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"You are not gonna believe what almost just happened!"

"Don't cross the street in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle of the block
Don't cross the street in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle, in the middle of the block
Use your eyes to look out, use your ears to hear
Walk up to the corner when the coast is clear
And wait, and wait, until you see the light turn green..."
They Might Be Giants, "In the Middle, in the Middle, In the Middle"

A specific variant of Dropped a Bridge on Him. A character runs across the street without checking for oncoming vehicles, usually because of someone chasing him or something. Often, he attempts to provide the last word in the argument by turning his back to the opposite side of the road. Without warning, a bus or car wheels in from the side of the frame and slams into him, crushing his bones into the dust of death. Often it seems the vehicle was moving pretty quickly for the road it's on. The guy who left his common sense behind in the heat of the moment is Killed Off for Real to provide Anyone Can Die shock value. Or, it can make for comedy with its abruptness.

Plus, it's a kind of Karmic Death. Remember, folks: you were taught in elementary school to Look Both Ways before crossing the street!

Interestingly, the driver almost never slows down (if they try, they will brake so hard that their wheels lock up and they end up not slowing down anyway) and never swerves, even if the person was in the street long enough for them to react. If the victim is "lucky" they might just honk (might). This, however, can be often a case of Truth in Television. Drivers are humans, not automated machines, and a quick and unexpected obstacle that shows up in the car's way, such as someone running, may not give the driver time enough to react and cause a traffic accident. In most fictional instances, especially in Anime, this also results in the driver being rarely if ever seen and usually getting zero repercussions for their actions, be it legally or emotionally.

Among other popular death tropes, Japanese media really likes this one, whether it be for setting up a sudden drama arc, giving a character a tragic backstory where they lost a loved one in this way, or killing some poor sap so they can Reincarnate in Another World. Calling the vehicle in question "Truck-kun" (or its local vehicular equivalent) has become a meme.

Can invoke Diabolus ex Machina if done particularly suddenly, or Schrödinger's Gun in video games in which the vehicle crosses your path only if you didn't look first. Nearly always invokes Mood Whiplash. Can sometimes be averted by a Heroic Sacrificial Diving Save. Compare Car Fu, where someone is trying to hit someone else with a vehicle. For instances involving trains and railroads, see Railroad Tracksof Doom instead.

The incredibly dangerous roads in Fictionland might explain why Jaywalking is considered as serious as Murder and Arson...

Not to be confused with the two films (2005 and 2022) of the same name. If the pedestrian can not only survive it, but shrug it off (usually wrecking the vehicle), it's a case of Pedestrian Crushes Car.

Because this is a Death Trope, beware of Unmarked Spoilers!


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • Happens in one of the early Got Milk commercials to a yuppie on a cell phone as he's in the middle of screaming at the person on the other end that they're fired. He thinks he's in Heaven initially due to winding up in a room with relaxing music, a fluffy cat, and fresh chocolate chip cookies on a plate. But right after he takes a bite from a cookie he finds that the fridge is full of nothing but empty milk cartons..
  • Public information films aimed at kids in Britain in the 1970's used this trope. One popular in The '70s repeated the mantra "Look left. Look right. Look left again!" to kids, to try to drum it into them to look before they crossed the street. With visual reinforcement concerning what might happen to heedless kids who didn't. Here's one featuring Jon Pertwee. SPLINK!
  • Road safety ads naturally feature this trope fairly often. This Irish advert is particularly realistic insofar as it illustrates both the importance of not texting as you cross the street, and not crossing from behind a large parked vehicle that would obstruct you until you suddenly "jump" into traffic.

