How many of these driving habits are you guilty of?
Thread Starter
BAZINGA!
Joined: Aug 2004
Posts: 21,613
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From: San Diego, CA
How many of these driving habits are you guilty of?
1. Learn to Merge
Sauntering to the end of a really long freeway onramp at 52 mph, confirming that all those cars and trucks swerving in avoidance are going 75 mph as you pull into a traffic lane, then accelerating to 80 mph two minutes later torques everyone off for three miles behind you.
Traffic already on the freeway has the right of way and it's your duty to merge seamlessly with it. If you're not going freeway speed by the bottom of the onramp then step on the gas. Most importantly of all, train yourself to look over your left shoulder while accelerating on the ramp so you can pick your target merge point. And don't blame me if I don't move over for you; I'm busy and fitting in is your job. I have the right of way, jackass!
2. The Gaping Fool
If you have a hankering to see a wrecked car, then take a beer and a lawn chair to a junkyard and pass a lazy afternoon contemplating the near-infinite combinations of wrinkled sheet metal. Revel in the mathematic complexities of shattered glass; compute the force vectors written irrevocably in all that carnage. But brother, don't balk me with your rube's need to stare during the morning commute.
Look, if you're going to pull over and assist, great. If you're picking your way through broken glass, we understand. But jamming traffic for five miles because of some dark need to gawk at a fender-bender is a hanging offense. Instead of rubbernecking at the wreck site, look for the escape route around and away from it. If you have passengers, they can stare for you and give a detailed report.
3. Get High on the Beams
Thanks to the near-total urbanization of most American's driving experience, we've come to a collective inability to use high beams properly. As a result, any rural native can spot the dark-night newbies; they're the ones groveling along blessedly uncongested county highways with their low beams on. Sniffing their way home from bingo night at 32 mph in a 55 zone, these incompetents are another unnecessary hazard to navigation.
If you can't be bothered to either remember that every vehicle has been equipped with high beam headlights since before Humphrey Bogart was getting whistling lessons from Lauren Bacall in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, or are too lazy to use those high beams, then you simply aren't participating in society. This is the sort of lazy ignorance that begets risky passes and menacing tailgating.
Most telling, slovenly low-beam-only operation proves that the occupant behind the wheel isn't looking even 80 feet ahead, the cardinal sin of all. It doesn't take more than a flip of the fingers to swap the headlights up or down. The instant traffic passes those high beams should be on, illuminating well down the road and giving the eyes an easier time adapting to the lack of glare. An instant before oncoming traffic rounds the bend or crests the hill, another finger flick puts the low beams back on. It's really easy folks.
4. Jackrabbit Smarts
I'm frustrated to no end by people who have internalized all that hogwash to avoid jackrabbit starts. They crawl away from signals and stop signs as if each foot traveled has a ten dollar toll attached to it, ignorant of the fact that creeping to speed wastes not only fuel, but also bottles up traffic behind them.
Learn this truth: Engines are most efficient when operating at or nearly at full throttle. Otherwise, a moderate, steady pace is best. So it's more efficient to power up to speed relatively quickly, then back off the throttle and cruise at a steady speed.
5. Mystery Brakers
Just asking, but what's up with these inexplicable brake applications in the middle of straightaways? Did you just remember the cat is still in the dryer? See your high school flame pass in the opposite direction? Wake up and realize you were driving? The mystery is baffling. All I know is that it seems people aren't paying attention and then get startled back into focus, so they apply the brakes. Focus on driving when you're behind the wheel, not the other things that are happening in your life. You might live longer and worry less.
6. Lights On, No One Home
Every morning I wake up hoping tonight I'll be blinded for 10 minutes by the headlights of a parked car. Really, is it such an intellectual connection to understand that parking lights are for, uh, parking? That headlights blaring uselessly and dangerously into oncoming traffic are needless hazards? Turn them off when you are parked.
7. Rolling Your Own
You don't know him, but curmudgeon extraordinaire Steve Statham, the editor of Musclecar Enthusiast magazine, once growled about "making up your own driving rules as you go along." This after another excruciating round of, "Oh no, you go first, oh no, you go first" at the local four-way stop with an indecisive motorist.
Really, which is more courteous, recalling and applying such driving law basics as the car on the right has the right of way, or displaying a pigheaded devotion to ensuring everyone else goes first? There's already a whole body of law dedicated to the orderly flow of traffic and we'll all get there sooner if we didn't hold these crossroad coffee klatches.
