I met a guy named Terry the other day. He’s a truck driver from Iowa. We had never run into each other before, and I sure hope we never do again.

As we waited for an Illinois trooper to officiate at our crash scene, I was overwhelmed with the irony: After crusading 11 years for safety changes on the Martin Luther King Bridge, I had finally been in a wreck there — nine days after the improvements were completed.

And as strange as this might sound, it was pretty clear that the collision would never have occurred if those improvements had not been made.

But no, I’m not starting a new crusade to take them back.

I’ve always been a highway safety kind of guy.

I grew up with a fascination for it, which in retrospect I realize was the product of the failure of Indianapolis TV stations to sell enough advertising. Really.

The shows I watched as a child were loaded with safe-driving public service spots, some pretty graphic. I surmise they ran gratis, in place of paid ads not sold. I saw so many that I became morbidly afraid of bad driving.

I also loved bridges. By early high school, I wanted to be a civil engineer. By late high school, I realized that my math skills would kill people if I didn’t change aspirations.

Remnants of those interests were at work in 1998 when, as a reporter (a job that seldom requires math learned beyond the sixth grade), I did a study of the dangers of the King Bridge. I found that at least 12 people had been killed in 10 years.

The lanes were just one foot wider on each side than the big trucks that pack the span. There was no room for a center divider without reducing desperately needed highway capacity over the Mississippi River.

Even at the posted limit, vehicles were hurling toward each other a couple feet apart at a closing speed of 90 mph. Speeding was rampant, and police admitted there was little enforcement, for lack of room to stop violators.

So people kept dying, mainly in head-on collisions. By the state’s count, up to 14 since my 1998 story.

Last January, the state police began aggressive speed enforcement. Last month, pushed by news media and state Rep. Ron Stephens, R-Highland, officials finally put in a concrete barrier, sacrificing one of the two westbound lanes to make room.

I tried it out the first night, and never felt safer on a bridge I had warily continued to use for my work commute between Highland and St. Louis.

There was one hitch. The new merge is unpleasantly but necessarily abrupt where the westbound ramp from Interstate 55-70 and the westbound ramp from I-64 now must funnel into one. Better be careful there, I reminded myself.

Hah.

The following week, I faced that merge from the right on a rainy morning. A stream of vehicles moved slowly in the lane to my left. A big truck left open a gap (I gratefully gave a small wave) into which my sedan fit nicely, if temporarily.

Soon came an awful clashing sound, as if someone were grinding the lug nuts on the right front wheel of a teal green 2005 Peterbilt tractor into the rear left door of a black 2007 Ford. I stopped to find that was exactly what happened.

"What were you doing?" Terry asked.

"What were you doing?" I asked back.

This was a tense start for what quickly became a friendly understanding that a very efficient trooper emphasized later: Both of us were at fault.

My little wave had been for naught, by the way. From over Terry’s massive hood, he explained, he had never seen me.

It was a little weird that he would be driving a Peterbilt — not a Kenworth or a Sterling or other brand of behemoth. That’s because I had written in a column last year of a hypothetical head-on collision on the bridge with that very make of truck.

What I had feared then was not a bloodless, drive-away crash with just $946 worth of cosmetic damage. But hopefully, with the new divider, this will be the only kind we see.