    Anime & Manga 
  • A variant appears in Astro Boy. In the Downer Beginning, Tobio takes his dad's car for a drive and ends up driving into a car himself.
  • Amalgam of Distortion kicks off the plot when Rokumichi tries to save a kid from a truck crash and gets hit himself. Uniquely, this is then revealed to be an Invoked Trope by SAI, who used a hologram of a little boy to lure him there so they could knock him unconscious and take him to one of their labs to be experimented on.
  • The trope occurs hilariously — twice — in Baccano!.
    • In the first instance, resident Cloudcuckoolanders Isaac and Miria are dancing about and enthusing about their plan to become rich when they are abruptly hit by a car driven by Ennis. Since it wasn't going very fast, they're not seriously hurt.
    • Later on, Szilard leaps out of a window in pursuit of Maiza - and directly into the path of his own car, now driven by Isaac.
  • Happens in Black God to a young pedestrian to throw more angst at the protagonist. It happens again near the end of the anime, only this time the hero saves the civilian's life.
  • Implied in Bloom Into You. Touko's older sister Mio is said to have died in a traffic accident, and a flashback shows her setting out to do some errands, presumably resulting in her being hit by a car at some point.
  • In Boku no Kanojo Meguru Isekai, our boorish hero was run over by a truck before he was reincarnated into a new world. It's only later when he remembers that his Stalker with a Crush was behind the wheel, and realizes too late that she reincarnated into the same world to kill him again. The story then follows a grim cycle where whatever world he goes, another version of her follows.
  • Captain Tsubasa:
    • Happened to Stefan Levin's girlfriend Karen. She was in a hurry to go to Levin's latest match, carelessly tried to cross the road... and got hit by a truck for her trouble.
    • Subverted with Misaki's sister Yoshiko, who almost got hit by a bus and Misaki saved her at the cost of being seriously injured — it happened because she fell over while riding her bike.
    • Also subverted in the first chronological scene of the anime canon. A tiny Tsubasa reaches for the streets when his parents are distracted, is juuuust about to be run over by a car... and his soccer ball softens the impact enough for him to be completely unharmed.
  • A common cause of death for soon-to-be cynicism catalysts and/or general dead loved ones in Case Closed. For example, there's Takagi's Big Brother Mentor Date; he accidentally dropped his police notepad and a ring he kept for his girlfriend, tried to retrieve them... and got a face full of a car whose driver fell asleep at the wheel for his trouble.
  • In an odd version, Rei Asaka from Dear Brother pulls this with a train, since she fell on its path while trying to recover a bouquet of roses that she was carrying as a gift to her date, Nanako. This only happens in the anime; in the original manga, she kills herself with a drug overdose.
  • In Death Note, a gangster is splattered by the truck, having been sentenced to death via Light's Death Note to test its capabilities.
  • Episode 10 of Dropkick on My Devil X has Jashin-chan attempt to cross the street in an attempt to defy her fated death by an omikuji, except she stops midway through the crossing to gloat that she will not die. Alas, she was rammed by a "39 Dropkick" truck, driven by Hatsune Miku herself. Thankfully, Jashin-chan survived thanks to her healing factor.
  • EX-ARM starts off with Akira reluctantly growing a spine to help a girl harassed by punks... only to IMMEDIATELY get clobbered by a truck just as he started running back. He only wakes up 16 years later In Medias Res.
  • In the very first episode of Excel♡Saga, Excel gets hit by a bus while prancing home from her high school graduation, and the Great Will of the Macrocosm has to resurrect her.
  • Fly Me to the Moon: Nasa gets hit by a truck when he tries to cross the road and speak with the pretty girl standing on the other side. Not only does he survive (albeit with heavy injuries that require surgery and months of physical therapy), it ends up being the catalyst for his romance with the girl, Tsukasa (who tanked the worst of the hit saving Nasa, but walked off with only minor injuries for some reason).
  • Subverted in Fruits Basket, where Tohru's mom Kyouko was fatally hit by a car because the driver actually had a lethal heart attack while driving. Oh, and because Kyou panicked from trying a Diving Save in fear of triggering his curse — needless to say, Kyou couldn't forgive himself for it.
  • Ghost in the Shell: Arise: Another Mission (basically an advertisement for Microsoft's Surface Tablet in the form of a three minute short) has the Major throwing a tablet carrying crucial information to Togusa. An android leaps through the air to intercept it, only to get hit by a truck.
  • Invoked in Goodbye! I'm Being Reincarnated!, where a princess from another world appears before the main character, asking him for help in her world against evil forces and telling him that he needs to be reincarnated there. He agrees, then the next day, a truck comes at him and almost kills him, stopped only by a goblin who appears out of nowhere and saves him... and the princess herself is revealed as the driver of the truck, while the evil forces are trying to save his life.
  • Hanako-chan from Haunted Junction died like this, having been hit by a speeding car when she was running away from her rockstar boyfriend's Loony Fans, who were harassing her.
  • Hitomi from ICE gets run over by a car, which promptly transports her mind into the body of a woman living in the near future, where all males have gone extinct.
  • Parodied in Isekai Nande Ikumon ka!. Girls from many different worlds need Komoru to help them out, but none of them want to share, so they often compete against each other as to who will gain his favor. One time, one of the girls invokes this trope by summoning a truck to run him over (in his own room) in a bid to reincarnate him in her world first. The others respond by bombarding him with summoned trucks.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
    • Stone Ocean: Upon Pucci's activation of Made In Heaven, one of the resulting effects causes a civilian to get rammed over by a speeding car.
    • JoJolion: Just as Aisho Dainenjiyama thinks he's cornered Yasuho and Tsurugi, he sees Jobin Higashikata approach him, unaware that Tsurugi has used Paper Moon King on him, which has made every single bus in Morioh appear as Jobin to him, and he finds out the deception too late as he gets run over.
  • Kagerou Project: During Heat Haze Days, Hiyori chases a cat she had been petting out into the road. As the pedestrian crossing sign has just turned red. And that's not even the worst way she gets to die. After realising her fate of dying over and over, Hibiya decides to Screw Destiny and get hit by the truck instead. It doesn't work.
  • The death of Leon's sister and partner Sophie in Kaleido Star was like this. In an attempt to get her and Leon disqualified from a very important circus contest, Yuri wrote a fake letter in which he asked Sophie for a meet-up that never took place. When she realized that she had been tricked and had few minutes to spare, Sophie tried to reach the stadium in time and crossed the streets without looking — and without seeing a truck that was coming her way.
  • Nayuki's mother Akiko in Kanon is hit by an SUV running a red light and traveling too fast for snowy conditions near the end, but survives thanks to Ayu's miracle.
  • In Kaze to Ki no Uta, Gilbert is run over and killed by a horse carriage after running into the street while hallucinating.
  • Knight Hunters:
    • The first episode opens with a girl named Michiru waving goodbye to her boyfriend, who gets on his bike and is suddenly run over by a van. "Run over" as in it falls on him from an overpass, on fire, covered in ninjas.
    • Averted in the case of Ran's ill little sister Aya-chan, since it turns out it was intentional.
  • The Reincarnate in Another World version is mocked in KonoSuba, where the plot is kicked off by the Loser Protagonist dying of a panic-induced heart attack after heroically pushing a girl out of the path of a slow-moving tractor he mistook for a truck. He then soils his pants as he dies and gets laughed at by both his family and the hospital staff for dying so embarrassingly. This all happens within the first five minutes.
  • Averted in episode 1 of Kotoura-san. Haruka is able to save both Manabe's life and her own simply because her Telepathy allows her to see an oncoming, careless delivery van driver that's running the red light at full speed.
  • Happens to Hayate in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha The Movie2nd As. In this case, she does look both ways and waits for the stop light to turn green for her. Unfortunately, the driver of the truck has fallen asleep on the wheel, only waking up when braking and swerving won't be enough to avoid her. Fortunately, this is the event that triggers her powers in the movie, leaving a confused truck driver to wonder where the crippled little girl he almost hit went.
  • Magical Princess Minky Momo being run over by a truck (and her show not immediately ending) has become infamous among anime fans. It's quite over the top, with the truck being full of children's toys, first swerving to avoid a toddler and then hitting Momo, and the ambulance sound coming from one of the toys. In fact, it was the inspiration for the Excel Saga incident mentioned above. It is likely the Ur-Example within anime.
  • Monster:
    • An incarceree's brother practices a Staged Pedestrian Accident on a road while awaiting the prison van transporting Tenma and the aforementioned. While talking to his girlfriend he steps out backwards into the road, only to be hit by said prison van in a manner far more real than he could have intended, though Tenma does manage to save his life.
    • It later happens to Tenma, who's running from the police at the time. He escapes with little more than a twisted ankle and a head injury because the truck wasn't driving that fast and was able to brake.
  • Monster Musume: Parodied when Kimihito decides to prove that he's not about to die by deliberately invoking a bunch of death flags, then stepping into the street. It suddenly looks like there's a huge truck bearing down on him at high speed, but then the perspective changes to reveal that it's actually a remote controlled car that some kids are playing with and only lightly bumps him in the ankle.
  • In a flashback of Muhyo and Roji, a young girl named Ai suffers this fate. After getting a hand-made "Riko-chan" doll as a present from her mother, she rushes over to show it to her friend in another building. She isn't looking where she's going, and as she turns to call out to her mother, she doesn't notice the truck that hits and kills her.
  • An episode of Nurse Witch Komugi parodies this by having the title character get hit by a car in the first scene and spending most of the episode as a ghost, then come Back from the Dead and get roadkilled again, revived and flattened about half a dozen times back to back.
  • Narrowly averted twice in PokĂ©mon: The Series. In Sun and Moon, Sandy is nearly hit by a car in a busy street and has to be rescued by Shaymin. Chloe's Eevee reminds Grookey about this in Journeys when running an errand, then wait for the crosswalk to turn on to safely cross (but look both ways again to be safe).
  • In Sarazanmai, this happened to Kazuki's brother Haruka because he recklessly crossed the street after his brother when the crosswalk light was off, and his legs are paralyzed in the present day. Kazuki blames himself so much for it he nearly trades away his existence for Haruka's life at the apex of his Heroic BSoD.
  • Inexplicably, unfathomably, illogically, and hilariously, M. Bison tries to do this to Ryu at the very end of Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie. Why an international crime lord with near-unlimited Psycho Power, an otherwise brilliant tactical mind, and martial arts expertise would try to run down someone with a truck will forever be a mystery.
  • Played with in The Twelve Kingdoms, where Seishuu dies this way when hit by a carriage. The twist comes because he had gone blind a short while ago and the rich bastard riding in the carriage had the kid intentionally hit, thus whether he looked both ways or not... it wouldn't have mattered.
  • Subverted first as a Visual Gag, and then played straight, in the first episode of Uncle from Another World. The Narrator of the series (the nephew of said uncle) was apparently going to get hit by a truck while crossing the street, but was then revealed to have made it safely across. Then it is revealed that the titular uncle got into the predicament he is in now because he was hit by a truck while crossing the street.
  • This is how Jibanyan from Yo-kai Watch died. His teenage owner Amy was crossing the street, but it was supernaturally decided that she was supposed to die that day, so a truck driver was inspirited to run a light. Jibanyan saved Amy at the sacrifice of his own life.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Cobra gives his adopted son Rick some cards, at which point a strong wind blows them away into the street. Rick runs after them and gets hit by a truck, causing Cobra's Start of Darkness. In the 4Kids version, it's Bowdlerized into having Rick die of an illness.
  • YuYu Hakusho starts off with the protagonist dying from being hit by a car to save a boy who had chased his ball into the street. It doesn't really count for Yusuke himself since he saw the car coming and dove in front of it deliberately to save the kid. However, the kid wasn't looking both ways...and ironically would have come out completely fine if Yusuke hadn't interfered.
  • Zombie Land Saga has this happen in its very first minute. Sakura literally runs out her door and is hit by a speeding truck; the whole thing is given a montage set to death metal. Of course, she ends up as one of the titular zombies later on. Then it happens again in episode 10. Being a zombie this time, it doesn't kill her, but she does regain her memories of when she was alive and forgets everything she experienced after she became a zombie.

