Five Traffic Pet Peeves…

I remember when I first obtained my license.  This was back in the day when to get your license you actually had to take a driver’s education course.  I took it during summer.  I remember how utterly bored of the class I was.  Mostly, it was about scaring us to death through the use of ancient films with over dramatic actors, films of the like I hadn’t seen since I was in grade school. 

The one film I remember was about the dangers of driving while tired.  It featured two Afro-Americans traveling in large boat of a vehicle.  The two had been driving for a long time, which I had thought was sinister in a way.  Anyway, the driver fell asleep, and, as right as rain, an accident ensued.  I was a sick kid, and my sickness showed itself in the way that the film humored me.  “No way is this the way accidents occur.” 

Years later, I had the chance to experience the seriousness of the film, when my wife and I were forced to travel from Texas to Virginia without stop because Elvis happened to die some years early on the same weekend that we were married.  I remember at the darkest part of the night we ended up stopping at a gas station to get some coffee.  As we exited the car, hundreds huge moths twice the size of man’s fist were fluttering around us.  I’ve never been on a drug trip, but I imagine that being caught in a cloud of fist-sized moths might be something like one.

I have a bad record with vehicles.  I have been in multiple accidents.  One actually knocked me out for some time.  I would freely admit I am not the best driver.  However, I am not the worst.  There are driver’s out there that frankly get on my last nerve.   Below are five types of drivers I can’t stand.

1. Truck Drivers

In Texas, every other vehicle is a truck.  In rural areas of Texas, every vehicle is a truck.  I see how on a farm or a ranch a truck is definitely a good idea.  It is rugged.  It is large with lots of loading capacity.  It is hard to do any real damage to a truck.  I dislike those who drive trucks in the city.  In a city everything is compact, pushed in tight to fit as much as possible.  Streets are narrow.  Parking spaces are even narrower.  Somehow, truck drivers think they can fit into the tight spaces with no consequences.  Maybe they can fit into tight spaces only to find that when they open their doors, they leave little nicks in the vehicles the rest of us urbanites were smart enough to buy, little reminders of how much these people are idiots.

2. Crooked Parkers

Similarly, there are those who can’t park there car straight.  Either they can’t center themselves in a parking space so that they park too close to the vehicle on their left or right or they park in the space diagonally because they were in a rush to get in to the spot.  It makes things difficult for the vehicles around them.  The owners of the vehicles on either the right or left then have to play a game of Operation, carefully backing out so that they don’t hit into the car next to them.  There are extreme crooked parkers, usually owners of faux expensive cars, tricked-out Hondas, who park park crooked so that no one will park next to them.  These are the real pricks.

3. Slow Drivers in the Left Lane

My wife and I do quite a bit of traveling.  I am the kind of guy who likes to get on the highway and go.  I skirt speeding driving anywhere from five to ten miles over the speed limit just to shave a few minutes off our travel time.  However, without fail, on every trip there is always some snail of a driver who insists on driving in the left hand lane at the same rate of speed as the person in the right hand lane.  What result is a stock pile of cars in the left hand lane all wanting to get around this slow car.  Get a few slow cars in the left hand lane and you get yourself into a maze, the challenge is not just to get around the barriers but at the right time for fear of boxing yourself in.

4. Automobiles that Turn on Red

There is a certain type of driver who turns at red lights only when they see that the light for the through traffic is about to turn green, and not a moment earlier.  Often, these drivers not only turn right in front of oncoming traffic, they often sneak over into the left lane, the quicker of the two lanes.  I like to think of these drivers as squirrels, only willing to go once they see a car coming.

5. Blockers

I think there are also drivers out there who get a thrill out of preventing people from getting in front of them, so much so that they will slow down when the light is green, only to escape through a red light leaving you to sit a the light.   I have noticed an overwhelming number of these drivers talk on cell phones, not realizing that they in fact are causing everyone else to sit at light that everyone could have easily driven through. 

I believe that when Dante wrote the Inferno, he probably forget one level for the sinful drivers, the slow ones, the terrible parkers, the truck drivers.  I am sure that in that level of Hell, these drivers are doomed to suffer immeasurable tortures related to their years of being awful drivers.  I hope such a place exists; it is the only thing that gets me through a red-light I got stopped at because some jack hole wouldn’t let the rest of through.

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