I’m actually okay with that!
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Was in line going slowly up an on-ramp during rush-hour and a guy flies up the right shoulder, cuts through a small gap in the line, accelerates hard across the gore (wheels spinning, big dust cloud) and squeaks through a tiny space in the slow lane to the middle lane where he’s stuck for the whole five seconds it takes an unmarked cop who had to have seen it all to drop in right behind him. Shazam, asshole!
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Most of the time the cops are staring at their laptops, oblivious to everything around them. Hell, it used to be you could tell the unkmarked cops from a mile away because they always drove “perfectly”, now they wander all over the lane like any drunk fool.
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One time in Houston i saw a beat up car behind a cop do an aggressive turn during stopped traffic. They pulled into a gas station that was adjoining the street we were on and they peeled off down another road pretty quickly. It was terribly obvious the driver noticed the cop car and freaked out and b-lined it outta there. The cop never noticed ]:
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In Boston this in fact the case during rush hour.
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In Minnesota the shoulder is reserved for city buses should there be a traffic jam.
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In Boston lane lines are merely suggestions that everyone feels free to ignore. While honking at everyone else doing the same thing.
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On many roads, including the parking lot known as Rt128, use of the breakdown lane is legal during rush hours.
V true, and is where I learned the Mass Pass (crossing three lanes of traffic at once, also known as the Jersey Slide,) which has proven invaluable navigating my way around the self-absorbed nitwit drivers of Portland.
I’ve driven around Boston a fair bit since my brother-in-law moved there a decade ago, and I’m sorry, I never find myself screaming at people the way I do here in Jersey. There’s simply no comparison, I can’t drive 10 minutes here without seeing 5 moving violations in front of me. We’d have mayhem here if there were as many roundabouts as Boston has, people here don’t know what to do at a multi-way stop!
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There’s no real animus behind most of the honking. You just do it to let people know you’re there and you plan to keep going that way regardless of what they’re doing.
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Here’s another one: I’m going downhill on winding 2-lane road from Castle Rock State Park at a reasonable clip. However, there’s 2 guys from Sand Hill Road in a red, convertible Porsche behind me who evidently want to road test their vehicle and feel the need to go even faster. They tailgate me mercilessly and I repeatedly see them try to veer into the opposing lane to pass me, heedless of the blind curves. I am powerless to do anything but what I’m doing: if I slow down, I’ll be encouraging them to pass me and get clobbered collaterally when they get clobbered, and I cannot go any faster on this windy, mountainous road. On the second or third attempted veer, I sight an oncoming state police car ahead of me. He passes us and he evidently sees the veer: in my rear-view mirror, I see the cruiser do a quick 180, flash his lights, and pull over the over-eager Porsche. Priceless.
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I have my own. Light had just turned green and two lanes of traffic had just started to move forward, when some hotshot in s sports car decides to do a left turn in front of us.
Apparently, he did not see the police car sitting one car back and conveniently in the right turn lane (thus, situated to follow him). Nor, I guess, did he see all the signs pointing out that he was a block from the detachment (ergo, there is a high likelihood of cops around).
Almost as big an idiot as the one who got into a drunk driving collision. At night. In the Tim Hortons drive-through.
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I have one where justice was served hard.
It was a Friday, heavy but not stop-and-go traffic. Heading up the Sunol grade on southbound 680 approaching Fremont, California. Just below the truck scales, I get passed by a what looked like a contractor’s or construction worker’s pickup truck, going fast in the emergency lane to my left, as in, the median. The guy keeps going over the top of the grade, passing everyone while leaving a thin cloud of median dust behind him. I lose sight of him, then quickly forget about him.
On the other side of the hill, about a quarter mile ahead, I suddenly see that same truck spinning in the air, nose over tail. It was surreal, and it felt like I was at the sprint car races, where this not uncommon. What happened was that a row of those concrete, waist-high barricades had just started and he hit it head on, which launched his truck high into the air. I was in perfect position to stop right next to his scrambled, upside down truck, his front kingpin broken off, his wheel landed a hundred feet downhill, his tools spilled all over the place, car parts scattered, some smoking, fluids leaking out of the hood area. I stopped safely, got out of my car, and approached his vehicle. I saw some part of a clothed, crunched up figure halfway out of one of the windows, I couldn’t tell what part of the body I was looking at; could have been his leg. It was weird, in those seconds, I couldn’t figure out what configuration the guy was in.
Cops were already showing up, stopped from the other direction and were taking charge. That was enough, I thought to myself, I’m outta here. There was very little traffic all through Fremont, though unbearably heavy traffic in the opposite direction, poor folks. I read in the paper the next day it was a fatal single-vehicle accident. That was one helluva sentence that guy got.
Oh the delight that filled my heart upon seeing this one. I know exactly where this happened and people (Stonecutters?) do this every day. Not for a few feet before the exit; for like a mile.
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No traffic is worth driving in an unsafe matter. Even if you get somewhere an hour or 5 mins late.
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Could be. But I think cops are not supposed to engage in high speed chases, but rather radio for an intercept down stream. Whether they did that, who could say?
If a vehicle in front of me pulls into a crosswalk or intersection before it’s legal or safe for us both to proceed, I leave their vacated space open for the simple reason that I don’t want them blindly backing up into me in an unthinking rush to correct their error, in my car but most especially on my bike. Defensive driving is safe driving. I assume everyone else is about to make a potentially dangerous mistake, or have a psychotic fit of road rage, and do what I can to reduce my exposure to the risk. Basically, when I’m on the road, I endeavor to do the opposite of what I try to do the rest of the time, I give no one the benefit of the doubt and simply assume the worse. It’s safer for everyone.
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