    Comic Books 
  • All-New Ultimates: Terry wakes up in the morgue, walks out, still dizzy and confused, and gets run over by a truck.
  • In the final issue of a story arc in The DCU's Justice Society of America, Wildcat and his new-found meta-human son are fighting a losing battle against Diabolical Mastermind Vandal Savage, until Savage charges out into the street after the son, right into the path of a speeding fire truck responding to a blaze started earlier in the brawl. It's not near enough to kill him, but it does end the fight.
  • Underground Comics artist Gilbert Shelton penned a series of one-page comics on motoring tips — in a spotlight on Britain, he reminded us that they drive on the left, illustrated with him stepping off a curb looking to his left as a London cab barrels up behind him.

    Comic Strips 
  • The exact theme in a road safety poster contest that Calvin enters in Calvin and Hobbes, to which his slogan is "Be careful or be roadkill!" While his father's suggested slogan is just a full-sentence rant about something else entirely but still related to road safety, his mother's is something much more coherent and tamer:
    Before you cross, look each way, and you'll get home safe each day.
  • A 1987 Garfield strip had Garfield attempting to teach Odie this as the latter walks onto the street. Odie does look both ways as he crosses yet ends up being almost hit by a car anyway, not catching onto why he should be looking both ways in the first place.

    Fan Works 
  • In Before We Had Wings, Hikari died after getting hit by a car in a hit-and-run.
  • In 28th Kill la Kill AU comic, we find out that Ragyo was hit by a car when she was a child (on her sixth birthday no less) and, being mortally injured, it's implied the only way her life could have been saved was for her to be infused with life fibers.
  • In the K-On!/Hyouka crossover fanvid Our Tapes, Mio gets hit by a bus while going to see her boyfriend Oreki on a date. She survives but is wheelchair bound. The crash leaves her unable to play in her band.
  • In Secret Sunshine, Ryuuko is hit by a car after she storms out of the house, which leaves her back injured. She doesn't quite remember the event, but does remember that she managed to throw Kiko out of the way.
  • The entire plot of Yu-Gi-Oh Resurrection occurs because Yugi is hit and killed by a vehicle while crossing the street to meet Joey and Tristan at Burger World, which allows him to travel to a different universe.

