The world is on high alert over the threat artificial intelligence poses to humanity. I prefer to focus my attention on humanity’s original threat to humanity – humanity. Nowhere are our self-destructive impulses more apparent than on the road. If AI truly wants to wreak havoc, then all it needs to do is study “humanity’s drivers” as they relentlessly find new ways to break the law and endanger others.
I witnessed a new twist on the old “ego plus automobile times stupidity” equation last weekend while driving along Dundas Street East in Toronto. I was in the right lane travelling west and arrived at the Jones Avenue intersection. Here, the single lane forks into two. There is a left-turn-only lane, a centre lane for traffic continuing straight or turning right and a bike lane.
Dundas St. E and Jones Ave. in Toronto looking west where a left lane is for turning left and the right lane is meant to be either for going straight or turning right.Andrew Clark/The Globe and Mail
We had a green light. I waited in the centre lane behind a driver preparing to turn right, who was letting the cyclists pass in the bike lane. This, apparently, was too much for whoever was driving the black Volvo XC90 that was approaching from behind. Mister XC90 blasted into the left-turn-only lane and sped straight through the intersection. I’d say he was going between 50 and 60 kilometres an hour.
He was probably driving too fast to notice the all-white ghost bike on the north side of Dundas, erected to memorialize a cyclist who was struck and killed there in 2018. The Jones and Dundas intersection is a tricky one. Even if Mister XC90 had seen it, I doubt he would have registered the irony.
Generally, I try to avoid hyperbole and cliches such as “sheer stupidity.”
This time it’s no exaggeration. Here was an act of sheer unalloyed 100-per-cent organic human stupidity.
All to save what amounted to a few seconds.
Let’s roll through the countless ways this was dangerous and stupid. Who knows, maybe Mister XC90 will read this and some of it will nestle in his brain.
Well, it’s illegal for a start and illegal for a good reason.
When you drive straight through a left-turn-only lane you run the risk of drifting into the lane beside you that has the right to drive straight. If the driver who had been waiting to turn right changed his mind and decided to drive forward, there could have been a collision.
The drivers turning left from the opposite direction do not expect a car to race through the left-turn-only lane. They expect it to turn left. The Volvo XC90 ran the risk of T-boning one of them or being swiped by one as he flew past.
What if a car travelling north on Jones turned right onto Dundas? Would there be a chance he might drift and not see the XC90 and they could have collided?
What if a pedestrian had been crossing? Sure, the light was green and they would have been jaywalking but that’s been known to happen.
What if a child or an older person had been jaywalking and the car in the right lane was planning to go straight but was waiting for them? The driver of the Volvo would not have seen them and would have struck and (almost certainly) killed them instantly.
But hey, it’s all worth the risk if you can save three seconds.
You can wring your hands all you want over AI, but is it really that much worse than a world in which I have to write, “Do not use the left-turn-only lane as a way to drive straight through an intersection in a densely populated urban setting (or any other for that matter).”
I asked Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude, “Is using a left-turn-only lane to drive straight through an intersection dangerous?” In two seconds, it told me:
“Yes. Driving straight from a left-turn-only lane is dangerous because every other road user at the intersection is acting on the assumption that you will turn left... Beyond safety, it’s illegal (in Ontario it’s disobeying a traffic control device under the Highway Traffic Act, and similar rules apply almost everywhere), and if a collision results, fault will almost always be assigned to the driver who went straight. The intersection is only safe when everyone is predictable, and this manoeuver breaks that predictability.”
If I had asked the guy driving the black Volvo the same question, odds are he would have sworn at me and given me the middle finger as he sped by.
Artificial or human. I don’t care. At this point I just want to see a little intelligence applied and an end to such irresponsible and dangerous driving on our streets and highways.