8. Pull In Front of Me, Will You?
Why is it so many tin pots play that infantile, "I don't see you" bit when two lanes of traffic merge in crawling rush hour traffic? They keep their nose glued to the guy in front, avoid all eye contact and like three year olds wish you'd simply go away.
Oh, please. Is your life so devoid of success that you need to impose your will on another driver stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic? A lane has ended, the people next door are going to merge into your lane, hopefully every other car at a time. Deal with it.
9. Herd Instinct
Here's an idea: Let's all get in our cars, jump onto the freeway and bunch together in packs in the left lanes. It'll be fun and we'll barely have to maintain consciousness because we can just follow the guy in front of us.
If this sounds stupid, it is. But that seems to be the norm on interstates all across this country. Cars pile up like logs at the mill because the guy in front is texting his dog groomer and the strokes behind him put their brains out to pasture 10 miles ago.
If your path is blocked, do something about it. Given today's clogged freeways often you can't, and then we're told patience is a virtue (code phrase for hopeless). But just as often, looking ahead and plotting a careful lane change will smoothly avoid such mindless wandering.
10. All the Rest
I've left out a veritable hall of fame of daily irritants and driving clichés. Juvenile thumping stereos, unused turn signals, shaving, reading, make-up application, eating while underway, cell phone idylls, weaving, drunks, 64 mph in residential areas, not pulling over for faster traffic — the list is endless. You know, you don't have to smile, and I sure don't want to exchange addresses with you, but if we'd all just keep our minds on what we're doing — that's driving — it would help.
Sauntering to the end of a really long freeway onramp at 52 mph, confirming that all those cars and trucks swerving in avoidance are going 75 mph as you pull into a traffic lane, then accelerating to 80 mph two minutes later torques everyone off for three miles behind you.
Traffic already on the freeway has the right of way and it's your duty to merge seamlessly with it. If you're not going freeway speed by the bottom of the onramp then step on the gas. Most importantly of all, train yourself to look over your left shoulder while accelerating on the ramp so you can pick your target merge point. And don't blame me if I don't move over for you; I'm busy and fitting in is your job. I have the right of way, jackass!
2. The Gaping Fool
If you have a hankering to see a wrecked car, then take a beer and a lawn chair to a junkyard and pass a lazy afternoon contemplating the near-infinite combinations of wrinkled sheet metal. Revel in the mathematic complexities of shattered glass; compute the force vectors written irrevocably in all that carnage. But brother, don't balk me with your rube's need to stare during the morning commute.
Look, if you're going to pull over and assist, great. If you're picking your way through broken glass, we understand. But jamming traffic for five miles because of some dark need to gawk at a fender-bender is a hanging offense. Instead of rubbernecking at the wreck site, look for the escape route around and away from it. If you have passengers, they can stare for you and give a detailed report.
3. Get High on the Beams
Thanks to the near-total urbanization of most American's driving experience, we've come to a collective inability to use high beams properly. As a result, any rural native can spot the dark-night newbies; they're the ones groveling along blessedly uncongested county highways with their low beams on. Sniffing their way home from bingo night at 32 mph in a 55 zone, these incompetents are another unnecessary hazard to navigation.
If you can't be bothered to either remember that every vehicle has been equipped with high beam headlights since before Humphrey Bogart was getting whistling lessons from Lauren Bacall in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not, or are too lazy to use those high beams, then you simply aren't participating in society. This is the sort of lazy ignorance that begets risky passes and menacing tailgating.
Most telling, slovenly low-beam-only operation proves that the occupant behind the wheel isn't looking even 80 feet ahead, the cardinal sin of all. It doesn't take more than a flip of the fingers to swap the headlights up or down. The instant traffic passes those high beams should be on, illuminating well down the road and giving the eyes an easier time adapting to the lack of glare. An instant before oncoming traffic rounds the bend or crests the hill, another finger flick puts the low beams back on. It's really easy folks.
4. Jackrabbit Smarts
I'm frustrated to no end by people who have internalized all that hogwash to avoid jackrabbit starts. They crawl away from signals and stop signs as if each foot traveled has a ten dollar toll attached to it, ignorant of the fact that creeping to speed wastes not only fuel, but also bottles up traffic behind them.