    Films — Animation 
  • Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse: During a flashback, Kingpin's wife and son, Vanessa and Richard were killed in a Surprise Car Crash while they were driving away from him in a panic, causing them to run a red light where they were t-boned by a truck.
  • In Turning Red, Mei steps into the street intent on hiding behind a parked truck so she doesn't see an oncoming car in time to jump out of the way. She ends up bracing for impact instead but fortunately for her the car stops just short of hitting her.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • In 11:14, Cheri not only steps into the street without looking, she stops to answer her phone in the middle of the road. Despite the dangerous driving on Mark's part, what happens next is at least partially her fault.
  • The Abduction of Saint Anne: One of Anne's miracles is the healing of a three-year-old boy whose legs were crushed by a news truck because he leapt out of his father's pickup truck without looking around first.
  • Paul from Adam & Paul walks across the street without looking and is struck by a moped. He spends the rest of the day walking with a limp and complaining about the pain in his leg
  • The Air I Breathe: Trista has a memory of her father trying to entertain her by absentmindedly skipping in the rain on the street before being hit by a bus.
  • In Angel, Angel, Down We Go, Tara flees her coming out party onto the dirt road where Bogie is driving. Surprisingly, he doesn't hit her - instead, she runs into the side of the moving car and falls over.
  • Bird Box. After the mass insanity strikes, Malorie's sister deliberately steps into the path of a truck. Malorie goes into shock and would have ended up dying the same way if a bystander hadn't dragged her off the road.
  • In Bloody Reunion, Jong-Wo's mother was hit by a car when she she stormed off across the road with Jong-Wa's soiled underpants.
  • The Body (2012): At the end of the Dramatic Chase Opening, the security guard bursts out of the forest on to the road. He looks the wrong way along the road and gets hit by a car coming the other direction.
  • In Carnosaur, an adolescent megalosaur misses its chance to act out the T. rex's role from The Lost World: Jurassic Park when it steps out into a highway and is flattened by an 18-wheeler.
  • Subverted in Constantine (2005). A Mexican man finds a spear point and walks out into the street, where he's hit by a car. Not only is he not killed, he runs away completely unharmed. We later find out that he survived because the spear point he's carrying is from the Spear of Destiny.
  • One of the first sufferers of the disease in Contagion (2011) becomes so delirious from it that he ends up wandering into the street and is hit by a truck.
  • At the beginning of Dawn of the Dead (2004), as the Zombie Apocalypse tears through Ana's neighborhood, her threatening gun-toting neighbor gets mowed down by a speeding ambulance.
  • Happens to that one guy from The Devil's Advocate, although it's strongly implied that it was a hit.
  • In Rob Zombie's film The Devil's Rejects, after being the only survivor of the Firefly family's escapades at a motel, a young woman, wearing the face of her husband, stops running from the motel room in the middle of a desert highway and is promptly hit by an 18-wheeler.
  • Emily's fate in The Devil Wears Prada (film version only), allowing Andy to feel a little bit less guilty about going to Paris instead of her.
  • Used in a Death Montage in Edge of Tomorrow. The protagonist is stuck in a nightmarish "Groundhog Day" Loop in which he dies in the same battle over and over again, each time learning from his mistakes and lasting a bit longer. In one scene he's making an Unflinching Walk across the chaotic landing zone, only to get blindsided by a truck. Gilligan Cut to him doing it again, only this time he runs. There's also a Running Gag involving a soldier cheering the fact that he survived the drop, only for an aircraft to crash on top of him. The first time the protagonist tries to save him, only to get squashed himself. The second time he gets them both out of the way in time, and the third time he doesn't even bother.
  • Used with considerable effect in The Exorcism of Emily Rose with the Doctor who gets hit right after admitting that he believes in demons and is afraid.
  • Fatal Instinct: While Ned is getting lost in one of his private monologues, he gets run over by a bus. He shrugs it off in the next scene.
  • Fear, Inc.: During a traffic stop, the sheriff tells Joe and Lindsey to get out of the van and takes a step back into the road, where he is promptly struck by another van.
  • Final Destination:
    • Final Destination: All of the characters in the movie have cheated death, and he (it?) is currently mowing them down one by one, in very elaborate ways telegraphed for the audience. Arguing about their situation while walking down a sidewalk, one of the girls exclaims that all of the others can "Drop fucking dead!" and steps off the sidewalk. BUS!
    • Happens again in The Final Destination in a scene that's probably a Shout-Out to the first. Two characters leave a hospital, having just witnessed the elaborate and spectacularly unlikely death of the latest victim, and are in quiet conversation when one of them gets hit by an ambulance.
  • Get Smart has a brief montage of compromised CONTROL agents getting assassinated. The first two are quietly shot with poison darts in the middle of their meals, faceplanting into their food. The third, sitting at a cafe on a street corner, gets shot in the neck with a dart, stands up in pain, and starts wincing and hopping... right into the road, and WHAM.
  • Lampshaded in the 2008 movie Ghost Town. After Dr. Pincus is hit by a bus, just as Frank was, Frank comments to the effect that the Transit Authority buses are a menace. Neither bus so much as slows down, honks, or screeches before striking.
  • A Rule of Threes version in GI Joe The Rise Of Cobra, the first two times Played for Laughs. Ripcord gets hit by a car right after he promises not to harm his multi-million dollar Powered Armor, then Duke gets run over by the bad guy's Hummer right after asking where they are, and the third involves the Hummer being hit by an intercity light-rail train right after they think their pursuers have given up.
  • The Hit List: Brian Felzner backs away from Allan and steps into the street,where he is immediately run down by Arbor.
  • In Hocus Pocus, when the heroes manage to escape from a sewer and seem to be in the clear, their talking cat Thachary is flattened by a passing vehicle out of the blue. After they mourn over his clearly very dead body and start to turn away, he suddenly reforms to his normal shape and comes back to life, running over to them and saying "Hate it when that happens". He then reminds them that he has so many lives that he's practically immortal.
  • In I Miss You, I Miss You, the twins Tina and Cilla oversleep and hurry towards the bus stop to catch their school bus. When they run over the road, they don't watch out for cars and Cilla gets hit by a car and dies, while Tina is unharmed. Martin, the driver and a neighbor of the twins, is traumatized and is afraid to even run across Tina and her family. One year after the accident, Tina tells Martin that it wasn't his fault but Cilla and hers, because they jaywalked.
  • Interstate 60 has a short scene in which a cyclist crashes into the opening door of a parked car just as the car's driver is getting out. In the chaos that ensues, the cyclist's bicycle is run over by a passing truck and the driver's suit and cell phone are ruined. The driver is upset and angry - he's going to be late for an important meeting and can't call to explain - and says that he wishes this hadn't happened. Unfortunately for the driver, the cyclist actually can grant wishes and enjoys being a Jackass Genie to people he doesn't like; after giving the driver a chance to change his mind, the cyclist grants the wish. The scene plays out again, and this time the cyclist steers around the car door - and the passing truck hits the driver instead of running over the bicycle.
  • Iron Man gets hit by a truck in Iron Man 3 seconds after saving a bunch of people falling from the sky and breaks into pieces. Subverted when it turns out that Tony Stark was piloting the suit remotely and was never hurt.
  • In Kick-Ass, the title character finishes off his first attempt at heroism by getting flipped by a car. To be fair, though, he had just been stabbed in the gut and probably wasn't thinking too clearly.
  • Happens to Diana in Knowing. She dies by an oncoming truck coming from her left while driving a stolen SUV to chase after some guys who "took" the kids but actually passes away at exactly 12 midnight.
  • Last Night in Soho: The Silver-Haired Gentleman is run over by a car in the street because he turned his back to the traffic to talk to Ellie.
  • The Lives of Others: Christa-Maria is hit by a truck after she betrays Dreymann. Not played entirely straight — it's ambiguous whether the incident was a suicide or an accident.
  • Used as a running gag in Local Hero: Every time Mac steps out into the street he is nearly hit by a guy on a dirt bike (who, by the way, is played by John Gordon Sinclair of Gregory's Girl fame). Every time. And this in a town so small that it only has one street and no other traffic. At one point, he becomes savvy to this, and stops himself and Danny well before the dirt bike passes.
  • Mean Girls: Near the end of the movie, Regina gets hit by a bus while arguing with Cady. She sustains moderate damage; the main effect is that she spends the rest of the movie encased in some kind of spine-straightening braces. Cady's narrating voice fakes the viewer out for a second by claiming that Regina died, but immediately afterwards she says, "Just kidding." Then at the very end the "treatment" for the new junior Plastics is being hit by a bus as well. This is also just a joke, the girls aren't really hit.
  • Happens to Brad Pitt's character (his original one, before Death borrows his body) in Meet Joe Black. Although the moral lesson of the incident is not so much "look both ways before you cross the street"; it's more like "Don't stand in the street for two minutes blankly staring back at the girl you just met." It actually happens twice in sequence, with his body being flung back and forth between the vehicles in a gruesome sort of pinball.
  • In the film Mimic, this happens to the main villain, a giant, man-eating cockroach, when he makes an ill-fated decision to step in front of a moving subway car.
  • My Super Ex-Girlfriend: G-Girl rescues a girl who wandered into the street without looking, rebuking her for forgetting about this... and then promptly gets hit by a car herself, after she fails to as well. Being Nigh-Invulnerable, she's unharmed.
  • In The Naked Gun, O. J. Simpson's character, through a series of unfortunate events, ends up stuck under a bus that winds up in Detroit.
  • Parodied in Night of the Comet: After the elimination of the human race, one girl decides that she no longer needs to look before crossing "against the light" — and is almost run over by another survivor.
  • Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight II: While Zosia is leaving the police station, angry at Adas for not killing Wanessa and suspecting he had feelings for her, she's hit by a police car so hard it gibs her.
  • Happens rather tragically in One Day (both novel and film) to one of the main characters, as she is riding her bicycle to a romantic dinner with her husband. The film actually starts with the bicycle ride, but then cuts back to the beginning of the story. When the bicycle ride resumes, she exits into a street without looking and gets hit by a truck. The rest of the film is her husband dealing with the loss and remembering how they met.
  • In what is possibly the Trope Maker, and one of the few humorous examples of this trope, the Buster Keaton short One Week has this happen to a house, via train. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • In an Our Gang Very Special Episode, Mickey is hit by a car while running out into the street to catch a fly ball. The other Rascals spearhead a grassroots campaign called "1-2-3-Go" where you always look left, then right, then left again before crossing a street, while chanting that phrase.
  • At the start of Paul Blart: Mall Cop 2, his mom steps forward just a bit to pick up her morning paper from the road rather than the driveway. Cue delivery truck.
  • In Prey for Rock & Roll, Lori Petty's character runs after some kids who steal her guitar, and gets hit by a car. She doesn't survive the incident.
  • Red 2: In a Car Chase through the streets of Paris, Sarah and Marvin are competing with Frank and Katya to catch a Knowledge Broker called The Frog, who's driving a stolen motorcycle. The Frog races down a narrow alley, and when Sarah tries to follow, her car gets stuck. The Frog stops and turns to flip them the "V", only to promptly get hit by Frank and Katya in their car.
  • Scary Movie:
    • Parodied throughout the series, as someone is unexpectedly hit by a car or bus at the end of every movie.
    • At the beginning of the second one, a couple of people are flattened by a bus. On the back it says "How's my driving? Call 1-800-KISS MY ASS. And yes, we know, that is too many digits for a phone number."
    • Double subverted in the third one. The main character's car barely stops in time to avoid hitting the kid. As he sighs in relief, another car comes out of nowhere at a 90-degree angle and runs him over. And no, there's no intersection, it's a perfectly straight road.
  • The Sense of Wonder: While fleeing a psychological evaluation, Pierre bolts into the road, in the path of Louise's car. He's lucky enough to get only a cut on his temple.
  • The leader of the Martian ship in the comedy Spaced Invaders charges from his spaceship onto the highway as soon as they land on Earth, howling his contempt for Earthlings. He is instantly smashed into the grill of a passing truck. Further spoofed when the less combative Martians interact with a human little girl:
    "Don't forget to look both ways before crossing the street!"
    "So that's the secret. If only Captain Bipto had known."
  • Street Racer 2008 (a film by The Asylum) has a rather Too Dumb to Live example near the end. After the hero wins the climactic race, his parole officer (who bet against him) runs across the race course to attack him. He's instead mowed down by the next pair of racers.
  • In Superman II, Clark Kent carelessly walks out into a crowded Metropolis street and is hit by a cab. Of course, Clark is unhurt because he's really Superman.
  • Despite the tendency of Terminators to get run over, a human version occurs in Terminator Salvation when the humans are fleeing a derelict gas station being torn up by a giant robot. One man gets hit by a stationwagon tearing out of a garage, bounces off the hood, and keeps running, with neither party stopping for a moment. The unfortunate man then hitches a lift on another vehicle, which is disintegrated shortly afterwards.
  • In The Tournament, Tupalov stops his scooter in the middle of the motorway to take a shot at Lai Lai and Father MacAvoy. He is immediately hit by a bus.
  • In Two Hands, the street kids Pete and Helen go on a spending spree with the money they stole off Jimmy. When they are returning, they start to cross the road and Pete gets run down by Acko. Helen watches in disbelief as Acko simply picks the dead boy's body off the street and dumps it in the gutter, concerned more about the damage to his car.
  • The Walking Dead (1936): On seeing Ellman coming for him at the railway station, Blackwood panics and runs into the path of an oncoming train.
  • The TV movie W.E.I.R.D. World has a rather interesting example of this. One of the scientists working for the titular organization discovers time travel and reveals that she knows she will die in a couple of days. On the day in question, her brother comes to her to steal her research and takes them both back in time half an hour to leave the facility. She tries to escape and throws what she pretends is her research file into the road. He goes to pick it up, discovers that it's actually her ID badge, and gets run over by his past self.
  • Wish Upon: Claire uses her last wish to travel back in time and prevent her father from finding the wish box. She gives the backpack containing the box to Ryan and tells him bury it without opening it. Relieved of her burden, she turns and crosses the road to go to school without checking. And is immediately struck by Darcie's car and dies.
  • In The Witch Files, Sarah is explaining what is happening to Claire and Brooke by way of holding up notes when she steps out of the alley and into the street backwards and promptly gets hit by a van.
  • In White Sands, Ray tries to chase Bodine across a parking lot, only to be hit by a car.
  • In The Wolverine, one of the Yakuza gets hit by a car as they chase Logan and Mariko across the street.

