Physics Always Wins

So last night Danny and I were watching an old movie (Fury, with Spencer Tracy) when suddenly we heard a loud, torn-metal-and-crunching sound from what sounded like our back yard. Since our back yard is bounded by other back yards, it seemed unlikely that (short of a house collapsing) the sound could actually be issuing from that direction, but sound does bounce. So we ran to the front of the house to see two cars--one pulled over to the far left side of the road, and another beyond that (meaning definitely off the road) and a police car already pulling up.

Since it was after 10pm, it was hard to see exactly what had happened.  But here's the thing: our street is fairly quiet and residential. There's a little patch of green across the street that separates us from San Jose Avenue, a split-lane road which is also the access to I-280, and (down the middle) has Muni-rail tracks for the J. Sounds confusing? Here, have a map:
People routinely go too fast on San Jose because they're accelerating to match the speed of traffic when they reach I-280. And because people routinely go too fast because they can.

So our hapless motorist (who did not seem to be hurt, as the next thing I knew, the car that had pulled over was gone, and the only people on site were the cops, who were clearly directly traffic around the site and waiting for machinery to come) had apparently been going fast enough that his car jumped a 10" tall curb on the left side of San Jose avenue and landed on the light-rail tracks and kept going with sufficient force to knock down about 60 feet of the fence between the two sets of tracks, and finally crash head-on into one of the cement-and-steel poles that holds the electric wires that power the light-rail. Aside from the damage to the car, there was a lot of dinged up municipal property. The red dot on the map indicates where the car was.

I finally gave in to my worst civic impulses, and went out about 11:30 to see what had happened, which is why I can describe it at all.  About 12:30 I started hearing a horrid grinding noise which (because sound bounces) at first I thought was the dishwasher malfunctioning. Nup. They had a crew out there with acetylene torches and a crane, and were cutting away the fence and lifting the wreck off the tracks. This morning everything is calm and Sunday-like.

This is the second such wreck on that road I've seen in under a month--although in the last decade of living in this house I'd never seen any such prior to  this (the other one was worse--the car was on its roof, facing east way, although it had clearly been going west when it hopped the barrier). Where is everyone going in such a damned hurry? And had neither of these drivers taken science? Physics always wins, no matter how smart you think you are.