A video from @evojuu pairs dashcam footage with a caption that lands somewhere between terrifying and absurd: “Red light runner almost took me out.. almost missed out on GTA 6 😫” The clip, filmed from inside a Honda Civic, racked up 255,000 likes, 967 comments, and 3,098 shares.

Red light running is not a rare fluke caught on one unlucky dashcam; it is a documented and worsening problem. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety’s research on red light running has tracked it for years as a leading cause of urban intersection crashes, and AAA’s own analysis, reported widely including by AAA Newsroom’s coverage of red light running deaths hitting a ten year high, found that roughly two people are killed every single day in the United States by a driver who ran a red light. The same research notes that nearly half of those killed are not the red light runner but someone else entirely, often an occupant of the vehicle that had the green light and the legal right to be in the intersection.

IIHS’s work also points to a pattern that matches what the Civic’s dashcam shows: red light runners are disproportionately likely to be speeding or distracted in the seconds before they blow through the signal, which is exactly why a split second reaction from the other driver is often the only thing standing between a near miss and a fatality statistic. Cities have leaned on red light cameras specifically because human enforcement cannot be everywhere at once, and the data consistently shows that camera-equipped intersections see meaningful drops in violations once drivers know they are being watched.

None of that context changes what actually happened on screen, which is the appeal of the clip in the first place: a driver going about his night, casually mentioning a video game he almost missed, interrupted by a car blowing through a red light directly in his path. The caption’s dark humor is doing real work here, taking a statistic that kills roughly two people a day in America and turning it into something the internet can process in fifteen seconds, which is exactly why it is still racking up shares days after it was first posted.

More from Steel Horse Rides

• Owner Says the Seats in a 1986 Toyota 4Runner Smell Exactly How You Would Imagine, Then Pulls Out the Carpet and Asks Followers to Pick the Color for the New Kit
• Mechanic Pulls a Snapped Crankshaft Apart in Two Pieces on the Shop Bench, Says the Car Drove In Like That and Jokes the Customer Only Wanted an Oil Change
• Narrator of a Repair Clip Says a Car That Shook Every Time the Owner Hit the Gas Had an Engine Mount Cracked Clean in Half, Then Explains Why the Impact Wrench Is Not the Last Step