    Literature 
  • Subverted in Ascendance of a Bookworm. At first, it appears that Urano (the girl who would become Myne) is about to get hit by a speeding truck, but she safely makes it across the street despite being nose-deep in a book at the time. It's not until she gets home that she dies and gets reincarnated after being crushed under an avalanche of books.
  • In The City We Became, the primary avatar of New York runs away from his enemies across the FDR drive, and they get killed by being run over by the cars there.
  • Moon from A Dog's Life dies instantly when she's hit by a van while trying to hunt a squirrel.
  • Narrowly averted at the start of The Fall of Doc Future. Stella is visiting London, is tired, and thus looks the wrong way before stepping into the street. Just as well she was talking to the fastest girl in the world at the time.
  • In the first Serge Storms novel, Florida Roadkill, a Satanic assassin tries to kill Serge and Coleman. Unfortunately, he kneels to pray in the middle of a poorly lit highway in the middle of the night while wearing black and ends up getting run over by a bus full of devout Christians.
  • In The Great Gatsby, Tom Buchanan's mistress Myrtle darts out into the street after an argument with her husband, only to be struck and horrifically killed by Tom's wife.
  • In Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert's wife Charlotte finds his diary, detailing his disdain for her and lust for her titular daughter, while said daughter is away at camp. Humiliated, she confronts him with the evidence and tells him she intends to take Lolita from the camp to a strict year-round boarding school and away from his grasp forever. However, crossing the street to post letters setting this plan in motion, she is killed by a passing motorist, leaving Humbert as Lolita's sole guardian. At least, that's his version.
  • In Mushoku Tensei: Jobless Reincarnation, the protagonist is an otaku and hikkikomori who's wasted pretty much his whole life inside. He sees a couple arguing in the street, unaware that they are about to be hit by a truck, and shoves/pulls them out of the way at the cost of his own life. Fortunately, his act of heroism is repaid when he is reborn in another world full of magic and adventure where he resolves not to waste his life a second time. (And for some reason keeps his memories and adult mentality from his previous life despite being in a child's body.) Given how popular it was at the time, this is likely the source of trucks as one of the more popular choices to Reincarnate in Another World by in late 10s novels.
  • "The monkey girl" from My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! was killed in a traffic accident while rushing to school. Having died so young, her primary goal when her memories reawaken as Catarina is to live to a ripe old age.
  • This starts off the plot of Rewind (William Sleator), one of William Sleator's less famous novels — because the main character would have grown up to greatly influence the world, he's sent back in time instead of dying, but he'll get run over again and again no matter what he does differently unless he makes some very specific changes to the course of events that got him killed.
  • Searching For David's Heart: The title character dies this way while chasing Darcy after the two have a huge fight.
    Driver: Oh, my God, he darted right out in front of me!
  • Ujurak is hit by a car in Seeker Bears, though it's a Disney Death. After eating some medicine and sleeping throughout the night, he ends up perfectly fine.
  • Pufftail's One True Love Tammy in Stray (1987) is hit by a car the night they plan on running away together.
  • Happens a few times in Warrior Cats:
    • In Bluestar's Prophecy, Bluestar's sister Snowfur tries to chase some ShadowClan warriors across the road, but a car comes by and hits her.
    • In Warrior's Return, Graystripe gets hit by a car when he isn't paying attention to where he's going. Fortunately he survives, but his shoulder is injured pretty badly.
  • At the climax of When You Reach Me, Sal is running away from Marcus, who he believes is out to get him, and runs out in the middle of the street, where a truck is bearing down on his position with a possibly inattentive driver. Only a Heroic Sacrifice saves him.
  • In the first chapter of Patriot Games, the chronologically first Jack-centric book in the Jack Ryan series, Jack nearly gets flattened by a double-decker bus because he looked the wrong way for oncoming traffic before crossing the street, forgetting that he's in England, where people drive on the other side of the road.
  • One of the assassinations in The Teeth Of The Tiger, a later entry in the Jack Ryan series, ends up going down in a way rather reminiscent of the Get Smart example above: The Designated Heroes shoot a terrorism suspect with a poison dart that's supposed to mimic the effects of a heart attack, and when its effects kick in the victim falls directly into the path of an approaching tram. It ends up working in their favour, as the body is so badly mangled that the puncture wound left by the dart is obscured.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Happens twice to a Croatian gangster on Blue Bloods, who's fleeing from a park after the police interrupt his attempt to trade a kidnapped girl for some fellow gang members. Not watching for traffic, he gets bounced off a taxi's fender as he steps off the curb, losing his gun. His pursuer, Danny, draws and demands his surrender, but he steps onto the road without looking again, sneering that Danny won't shoot him in the back... and gets hit head-on by a delivery truck.
  • The Brittas Empire: Gordon Brittas has a nasty habit of going on to the street without looking both ways (out of the belief that the pedestrian always has the right of way). This ends up biting him in the butt when he gets run over by a treacle lorry and put into intensive care.
  • Broad City: The second timeline in "Sliding Doors" ends with Abbi and Ilana both getting hit by a bus while running away from the police.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • Nearly unstoppable Big Bad Glory gets slowed down (though not killed — she is The Unstoppable Woman, after all) when she's hit by a truck... after standing in the road talking to Buffy for almost a full minute. That must be one hell of a bad driver.
    • In the season finale, Glory gets blindslided again... by a wrecking ball, though in this case it was intentional, compliments of Xander.
  • Alan Bradley from Coronation Street was killed by a Blackpool tram this way, quite an achievement with it being hard to miss and not exactly fast.
  • Used with odd hilarity in Crossing Jordan when the bastard of the week survives fugu poisoning and an almost-autopsy, and leaves the building threatening legal action... and promptly gets smooshed by a car.
  • CSI: In "Turn On, Tune In, Drop Dead", a college kid coming down from a bad trip runs away from the cops and straight into the street, where he gets run over by a car.
  • CSI: NY:
    • Thought to have happened in the b-case of season 1's "The Dove Commission" where the body of a young boy is found under the front of a taxi, but it's later discovered that the boy died before the taxi hit him. Unfortunately, this isn't determined until after an angry mob beats the taxi driver to death.
    • Played straight later that season in "The Closer" when a young woman running from her angry boyfriend while clad only in lingerie darts out from an alley and is hit by a delivery truck.
    • Played with again in season 5's "Page Turner" after a young lady runs away from a riot that breaks out during a free Maroon 5 concert in Central Park. Looking back over her shoulder, she runs in front of a bus that was just pulling away from the curb. Turns out not to be what killed her...the bus wasn't moving fast enough yet.
    • Played straight again late in season 6 during "Unusual Suspects." Flack is chasing a guy who's wanted for questioning in the shooting of a 14-yr old kid. The guy runs straight into the street without looking either way and is mowed down by an oncoming truck and is dead before Flack reaches him.
  • Dan for Mayor sure seems to like this trope.
    • The first episode ends with Mayor Bud getting hit by a bus.
    • In the third episode, Dan borrows Charlie's cat; it jumps out of his arms, then runs into traffic and gets hit by a bus.
  • The Life on Mars example below is parodied by Dead Ringers, in which Professor Robert Winston walks into the road while pointing out that TV presenters never look before crossing, and ends up re-enacting the opening sequence of Life on Mars (while still explaining to the camera how it's a hallucination caused by a brain injury).
  • Desperate Housewives: Mike Delphino falls victim to this trope at the end of one of the earlier seasons, falling into a coma. The culprit? Orson Hodge. Although in this case the driver was trying to hit him.
  • The Doctor Blake Mysteries: In "Against the Odds", a jockey fleeing the police runs onto the track and gets run over by horses.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Pete Tyler in "Father's Day", although this is a deliberate act to put time back on track (well, it is the last time).
    • "Turn Left": Donna also gets hit by a truck on purpose to prevent a Bad Future. Interestingly, Rose is present to comfort the dying person in both cases.
    • In "The End of Time", Russell T. Davies deliberately put in the scene with Luke Smith because of this. He hated how, in most TV shows, people never look before crossing the road and there are no ill effects, teaching a bad lesson to kids. note 
    • Danny Pink gets hit by a car in "Dark Water". Clara is almost insulted that her boyfriend got such an "ordinary" death, and demands the Doctor fix it or get him back somehow. This... doesn't end well.
  • Subverted at the end of Due South. Turnbull gets hit by a bus in just that fashion, but it's revealed he only had some badly broken bones. It gets better — he was trying to break into politics, and the vehicle that hit him was his own campaign bus.
  • EastEnders seems to like this trope, especially concerning the Mitchells: Tiffany, Jamie, and Danielle were all killed in this manner. Jamie's death was also due in part to Martin Fowler texting on his phone and not watching the road, adding a double dose of Anviliciousness.
  • An episode of Eureka has a bunch of scientists use a serum that grants them Super-Speed in order to allow them to complete a project before a rival team. One of them ends up running through the woods and doesn't bother to look before crossing the street, likely figuring that he's too fast for anything to hit him. He's wrong. They later find his broken body in the woods, where he bounced off after a glancing blow (at super speed) from the grill of an SUV. Typical of the show, the guy's death is Played for Laughs.
