Close call

The drive in to the office this morning was faster than I expected, given that the necessary time had elapsed to allow Toronto drivers to forget that they'd ever seen snow on the road before. Perhaps the lack of accumulation gave them enough clues about how to cope . . .

The end of the drive, however, was a different thing altogether: I very narrowly avoided becoming the filling to a GO bus sandwich.

The parking entrance to our building is near the bottom of a moderate hill, and the left-turn lane was much slicker than it appeared to be. I got into the turn lane and barely touched the brakes (I wasn't travelling very fast), and I was almost instantly in ABS mode: there was so little traction that the wheels started to spin even at that low speed. I continued my slow-speed slide down the hill, past the entrance to our parking area and almost into the back of a GO bus waiting to turn into the GO station adjacent to our parking area. I stopped perhaps two metres behind the bus.

I breathed a sigh of relief . . . and then noticed with some alarm that another GO bus was coming down the hill. The bus driver did exactly what I'd just done, pulling into the turn lane and starting to brake. The bus did the same thing that the Quotemobile had just done: slid slowly but steadily down the hill. At almost the last second, the bus driver managed to change direction ever so slightly, so that he just managed to avoid my right corner, as I desperately tried to get moving further to the left (remember that I only had a couple of metres to move into). The car behind that bus wasn't quite as lucky . . . sliding directly into the back bumper of the bus.