Driving ourselves to extinction

I couldn't believe it when I came across the video below. If you watch carefully you'll see someone miss their freeway exit, make a U-turn on the freeway and drive back to the exit in the outside lane, and then make another U-turn to the exit.

I mean WTF? Miraculously no one is killed in the making of this video but really they should have been - the driver of that car should be dead because whether they realized it or not it was effectively attempted suicide and attempted manslaughter all thrown in. They might as well have sat on the freeway bridge and jumped into traffic... If we have become that dumb and that coddled that someone can get away with something so stupid and walk away scott free to drive another day there really is no hope for us.

Once in my youth I remember one of my brothers suggesting that all criminals should just be executed. I'm not sure where that line of thinking sprang from, perhaps he'd been studying the Old Testament too closely, but I seem to recall some debate about the wisdom executing everyone who commits a crime. If you can get past the dubious ethical basis of executing anyone at all (which America seems to have no problem with) then there are still insurmontable problems. Like determining which people broke a law which they had no idea existed (I did this once myself - so I should be dead), and proving they broke a law in the first place - of which America again provides dozens, if not hundreds of examples of failing to do so - sending innocent people to the gas chamber, electric chair and the like.

However, when I see a video like that I really feel that person should not be alive any more regardless of what they are thinking. Yeah, that's a pretty shocking conclusion, but go figure that the other 99 times out of 100 the person would probably have been broadsided by a truck and probably killed several other people. Even more shocking is that with all the technological advancement we have we still allow people to take personal command of several tons of steel and propel it at 60, 70, 80 or more mph down the freeway separated from other people doing the same thing surrounded by nothing more than a few feet of thin air and a strip of paint a few millimeters thick.

It really is time that cars ran on rails and people took the back seat to technology on this one. If necessary the backseat can have a driving simulator so they can pretend they are driving and yacking on the cellphone. Sure technology lets us down but at least that is something we can fix, unlike the 150 or more people killed by human error on US roads every single day. That's better than 1 in a million odds of not making it home each day - orders of magnitude better than winning the lottery. I think the next "fish" religion/darwinism bumper sticker should combine the two concepts - a fish with wheels on a crucifix tombstone.