  • Forever:
    • In "Look Before You Leap," while investigating the death of an apparent bridge jumper, Henry nearly falls off the bridge, himself. Though he would have resurrected, he points out that it's one of the least pleasant ways to die. He manages to climb back onto the bridge... only to be almost immediately hit by a truck. By the time the driver comes out to check what happened, Henry's body has already vanished to reappear in the river.
    • In both "Fountain of Youth" and "The Frustrating Thing About Psychopaths" this trope is narrowly averted as Henry casually but purposefully crosses a street with absolutely no regard for the surrounding traffic. In the former, Jo quickly pulls out her badge and flashes it at approaching cars to keep them from hitting him, a gesture Henry doesn't seem to notice, or at least pay attention to, any more than the traffic.
    • In "The Pugilist Break" a suspect who's being chased stops and turns to shoot at Henry. Before he can shoot, he's hit by a truck.
    • In "Social Engineering" a woman is tricked by a hacked walk signal into crossing the street, at which point she's hit by a car.
  • The Goodies. In "Cunning Stunts", Bill is trying to commit suicide, so he stands in the way of an oncoming truck. Tim and Graeme put up a railway crossing barrier to stop the truck, only to get run over by a train coming from the side.
  • In the beginning of episode 111 of The Hard Times of RJ Berger, Lily is nearly hit by a bus. The bus driver says that the school cannot replace the brakes because of budget cuts. At the end of the episode, she walks into the street without looking and is hit by the same bus.
  • Harrow: In "Sub Silentio" ("In Silence"), Callan is attempting to escape from Francis and runs out of the kitchen of the restaurant and into the street, where he gets hit by a delivery scooter.
  • Heroes:
    • On Claire's multiple suicide tape, one of the "deaths" she suffers is getting hit with a car.
    • At one point, Hiro stops time and saves a little girl who would've otherwise been run over.
  • High&Low has this happen not only once, but twice.
    • First, when Noburu reconciles with his friends, but thankfully, he survives.
    • Tatsuya getting killed this way by saving a friend from being run over by a car was the main reason that the Mugen gang disappeared.
  • The How I Met Your Mother episode "Miracles" has Barney run to the hospital, look the correct way on a one-way street, but neglect to look the other way and promptly get hit by a bus that was going the wrong way. Luckily, they're in front of the hospital.
  • Law & Order:
    • Various plots involve a would-be suspect running (they always run) from police. They run out into the street and splat. This has also happened to crime victims fleeing their assailants.
    • One episode opens with a woman trying to escape a paparazzo who's following her, and getting hit by a car when running out into the middle of the street. Half the episode is spent figuring out whether or not the paparazzo was at fault.
  • Life on Mars kicks off with the protagonist being hit by a car and waking up in the 70s, unsure if he's a time traveller, in a coma, or delusional.
  • Lip Service: Cat is texting Frankie when she steps into the street without looking. She's immediately struck by a car.
  • Lost:
    • Juliet tells Richard, facetiously, that she could accept his job offer if her ex-husband were hit by a bus. Guess what happens later in the episode...
    • Earlier in the series, Michael ended up in the hospital after a similar incident.
    • And John Locke crossing a parking lot.
  • Lucifer:
  • In the Midnight Caller episode "Play Blotto... And Die", a hitman fleeing the scene of a failed hit runs right into the path of a bus.
  • Midnight Sun (2016): One of the suspects whom Kahina's chasing runs out into the street and gets fatally struck by a car.
  • Monk:
    • Happens in the cold opening of one episode to the title character. It's actually a lookalike, who happens to be an assassin.
    • A variation occurs in "Mr. Monk and the End". Kazarinski is hit by a train while running from Stottlemeyer at the train station. Unfortunately, they needed him alive to tell them what he poisoned Monk with.
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus: One Vox Pops sequence, after a few fake-outs, introduces a literal "man in the street", who is run over before he can say anything.
  • The first episode of Mr. Show features a Bob Odenkirk character lamenting how everything has "really changed", from his friend, to the leaves, to a caterpillar (into a butterfly), to the... traffic light. As he's crossing the street.
  • In the first episode of My Name Is Earl, the title character realises he has a winning lottery ticket and, wildly celebrating, runs into the road and gets hit by a car, causing him to lose the ticket, though he gets it back after he leaves hospital and decides to be The Atoner. Becomes a running joke, usually when Laser-Guided Karma shows up.
  • After threatening to tell Sean McNamara's wife about their affair on Nip/Tuck, a crazy nanny stops running out of the practice to turn and throw a final verbal jab... and is promptly run over by a bus.
  • Orphan Black: Kira is taken from her house by Helena, and when she sees her mom coming after her, she runs right into traffic to get to her. Justified, as Kira is only eight years old and not savvy about pedestrian safety yet.
  • Preacher has a variation. The Saint of Killers fires a bullet at Jesse, only for a van to drive into its path, killing the driver and sending the van careening out of control into the Saint of Killers. It doesn't stop him.
  • Selfie: Eliza walks out into the road while looking at her phone and gets knocked over by a Smart Car. She pops back up saying it barely even hurt, but then falls into an open manhole and breaks several bones.
  • Six Feet Under:
    • In "The Eye Inside", a woman walking home late night fears a group of men are trying to corner her. They actually turn out to be friends of hers joking around, but by the time she realises, she's standing in the middle of the street. A car hits and kills her.
    • In "Singing For Our Lives", a woman is rollerskating down a steep hill but is hit and killed by a car upon passing an intersection.
  • Skins has this in the case of Tony, and it takes him half a season to recover from the accident. Given Russell T. Davies' love of the show, this may be a precursor to the "End of Time" example from Doctor Who that happened nearly three years later.
  • The Soup has been known to edit speeding bus attacks into clips that they feel need it.
  • Special Ops: Lioness: Kate gets injured in a car accident because a friend of hers, who was driving, had been distracted by looking at something on another girl's phone and ran a stop sign, with their car being hit from the side by an oncoming truck.
  • Stargate SG-1:
    • Happens to a bounty hunter who was holding Daniel at gunpoint. To be fair, most other planets don't have cars, buses, or elementary schools, so she likely never learned to Look Both Ways. Strangely, the bus apparently doesn't honk, swerve, or even slow down, despite said bounty hunter clearly standing in the middle of the road for several seconds before being hit. Hell, it even keeps going at full speed afterward.
    • Earlier, a reporter threatening to expose the Stargate program is hit by a car and killed. The audience and O'Neill are "assured" that it was a "legitimate accident".
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The City on the Edge of Forever", Edith Keeler is hit by a car as she crosses the street, while Kirk prevents McCoy from saving her in order to restore the original timeline.
  • Supernatural:
    • In "Mystery Spot", Dean sallies forth straight into the path of an oncoming car. He flies through the air, makes several crunchy noises, and dies. But don't worry. He gets better. Heeeat of the moment...
    • Fate is killing people off in accidents. Sam and Dean do a Diving Save on an asshole lawyer as he's about to be hit by a car. He's not impressed, as the only reason he was standing in the middle of the street was because they distracted him by calling out. He steps onto the street again, turns to threaten to sue them, and then gets hit by a bus.
  • In Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Terminators show utterly no ability to Look Both Ways.
    • In "Pilot", Cromartie gets creamed in a parking lot by a truck driven by Cameron.
    • In "Gnothi Seauton", Vick trips over a motorcycle doing a lay-down by Sarah, despite easily being able to see it coming from about fifty feet away. No more than a minute later, Cameron, chasing Vick, gets stuck in the windshield of a car while chasing Vick across a street.
    • In "Samson And Delilah", Catharine Weaver lampshades this a bit with a scary monologue about humans "crossing against the light" and getting run over, and that she's looking for a computer that can "cross against the light".
  • Twin Peaks: In Season 3, a young boy playfully chases his mom, letting her go a distance before following after. The two continue this across a desolate street — at least, desolate until a road-raging Richard Horne runs a red light. Suddenly, the child is caught in more than the moment...
  • X-Files
    • In an episode involving a genie, a man gets his wish of invisibility. He gleefully runs off to enjoy his newfound superpower only to get run over while crossing the road by a truck driver who couldn't see him.
    • The episode "Tithonus" involves a photographer who can see when someone is going to die. He points out a prostitute who is apparently doomed, so when her pimp tries to get rough with her Agent Scully arrests him. The prostitute has a good laugh over this until she gets hit by a truck because she's standing in the street.
  • In season 1, episode 9 of Ozark, real estate agent Sam Dermody is arguing with his overbearing mother Eugenia about the placement of an open house sign. She plugs her ears and outright goes "la-la-la I can't hear you" - which not only stops her from hearing a truck that speeds past, hitting and killing her, but also apparently makes her invisible to the truck driver, who only bothers to hit the breaks offscreen.
  • Never Have I Ever: In season 2, episode 2, Paxton discovers Davi has been dating another guy. He runs out of her house, and as he argues with her on the street, a car drives past and hits him.

