The First Near-Accident That Was Actually Totally My Fault

[RenegadeXR]

For my 1,000th post on these forums, I'm deciding to celebrate my 4 years of owning a Camaro by calling out my own stupidity.

On Tuesday, I was pulling out of work. Our lot has multiple sections with a few private roads that connect them. A driver with a car that still had paper tags ran one of the stop signs that are posted before you exit one of the lot sections, causing me to have to brake.

Seconds later, I was still a little irritated and came to the exit that leads to the main road where I found the same car sitting dead center with no turn signal and sitting past the white "stop" line. I spent a couple seconds trying to figure out what he was doing, since the only options are to turn left or right.

I ended up snaking around him to make a right turn, head locked left to crow my neck over his hood for oncoming traffic. I glanced across the road because there's another parking lot that exits in the same general spot and saw nobody moving. I again began looking left while easing my way onto the road, not noticing that the tan SUV exiting the lot opposite of me had began creeping into the road. We must have both been more focused on the passing car, since we both sped up at the same time to tail it.

By the time I noticed we were about to have a head on collision, I was 3/4th in the road and hit my brakes. I was worried we'd both try to side step each other and have an automotive version of two people blocking each others path in a hallway, so I left him to decide what he wanted to do. He ended up driving in the middle lane, but he came within maybe 2 feet of my car. The whole time I was also wondering what the hell I was going to do if another car came speeding down the road while I was stopped. Luckily that didn't happen.

All things considered, I am still in the wrong. Since the SUV was creeping into the main road and technically entered it first, he had the right of way even though I was going right and he was going left.

I feel dumb for doing this and for my impatience with the other driver with the paper tags. I feel I need to call myself out on this, which is why I'm sharing. I know people on these forums have gone through way, way worse, and this would have been a low speed collision even if something happened, but it would have been my fault. Even small accidents are a pain in the butt in terms of paperwork, insurance hikes, and time spent in the shop.

I'm lucky I haven't had a single accident since 2013 (deer ran into my old car before I had a Camaro.) There have been lots of close encounters primarily from other drivers (eg: slamming brakes due to missing their off ramp on the highway, cutting me off by making a blind turn from a stop, swerving out of the lane while texting, etc.) I'm sure it will happen one day, but until then, I will use every experience as an opportunity to learn.