Learn this truth: Engines are most efficient when operating at or nearly at full throttle. Otherwise, a moderate, steady pace is best. So it's more efficient to power up to speed relatively quickly, then back off the throttle and cruise at a steady speed.
5. Mystery Brakers
Just asking, but what's up with these inexplicable brake applications in the middle of straightaways? Did you just remember the cat is still in the dryer? See your high school flame pass in the opposite direction? Wake up and realize you were driving? The mystery is baffling. All I know is that it seems people aren't paying attention and then get startled back into focus, so they apply the brakes. Focus on driving when you're behind the wheel, not the other things that are happening in your life. You might live longer and worry less.
6. Lights On, No One Home
Every morning I wake up hoping tonight I'll be blinded for 10 minutes by the headlights of a parked car. Really, is it such an intellectual connection to understand that parking lights are for, uh, parking? That headlights blaring uselessly and dangerously into oncoming traffic are needless hazards? Turn them off when you are parked.
7. Rolling Your Own
You don't know him, but curmudgeon extraordinaire Steve Statham, the editor of Musclecar Enthusiast magazine, once growled about "making up your own driving rules as you go along." This after another excruciating round of, "Oh no, you go first, oh no, you go first" at the local four-way stop with an indecisive motorist.
Really, which is more courteous, recalling and applying such driving law basics as the car on the right has the right of way, or displaying a pigheaded devotion to ensuring everyone else goes first? There's already a whole body of law dedicated to the orderly flow of traffic and we'll all get there sooner if we didn't hold these crossroad coffee klatches.
8. Pull In Front of Me, Will You?
Why is it so many tin pots play that infantile, "I don't see you" bit when two lanes of traffic merge in crawling rush hour traffic? They keep their nose glued to the guy in front, avoid all eye contact and like three year olds wish you'd simply go away.
Oh, please. Is your life so devoid of success that you need to impose your will on another driver stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic? A lane has ended, the people next door are going to merge into your lane, hopefully every other car at a time. Deal with it.
9. Herd Instinct
Here's an idea: Let's all get in our cars, jump onto the freeway and bunch together in packs in the left lanes. It'll be fun and we'll barely have to maintain consciousness because we can just follow the guy in front of us.
If this sounds stupid, it is. But that seems to be the norm on interstates all across this country. Cars pile up like logs at the mill because the guy in front is texting his dog groomer and the strokes behind him put their brains out to pasture 10 miles ago.
If your path is blocked, do something about it. Given today's clogged freeways often you can't, and then we're told patience is a virtue (code phrase for hopeless). But just as often, looking ahead and plotting a careful lane change will smoothly avoid such mindless wandering.
10. All the Rest
I've left out a veritable hall of fame of daily irritants and driving clichés. Juvenile thumping stereos, unused turn signals, shaving, reading, make-up application, eating while underway, cell phone idylls, weaving, drunks, 64 mph in residential areas, not pulling over for faster traffic — the list is endless. You know, you don't have to smile, and I sure don't want to exchange addresses with you, but if we'd all just keep our minds on what we're doing — that's driving — it would help.
I like to say that I am more aware than other drivers so I am the one irritated by these drivers and not the producer of these irritations to other drivers.
CBOTY 2010
Joined: Nov 2004
Posts: 34,786
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From: MI
i'm refering to him talking about the merging lanes and how its not the people on the highways job to do anything ... it may not be required but it doesnt take a whole lot of work to slow down or move over to let someone in. it beats flying forward at 100mph and causing an accident because "its not my concern"
then bitchin bout people looking at an accident, when you know he looks. its human nature. and everyones gonna look ... no harm
and then with his lane ending merge point he contradicts himself ... people merging on the freeway are on their own and he can say fuck you to them but a lane is ending and people need to merge over and now he's supposed to pay attention and be considerate? hmmmm isnt that two totally opposite reactions to the same issue?
Last edited by shirley; Dec 10, 2008 at 08:58 AM.
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Joined: Aug 2004
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Learn this truth: Engines are most efficient when operating at or nearly at full throttle. Otherwise, a moderate, steady pace is best. So it's more efficient to power up to speed relatively quickly, then back off the throttle and cruise at a steady speed.
I suppose that would be the only thing I am guilty of. I have been shifting up at 2500 or 3000. I don't creep along though.