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My friend Ted is a solid citizen and a dutiful sort. He pays his taxes on time. He does the family grocery shopping cheerfully. When his 90-something parents need something, Ted arranges it, even though he and they live 1,500 miles apart.

But sometimes your true nature pops out at moments when you don’t have time to think about it. So it went for Ted one recent evening.

He was driving home, and the hour was late — about 1:30 a.m., as Ted remembers it. All of a sudden, he noticed a car halfway into a ditch to his right. The car was resting on its side. There had obviously just been an accident.

Ted immediately braked and pulled over. He ran back to see if the driver was all right. He wasn’t.

Obviously woozy, perhaps a victim of whiplash, well over the age of 80 by Ted’s best guess, the driver couldn’t answer Ted’s questions and couldn’t track much of anything. “Obviously, this was a critical situation,” Ted said.

Ted called 911 from his cell phone. The operator dispatched the police and an ambulance right away.

Meanwhile, the driver had gotten out of the car (it was halfway down an embankment) and was clucking over the damage and his misfortune. Ted stayed with the driver until the sirens and red lights were on the scene, even though it was rainy and blustery, and even though he was due at work in six hours.

The good news is that the driver survived, and his car probably has, too. He evidently fell asleep at the wheel and drifted wide on the ramp. It can happen to any of us.

But the bad news — confirmed by both the police and the ambulance crew — is that Good Samaritan Ted was a rare bird.

Almost no one stops to help in situations like the one that Ted came upon, the officials told him. That goes double if the driver is obviously old.

You mean that a Grandpa type standing woozily beside a road is more threatening to the average passerby than, say, a teenager or a young man bearing tattoos? I would never have thought so.

But the police explained it to Ted this way:

It’s a very litigious world. People are more afraid than ever of getting dragged into a legal mess. So they step on the gas and keep going.

If they stop to help an elderly person who has just been in an accident, that person may blame them, or he might collapse and his family might sue, or he might try to drive away and do even worse harm to himself when the Good Samaritan might have snatched his keys.

No, it isn’t fair. No, it isn’t sensible. But it proves that older people are often seen as neon-flashing risks rather than deserving, needy citizens.

The police officer who responded to the scene of Ted’s accident told him that he had been at the scene of four other accidents already that night. He told Ted that, in every case, the driver who was involved in the accident was elderly and alone.

According to the officer, one man of about 75 had just been rear-ended and had ended up in a ditch. He had a big gash on his forehead. You couldn’t miss it if you tried.

But even though that man got out of his car and waved for help, blood and all, he got none. The officer said the man had stood beside his wrecked car for 15 minutes before any motorist stopped.

At the scene of another incident, the officer told Ted, an elderly driver’s car had caught fire on the Beltway. The driver, at least 75, had managed to limp his car off onto the shoulder. Smoke was pouring from under the hood. It was still daylight at the time, so any passerby could see that the driver was both old and in major need of help.

But he got none. No one even called 911 for about three minutes, the officer said. As a result, the elderly motorist had to stand there and watch as his car, which might have been saved, burned to a crisp.

I realize that sainthood in today’s world is rare. I realize, too, that it’s always safer not to get involved in anything untoward or unusual.

But how in the world can dozens of motorists stream past a man with blood on his forehead, or another whose car is smoking, and not lift a finger?

If this is truly age discrimination — and the police officer says it was — there’s only one answer, by my lights. All of us have to resolve never to pass up an older motorist in need. Not ever.

At the very least, we can spend 15 seconds of our precious time calling 911. The one thing we shouldn’t do is assume that someone else will help, or blame our failure to stop on silly excuses like being late for dinner.

As the saying goes, we’re all in this together. No one knows that better than older people.

By the way, when Ted told his 90-something parents this story, they said he was a good son. He sure is. I know one woozy, needy older motorist who seconds the motion.

Bob Levey is a national award-winning columnist.