    Radio 

    Tabletop Games 

    Theatre 
  • Tsukiuta Act 13: Iirenren features Koi, one of the Idol Singer main characters, getting hit by Truck-kun and reincarnating in the series' established Youkai AU. He does get sent back in the end, by his idol group's leaders who are actually ultimate gods of the multiverse (with fox ears and four tails).

    Video Games 
  • The ending of the game Deemo shows that this trope was the cause for the whole game. Alice, the amnesiac girl the story follows, gets pushed out of the way of an oncoming truck by Hans, her older brother. Hans is killed, while Alice is injured and sent into a coma; the game turns out to have been about about Alice trying remember and accept the accident in order to wake up.
  • In ef - a fairy tale of the two., Yuuko gets hit by a car when she suddenly rushes into the street without looking out for traffic. This is especially egregious, since she managed to survive some pretty bad stuff before that. Not to mention you can count the number of moving cars in both series in all of Otowa on one hand. In the game, however, she's hit not because of this, but because she was trying to save Miki, who was unaware of the approaching vehicle, from being run over.
  • FAITH: The Unholy Trinity: Once an Episode, walking into a road can get the player creamed by a truck with the developer's logo on it. In the first game, if you shoot Michael, he staggers backwards onto the road and is killed by the same truck.
  • The largely-forgotten 1988 Sierra adventure Gold Rush! has stagecoaches that can kill you if you don't keep out of their way. Fortunately these are actually avoidable, although heaven help you if you happen to be in one's path when changing screens.
  • Grand Theft Auto:
  • In the beginning of Heavy Rain, the protagonist's son runs into the street and is hit by a car and instantly killed.
  • Henry Stickmin: In "Escaping The Prison", Henry can attempt to escape using a grapple rope, causing him to land on the road, and immediately gets hit by a truck.
  • In the Dating Sim Hourglass of Summer, the heroine Kaho is set to die in a car accident caused by a number of different factors beyond her control. The main character spends the whole game making sure these events don't occur, only for the universe to get snotty and hand the girl an Idiot Ball as she crosses the road.
  • In Kindergarten, Cindy tells the protagonist to dump a bucket of blood over her bullying victim Lily. If the player chooses to dump the blood over her instead, she'll run into the street (which doesn't have as much as a fence separating it from the kindergarten playground) in a panic and get hit by a car off-screen, with only her shoe bouncing back on-screen afterwards.
  • In Kisetsu o Dakishimete, this is how the Sexy Lady's fiancĂ© died. He was so impatient to meet her, propose to her, and give her a wedding ring that he got hit by a car when he carelessly tried to cross the road separating them, and died in her arms.
  • Laura Bow II: The Dagger of Amon Ra: Look both ways before crossing the road or get run over. (Of course, if you look, there's never any car coming; there's a car coming only if you don't look.)
  • Leisure Suit Larry 1: In the Land of the Lounge Lizards kills you if you walk out into the street, which means the game can end mere seconds after you've started.
  • Loopmancer has the busy streets of Dragon City, constantly buzzing with vehicles, where cars will speed past on a semi-regular basis. Plenty of fights occurs in these areas too, and you (and enemy mooks) risk getting run over and losing a chunk of your life.
  • Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan 2's "sad song" features an ice skater who is killed because she was focusing too much on her younger sister, who yelled at her earlier for getting too much attention. The aforementioned sister decides to skate at a competition in her place to make up for it.
  • Persona 5:
    • Principle Kobayakawa is murdered this way by The Conspiracy after he tries to go to the police. As he's crossing the street in front of the police station, they cause him to have a mental shutdown so that he's still standing in the road when the light changes and a truck hits him.
    • In Royal, new character Kasumi Yoshizawa's sister, Sumire, was killed due to being hit by a car prior to the start of the game. Except that she wasn't. Kasumi was actually the one killed, and Sumire became so depressed by it (due to it being her fault — she'd ran into the road while the light was red into the path of an oncoming car after fighting with her sister and Kasumi died pushing her out of the way) that Dr. Maruki hypnotized her into believing that she was Kasumi and Sumire was the one who'd died.
  • In Police Quest 2: The Vengeance, crossing the airport street without pressing the crossing button results in your character Sonny Bonds getting hit by a speeding taxicab. Furthermore, like in Leisure Suit Larry, walking out into the street will kill you off screen.
  • In Saints Row 2, two junkies steal boxes of Loa Dust and make a blind run for it across a street. The first junkie isn't so lucky.
  • The subway trains and rollercoaster in Silent Hill 3 will run you over without fail if you set foot onto the tracks. The latter can be temporarily turned off, though.
  • The mute protagonist of skate. gets hit by a bus in the intro. He survives, but has to undergo a brutal operation.
  • In Um Jammer Lammy, this is narrowly averted in the Japan and Europe versions of Stage 6 when Lammy avoids getting hit by a car. She does, however, end up getting killed by other means...
  • In World's End Club, after it's revealed that the 'Vanilla' that Reycho, Pai, and Pochi were seeing was actually a ghost, it's later explained that she died one summer a while back by getting hit and killed by a truck on her way to the supermarket.
  • The opening of Yomawari: Night Alone involves the protagonist's dog getting run over by a truck after his owner tosses a pebble into the road. It makes for a very shocking First-Episode Twist.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon; in a first for the series, stepping into traffic now runs the risk of the main character getting hit by a car and losing a solid chunk of health. This feature was carried over into the next game in the Yakuza franchise, Lost Judgment. Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth also has that happening, but you have to go out of your way to hit a moving vehicle and you lose less health than in Y:LAD.
  • Zettai Hero Project starts with Pirohiko Ichimonji, the previous Unlosing Ranger, getting struck by a car on his way to fighting Darkdeath Evilman. His Bizarro Earth counterpart doesn't even get to fully introduce himself before suffering the same fate.

