If You Crash Into A Building, Don’t Drive Away With The Emergency Stairs

Sometimes, things happen on the roads that just leave us lost for words. This is one of those times. On Tuesday, a driver was spotted in Mississauga, Canada just motoring around with an entire set of metal stairs seemingly haphazardly plonked atop their Mazda 3. I’ve seen some questionable lapses in road safety in my time, but nothing quite this absurd.

For context, Mississauga is one of the two biggest cities in Peel Region, a district just west of Toronto. According to insurance aggregator rates.ca, Peel Region’s two main cities of Brampton and Mississauga have the highest average car insurance rates in Ontario, and this incident probably doesn’t help in that department.

It shouldn’t need to be said, but driving with a big set of stairs atop a Mazda 3 doesn’t seem like a great idea, partly because this set is bigger than the roof itself, and partly because I don’t see any ratchet straps or other load retention devices being used in the stills or video footage. It’s also the sort of move that would attract a ton of attention, which explains the various images and videos of the incident circulating on social media, such as this still image that was posted on Instagram by 905_Roadside.

 

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A post shared by 905 Roadside Services (@905_roadside)

If nothing about this seems thought-out, that’s because, according to Peel Regional Police, the stairs weren’t intentionally placed atop the hatchback. Instead, “Police investigation revealed that the vehicle reversed into a building striking the stairs and the stairs released from the building and stayed attached to the vehicle.”

Normally, this is when a driver is supposed to stop, file an insurance claim, and call the police due to property damage, but that’s allegedly not what happened here. Instead, the driver appears to have driven away from the building, as the footage below shows the car motoring along an arterial road.

 

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A post shared by @6ixnewzz

Unsurprisingly, someone called this vehicle into police, and the driver was stopped and charged with careless driving under the Highway Traffic Act. Mercifully, police report that no other vehicles were involved and that the driver was uninjured. As the story goes, this seems to be a case of one car, one driver, one building, one staircase, and a chain of decisions that shouldn’t have been made like that.

How does a Mazda 3 cope with getting wedged under a staircase and pulling it away from a building? About as well as you’d expect. In video shared by Instagram account Toronto_Only, the rear window’s shattered, the hatch is stoved in, the right curtain airbag’s deployed, and the left quarter panel is creased. I’m no insurance estimator, but there’s a good chance this otherwise respectable hatchback is now effectively totalled.

 

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A post shared by Toronto Only ➅ (@toronto_only)

I guess the moral of the story here is that if you crash, don’t do anything that could endanger people further. Part of this incident seems like it could’ve been avoided by throwing the car in park and making a few phone calls, and it really does feel lucky that this whole situation didn’t end under far worse circumstances. At the same time, if you see something like this on the road, don’t be afraid to call it in.

Top graphic image: Instagram/6ixnewzz

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