The HOV lane, or the High-Occupancy Vehicle lane, is a lane reserved for vehicles that carry a driver and a minimum number of passengers, usually two or more. But even though it is typically a quieter lane, as this dashcam footage shows, if you pull into it in an unsafe manner, you are going to cause an accident.
Footage showing a pickup truck moving into the lane has been uploaded to the r/dashcams subreddit by user bunnyvexa. The dramatic footage shows a pickup truck moving into the lane, clearly without looking behind it for oncoming traffic.
The footage is filmed from the rearview camera of the car we are on board with, and we also get some dashcam footage. The truck approaches behind us, then just pulls left into the HOV lane. However, clearly they didn’t check behind them, as a motorcycle is rapidly coming the other way.
Even though the bike is approaching much faster than the truck it is approaching, the truck driver still should have seen it. As you may have expected, the bike had no time to react and ploughed right into the back of the pickup truck. This resulted in a destroyed motorcycle and a brutal accident.
The Motorcycle Slammed Into the Rear of the Truck
No look illegal merge into the HOV lane, what could go wrong?
by
u/bunnyvexa in
dashcams
As the truck moves into the HOV lane, we can see that the motorcycle is approaching quite quickly. Playing devil’s advocate, the truck is roaring up to the back of the dashcam vehicle before the driver suddenly shoots into the HOV lane without indicating or seemingly giving any care to what could be coming up behind it. Plus, the bike may be going at regular highway speed, whereas everything else in the video appears to have slowed down.
It shoots past the camera with the bike following barely a second later. The video then cuts to another angle, and we see the bike smash into the rear of the truck with huge force. It is a huge impact, and we can just see the two people on the motorcycle being thrown forward as a result of the crash. The next shot shows us the aftermath of the accident, as the bike flies across in front of the car we are on board with.
More dramatically, both of the riders on the bike are thrown into the bed of the truck they have just crashed into. One of them can be seen rolling around, then righting themselves and jumping out of the truck. They turn around and see their friend also in the bed and proceed to try to help them out of the truck. The bike, meanwhile, is destroyed, while the rear of the truck has a nice big dent in the back of it from the impact.
What Did Reddit Say About the Accident?
Plenty of Reddit users waded in on the accident. “Yes. Even though the motorcycle was obviously going far faster than it should have, that truck is 100% at fault,” said one. They said that, as the bike had two passengers, it was perfectly fine for it to be in the HOV lane. In fact, bikes in general can go into an HOV lane. “The motorcycle looked to be using the HOV lane exactly as intended. It has dedicated entry points and is never supposed to merge into outside of that,” said another user.
“I’m not sure they were speeding at all; going at highway speed in the HOV lane while the rest of the highway next to you is going much slower due to traffic is the purpose of the HOV lane,” said one, believing the bike was going at the right speed. Whatever you think of the bike’s speed, the truck really didn’t pay attention to its surroundings.