Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/06/28/this-guy-made-a-video-showing.html
…
2 Likes
not using turn signals is for sure a dick move, bu a lot of these others are just symptoms of the fact that driving is hard, and not everyone has the aptitudes, driving is stressful, and people deal with anxiety differently, and driving is boring, and people have differing abilities to focus.
Pulling in front of someone and then not matching or exceeding speed can easily come from not being able to sense how quickly the car you cut off was going, which from a perpendicular position, is quite the subconscious physics problem.
Speeding up when someone passes you could be a competitive dick thing, but most often, I think, being passed makes someone look at the speedometer and realize they spaced out and were going slower than they intended. In some cases (circle of life) they might be trying to avoid someone pulling in front of them and then slowing them down.
Slowing down at a bend is certainly out of fear and/or miscalculation.
Long story short: get humans out of the drivers’ seat, stat.
4 Likes
If there is no one in front of you and seven cars stacked behind you - YOU are the problem.
11 Likes
He left out the most dangerous and annoying behavior … tailgating at freeway speeds.
22 Likes
Get off your cell phone while driving! PLEASE!
11 Likes
So many other bad behaviors he skipped…
A corollary of people speeding up as you try to pass them are those idiots I’ve encountered on several occasions who pass you, merge into your lane, and then SLOW DOWN. Seriously, what the hell is that about? I know there some people who intentionally try to get rear-ended for insurance scams do this, but I don’t think this is what was happening… these idiots just gradually slow down, as if to say “there, I passed them, now I can just relax…”
Similarly, is the few gifted individuals who were behind me when we reached a lane merge and opted to floor it to pass me, rather than to simply merge behind. It’s another of those pointlessly competitive moves that endangers people for no other reason than someone needs to exercise their inner asshole. Yeah, beating one car at he merge is GOING TO SAVE YOU SO MUCH TIME.
Finally, in city driving, there’s the moronic box blockers. You see that you cannot make it through the intersection due to traffic before the light changes, but you’re going to go into the intersection anyhow. Maybe you’ll shave 5 seconds off your drive, and only at the expense of costing everyone crossing your path 30 seconds. A bargain! I bet every single person who does this is a Trump voter.
4 Likes
My pet peeve is the “nice” people who stop to let others onto the road when there isn’t a light or traffic ahead of them, but there are cars behind them. You’re stopping five people to let one go who could easily have waited for another twenty seconds for the other cars to pass. I’m fine with this if the traffic is stopped ahead and you’re not losing any real time or opportunity, but this type of thing often leads to five people missing a light they could have made it through for the sake of being “nice” to one person. I’ve been rearended because I had to break suddenly for someone letting a car into the lane in front of me and the person behind me didn’t have enough time to break.
Be predictable, not “nice!”
12 Likes
There are plenty of intersections where I live in which there is so much opposing traffic that if you don’t pull out, you could be stuck in the left turn lane for half an hour (no arrow for left turns). Wail till that lane fills up and spills back into the through traffic lane, then you will REALLY be unhappy.
1 Like
The sheer lack of self-awareness involved with people merging badly is mind-boggling to me. It’s not usually during the commute hours, that’s just petty dickishness where people NEED to get ahead of everybody else in the lane, it’s the times when the freeway is actually moving at 60+, and somebody is so occupied with staring at their mirror that they can’t accelerate past 45.
Oh lord and people who drive with both feet on the pedals- who flash brakes while still moving down the highway.
it-it- the f - it -flam - flames. Flames, on the side of my face
3 Likes
He sure doesn’t like slow drivers, does he? I don’t hear him complaining about fast drivers one bit. Tailgating, weaving in and out to get a few feet of advantage don’t seem to bother him.
My personal favorite: people who see a lane closing in a half mile, so they race the entire half mile and then barge their way in at the last instant. Didn’t you learn better in the lunch line in first grade?
4 Likes
This guy better not ever move to south Florida, he’ll need a two hour thorazine drip after every drive home.
The one thing I would add to the list is on my mind because the offenders are skilled and experienced professional drivers. I’m talking about the semi-trailer doing 68.73 mph who is “passing” another semi-trailer doing 68.71.
6 Likes
lol, this is garbage
First, you can tell exactly where the video is going to come from by looking at the guy’s home theater wankery; dude is talking about driving luxury cars with veblen horsepower, the idea that the roads could be servicing vehicles with radically different power-trains, like busses, garbage trucks, or bicycles is already beyond his imagination.
Second, we already know what kills people on the road; it’s speed. All the projection in the world can’t escape the the fact that our technological capacity to deliver horsepower has exceeded our individual ability to regulate it, any driving ideology that prioritizes travel time is manifestly wrong-headed.
Third, he staged all of his dashcam footage, probably because dude is suffering from hard-core confirmation bias, and actually can’t prove that his peeves actually contribute all that much to road problems.
10 Likes
Since a lot of roads in the USA are speed-limited below their safe speeds in order to generate revenue for local governments and the insurance industry, I’m not at all surprised that there is more of a perceived problem with slow drivers.
It’s either that, or every encounter he complains about happens to be with a silver Focus hatchback. In which case, why doesn’t he just report the tag number?
5 Likes
Depends where you are. On a multi-lane highway, sure, you’re the problem, assuming you’ve boxed people in somehow, say by matching speeds with a vehicle in another lane.
But if you’re on a rural highway with few safe places to pass, the driver at the front of the conga-line could be a slowpoke, or just someone who happens to be at the front of the line. I regularly drive such a road, and if conditions warrant it I’ll exceed the posted limit by up to 20 kph. I can still wind up leading a long line of cars, and going even faster won’t shorten it.
I’ve also learned from that road that patience is important behind the wheel. There are some places to pass, but most of them probably shouldn’t have dotted lines; they’re from a time when there was much less traffic, and the road wasn’t all cracked and rutted. So if I get stuck behind someone driving below the limit, most of the time I’ll just relax and ride it out because ultimately they’re only adding a couple of minutes to my trip.
2 Likes
Why, yes, those are some of the many reasons I don’t own a car and drive only when I have to.
I’m in Germany right now, driving a relative’s 18 year old A-Class, which has lost some of its get-up-and-go. For my own sanity and out of courtesy to the much more skilled (and sometimes aggressive) German drivers, I’m doing my best to drive in low traffic times, but today’s destinations were not not conducive to public transportation. Pretty sure I showed up at least once in someone’s “what the hell is she doing on the road” list today.
1 Like
Do you drive?
If so, do you do your part to save lives by driving well below the speed limit?
I used to be bothered – even enraged – by this, but then traffic experts chimed in saying the most efficient approach is to keep both lanes filled right up to the choke point, where everyone zipper-merges. If almost everybody gets in line a half mile ahead of the lane closing, everything slows down and the few who use the almost-closed lane look like assholes.
So now I’ve become one of them.
9 Likes
Feels good, doesn’t it, getting thirty seconds ahead of all those morons? They’re assholes for making you feel like an asshole by not acting like assholes. And that old lady you cut off? Eh, she’s on her way out anyway.
2 Likes
