across the other side of the road, onto the pavement and into the side of a residential building, knocking over a street sign in the process.
Again, by a miracle, or rather two more miracles, there was no one in the house at the time of the collision and the driver of the truck was uninjured. The boy crossing the road got away with only cuts and bruises.
Footage of the incident from traffic cameras mounted above the intersection, which some readers may find disturbing, has been published by The Paper and can be watched via this link.
“Stop, look, listen, think”, is the mantra used in many countries in the educating of their children on how to safely cross the road. And that’s a concept we would all like to see drilled into China’s children a little more than is today, as the incident in Yangzhou shows only too well.
