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Snow or Rain Do Not Cause Accidents, People Do, As 100-Car Pileup Demonstrates

There are a few moments of the year that are especially dangerous for motorists, and this is true because those situations interrupt a rhythm, and most drivers are not prepared for that to happen. I am writing about the beginning of the motorcycling season (in areas where the winter involves snow and low temperatures), the first rain after several weeks of dry weather, and the first snow – in places where it snows.
100-car pileup in Denver, Colorado 24 photos
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by 9News
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All the situations described above will lead to an increase in vehicle accidents, and it happens even when people are accustomed to those scenarios. Drivers who have several years behind the wheel will tend to be a bit more relaxed on the road than those who are just starting out driving and want to be extra cautious.

In case you have followed us closely in the past two months, you may have noticed several articles referring to winter tire tests, as well as all-season tire tests. The latter kind of tires are called all-weather tires in the U.S., and not having even these on your vehicle when temperatures have dropped to the vicinity of the freezing point means you will not have enough grip on the road to drive safely.

A recent accident in Denver, reportedly caused by the first snow, led to a huge pileup of vehicles, with approximately 100 drivers involved. I do not know about you, but that is a massive crash in my book. The pileup on Sixth Avenue led to road closures for several hours, as tow trucks came in to clear the road by removing the damaged vehicles from the scene.

As 9News reported, the roads were slick due to the first snow, as the Denver metro area had received between two and five inches of snow overnight. If we look at the video from the scene, we see people walking casually on the road in winter clothing, and there is minimal snow on the asphalt.

100\-car pileup in Denver, Colorado
Photo: Screenshot from YouTube video by 9News
Since people were dressed in winter outfits, the overnight snowfall surprised about zero people, but seeing snow while driving should not be an excuse for wrecking your car. It is what it is, as they say, and you just need to adapt your driving (including your speed) to the situation at hand.

While I was nowhere near the scene of the accident, it is easy to determine some of the things that went wrong and led to the crash from what we already know about how humans tend to drive.

As we explained above, humans are creatures of habit, and getting us out of habit does not always mean an increase in attention. In other words, not everyone on the road that day was paying close attention to traffic.

We already know that both phantom traffic jams and even highway pileups are caused by people who are not closely monitoring the distance between them and the vehicle ahead, which makes them either touching the brake pedal more often than it would have been necessary just to mitigate their velocity, or occasional hard braking to prevent a crash.

Car cuts rider in hov lane
Photo: screenshot from Youtube
The problem with either is that driving on a road with other vehicles is like being an element in an accordion. What you do will affect the drivers behind you, and your actions might even affect those ahead (such as flashing your lights, not canceling your turn signal, as well as erratic driving).

If the drivers behind you are forced to slow down, some might get angry and try to pass you, while others will just slow down. Once several brake lights are lit, the entire flow of traffic will eventually slow down for up to several miles behind you if they are not following the two-second rule.

In other words, if the vehicles ahead of you are driving in a close formation, every tap you make on the brakes will cause more chaos in that cluster of vehicles, and the probability of a crash increases.

It sounds a bit crazy until you realize that those vehicles may crash, and one of them may even hit the back of your vehicle if its driver is more attentive to TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, e-mail, or whatever instead of the road. Snow or rain itself does not cause accidents directly, but people who do not adapt their driving to them will.

BMW M3 Ring crash
Photo: Ring Bimmer/YouTube
What is there to do to prevent this? Well, you need to have the right tires for the weather, and you must always adapt your driving to the situation ahead of time.

If you leave your house and it is cold outside, or if it had rained the night before and you see tiny droplets of water on the grass, you need to account for that while driving because it may mean the roads are damp, and that grip will be suboptimal. The same applies to a bit of snow, or when the water droplets on your windows are about to freeze—that day may bring an increase in car accidents, so be prepared.

Whenever there is a change of weather, scenery, or road quality, people around you may not adapt their driving style to the scenario, and that is when you need to be extra careful to leave space in front of you, as well as try to maintain a bit of distance from the vehicle behind you – just in case they are not as attentive as you are.

While I am sure most of the drivers in that pileup are responsible humans, it only takes a handful of people who happened to not be fully attentive to the road at the wrong time (there never is a right time to be inattentive to the road while driving) for an accident like this to happen. Just do your best when the weather is changing, and remember to leave extra time when heading out to prevent the need to rush to your destination.



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Editor's note: For illustration purposes, the photo gallery shows various images of vehicles involved in crashes.

About the author: Sebastian Toma
Sebastian Toma profile photo

Sebastian's love for cars began at a young age. Little did he know that a career would emerge from this passion (and that it would not, sadly, involve being a professional racecar driver). In over fourteen years, he got behind the wheel of several hundred vehicles and in the offices of the most important car publications in his homeland.
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