    Web Comics 
  • In Adventurers!, this is invoked by Khrima when he uses a Scroll of Summon City Bus to win a Wizard Duel.
  • Kevin gets struck by a car in Carpe Diem. Over the next few strips, we see his funeral, watch his friends and loved ones grieve, and notice as a few minor background events start getting creepier... Anyone who paid attention to the dates could probably see the Zombie Apocalypse story coming. After Halloween comes and goes, we snap back to moments before the accident, where Kevin just barely avoids getting hit.
  • In Guardian Ghost, Max getting hit by a car and then promptly revived kicks off the whole plot.
  • Isekai Transporter is a Thai webcomic about Bunrueng Songsawad, a truck driver, and Anna, his assistant from another dimension. They work for a company that provides people from Earth to act as heroes in other dimensions. As per the clichĂ©s of the Isekai genre, they do this by hitting them with a truck. Or bashing them over the head with the bumper of their truck, if they manage to dodgenote . Bunrueng drives the trucks, while Anna finds suitable candidates, makes sure the target is in position, and keeps an eye out for the cops when he has to escape.
  • In My Daughter Is A Zombie, Jeonghye gets hit by a speeding car that ran a red light because she went on the street as soon as the crosswalk light turned green. Jeonghwan blames himself for Jeonghye's death because he left her infant daughter home alone to celebrate his birthday with his friends, which is why she was in such a rush to get home.
  • Parodied in the Nerf NOW!! mini-arc "Isekai'd", where truck-kun Is hit by another, bigger truck, a mere second because it could do what it's known for.
  • Kestrel from Queen of Wands, upon first arriving in Something*Positive, calls out to Davan and Peejee... and, true to form, is run down without the two of them even noticing. She does return with some scars some time later; Davan, as it turns out, had been the one to turn down her insurance claim. The driver is revealed to be Avagadro, who also hit a minor character standing in the street crying (and this one he did kill; he and Avagadro are neighbors in Hell). Then she gets hit in Checkerboard Nightmare and Irregular Webcomic!.

    Web Animation 
  • The Twins (2022): As the twins fight over the toy car, Lake pushes Lucas to a nearby road, injuring his ankle. Lake stands by as Lucas cries out for help before he gets run over by a car.

    Web Videos 

    Western Animation 
  • Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In "Revenge of the Mooninites", Shake is told to stand in the middle of the road after being told a hot chick would meet him there. Several minutes later, he gets hit by a car.
  • Tex Avery liked to have characters Look Both Ways and, seeing no cars coming for miles, take one step into the pavement, only to be ran over immediately. Fortunately, since it's just a cartoon, they just get neatly flattened, and recover by the next scene.
  • The Cuphead Show!: Ms. Chalice is a ghost who was revived by a Deal with the Devil after getting hit by a streetcar.
  • Toot of the animated show Drawn Together falls victim to this, skipping happily and praising her newly purchased muumuu.
  • Family Guy:
    • In the episode "Road to the Multiverse", Stewie and Brian visit an alternate universe where humans are subservient to dogs. When they go back home, Brian's alternate counterpart (a human kept as a pet) goes along with them. Excited about his new prospects in life, human Brian begins his optimistic adventure in a brand new universe but is promptly hit by a car.
    • In "Life of Brian", Brian himself is hit by a car, only to return two episodes later due to Stewie stealing his past self's time machine.
  • Futurama:
    • Fry is down in the abandoned ruins of Old New York and decides that he can cross the street without looking both ways. So he does... and is trampled by a giant lizard.
    • In a post-cancellation episode, Fry reassures himself that even though he's not book smart, he's at least street smart... and as he's saying this, he steps in front of a bus.
  • Phil Ken Sebben in Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law is offed in this way. Or so we think until he comes back for the final episode. He actually just got lodged in the bus' grille. Then, he kills Birdman this way.
  • In Disney XD's Jimmy Two-Shoes, a sweet and enthusiastic teenage boy lives in Miseryville, a thinly-veiled kid's version of Hell, amongst demons and monsters; Word of God says that, had the show been created with its original vision seen through, it would have been made explicit that Jimmy was sent to Miseryville due to a clerical error after being hit by a bus, but since it wound up being a kid's show, the audience is never told why Jimmy is there when he clearly shouldn't be.
  • The Legend of Korra: Mako sprints out from behind a parked car to catch a bus on the other side of the street and promptly gets run over by Asami. Fortunately for him, she was just driving a small, slow-moving scooter so it ends up being a Meet Cute instead of a medical emergency.
  • An episode of Mighty Max has an alien follow Max through the portals to Earth, where it continues chasing him up until the point where it chases him across the street and gets run over.
  • An episode of Mike, Lu & Og has Mike going to the island's school for the first time. When Og points to a "school crossing", she says that there are no cars on the island and steps onto the crosswalk, only for a herd of elephants to stampede by and rip open her shoe.
  • Robot Chicken has a sketch involving someone who didn't believe in the afterlife step into a street, just to get run over, and sent to said afterlife:
    Friend 1: Oh, wow, what a, uh...
    Friend 2: Convenient plot device?
    Friend 1: Yeah, plot device.
  • This happens to Kenny in the South Park episode "Do the Handicapped Go To Hell?". In the next episode, "Probably", we find that Kenny somehow survived and wound up in Mexico.
  • Wile E. Coyote fails to do this on occasion, and gets hit with both semis and trains.
  • The Pink Panther has this happen to him in "Pink Before You Leap." He's trying to cross a street but is victimised by a crosswalk light that goes from "walk" to "wait" too soon, and then with no cars anywhere, he steps on the street and cars zip by in each direction.


 
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Evil Steve

In another universe, there's a Steve that's traveling the multiverse to kill other Steves to collect their Steveness. Unfortunately for him, he accidentally gets taken out by Principal Lewis in his car.

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Main / EvilDoppelganger

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