The Economy

I am annoyed when people are doing 40 on the highway on-ramp. Get up to cruising speed so you can merge more easily.

I’m more likely to get hit from behind if I’m forced to get on there at 40-45 when the rest of the traffic is going 65-75.

And people who don’t get over when they have plenty of space to do so.

 

I feel the need to clarify that I would never shoot anyone over this.

I feel the same glee when tailgating someone that you described by driving slow in front of them.

People both here and where I grew up will go as fast as the flow of traffic allows. Watching someone voluntarily drive slower than he/she can is a completely foreign concept to me.

You’d get shunned out of society if you did that on the Beltway or the Schuylkill Expressway.

 

Which is why I found the invectives funny. I drove the Eisenhower in Chicago perfectly at speed a week ago.

So to hear people go for the throat because a kid in a lifted truck outside Muncie, Indiana, had to wait a mile to pass was more telling of their mindset than anything.

People are rage-filled on roads where they aren’t anywhere else. It’s a deeply American ugliness.

I’ve driven in the Dominican Republic. If you’re slow, people just go around on their bike or honk absent-mindedly as they wait for miles. They don’t rage.

The need to draw the ugliness out of city people is just second nature when you grow up around the Mennonites, though. It was a sport for us living in a tourist town where they came to gawk and visit our historic village by the tens of thousands. I did things at half speed working at registers to see if they’d explode.

 

The number of times I've had people zoom by me, and 15 seconds later I coast right beside them at the red light . . .

I'm often going slower than I have to in the 100 yards before a light. Foot off the gas, get better mileage, make the same amount of time getting where I'm going. At worst, it turns green a few seconds before I arrive and I already have momentum and don't have to accelerate from a full stop.

 

Most of my commute is on the interstate, but the first/last few miles are on a two-lane road bookended by red lights. It's not a real smart place to speed. Cops do patrol it; you have the aforementioned red lights; there are a couple of places where cars turn in and normally a fair amount of traffic coming from the other direction; and the sight lines and hills are kind of bad. There's only one or two places where you should even think of trying to pass someone unless they're driving super slow and most people abide by the 55 mph limit, so you'd have to gun it to 75 to get around them. It's better to just stay cool and ride it out for a few minutes. Things tend to shuffle at the light, or you're behind so many cars that it doesn't make a difference.

You still see the assholes who are stupid enough to try and pass a line of six cars, though. Every now and then I see one of them have to squeeze in at the last second because they could only overtake four cars and someone is barreling toward them in the other direction, and it makes me cringe. Also pisses me off. My biggest pet peeve with other drivers is probably impatience and overaggressiveness when it's pointless. It's just stupid and dangerous. You want to slam yourself into a tree or drive into a ditch, that's you're business. Don't make it a problem for me.

 

The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.

— Dave Barry

 

You won’t get any argument from me that it’s beyond ugly out there.

Since you mention foreign countries, you should see how people drive in Poland. My brother got married there — his wife’s father picked us up from the airport and drove us the two hours to their house. I thought I was going to die at least four times. Imagine people speeding past you on the Beltway, but instead of four lanes each way, it’s one, and you have to go into oncoming traffic whenever you want to pass, and just hope the other car moves to the shoulder to give you room.

 

We've got a farmer who drives his tractor every morning and afternoon to and from the gas station with the no ethanol pump. It's a good five miles one way on a 55 mph two-lane twisty road with no passing zones, and he takes great pleasure in stacking up cars and trucks behind him.

 

Driving the Class C motorhome is equal parts calming and calamitous. I am in no hurry and will pull off if I'm on a road without decent opportunity to get around me. And on those rare occasions when I'm forced onto the Interstate system, I'm on cruise control in the right lane, following the parade of trucks. It's the journey, so we'll eventually go our separate ways if you don't stop believing.

While I'm big and slow, I can't stop worth a damn. That's nearly eight tons of rolling weight on six tires. So the morons who veer in front of me and brake-check have no better than a 50-50 chance of being my hood ornament. We've had two incredibly close calls -- one in Georgia and another in California -- where the person in front of me was lucky not to get knocked into next week. However, the deer that bolted in front of me in Mississippi went all Bambi's mom into my Ford grille. But he died doing what he loved.

 

I took the wheel of my dad’s Class C flat-towing a Wrangler on a trip a couple years ago and 10 miles in I told him I’m we’re stopping to get a hotel room because I’m not spelling him for hours again on that trip.

 

Reminds me of a story an old guy told me once. He was my grandfather's age, so "when he was a kid" had to have been during the Depression.
He said near where he lived, there was a long incline that produce trucks struggled to get up and did so at very slow speeds. He said he and his buddies would run alongside, one would climb up and toss down stuff the others. The driver couldn't stop because he'd never be able to get restarted.
They were legit watermelon and peach pirates. That still cracks me up.

 

I just spent the past three days driving the largest U-Haul they’ll rent a normal Joe; it was a 26-footer based on a Ford F350. After getting over the intimidation factor of being eye-to-eye with Semi drivers, I loved it. Unfortunately my follow-car had a blowout on a SoCal freeway at 4 o’clock on a Friday and that caused me to have to drive the beast through tiny roads in old neighborhoods in Montrose and Glendale which was rather nerve racking but I soon discovered SoCal drivers are super chill when it comes to giving the right of way to a UHaul beast! I assume it’s because there’s a little (or a lot of) “that poor bastard” people think when they see one.
I’m in no hurry to drive the beast, which I named Chuggy-Chuggy, anytime soon but from here on out when I see a UHaul doing 10 miles below the speed limit, he’ll get nothing but a thumbs up from me.