Drive into me, knocking me off my bike and to the ground. Rims bent to shit, sore ankle. The lady stops long enough to see that i’m alive… and drives away…
My favorite memory of idiots driving on the shoulder is from a traffic jam on the Baltimore beltway on a sweltering, miserable summer day. This was a rather bad traffic jam, with prolonged periods of no movement at all. I was in the right hand lane, and noticed about 5 cars pulling onto the shoulder to bypass the traffic. When traffic began to crawl again and I made it a few hundred yards further along, I was delighted to see those same cars stuck on the shoulder BEHIND A STALLED VAN!!! They were boxed in between the railing, the right lane of traffic, and the van. hehehehe 
Yeah baby!!! (and no one seemed to be in much of a mood to let them back in…for what it’s worth, it didn’t appear that there were any frantic pregnant women in any of the cars)
How about posting a pit thread like this moron?
We were northbound on US 301 in southern Maryland one evening. It had been raining lightly, and the roads were only just wet. We were coming down a hill and we saw the railroad crossing gates ahead come down. We also saw a cement truck skidding and swerving down the slick roadway. I was certain we were going to see a major accident, but the truck driver managed to stop his vehicle, at an angle to the road, tho to this day I have no idea how he managed to control it. I like to think he learned a valuable lesson that day. I know I was glad we were in the other lane and behind him.
Midmorning. A calm, summer day on the north shore of Long Island. I’m driving down the Northern State Parkway [We’re a creative bunch here on Long Island] in my '84 Laser. Northern State is a four lane divided highway. The median is grass and fairly wide, but there’s a barrier running down the middle of it. There are also overpasses. But they don’t span the entire highway. They are two arches that each span a roadway, and they meet on the median and usually take up the whole width.
So my Laser and I are driving to work. I’m in the left hand lane, traffic is moderate to heavy, but we’re still travelling at a good pace. There’s a woman in a blue sedan just slightly ahead of me in the right lane, and I see her left blinker go on. “Surely she’s not going to–”
Yep. She’s coming right into my lane, and forces me onto the median. I lay on the horn but she’s oblivious, so I turn my head to survey the state of the median in front of me and – wouldn’t you know it – there’s an overpass. [Now I’m not big on using smilies but this one seems pretty appropriate.] :eek:
So I start to force myself back into the left lane, figuring that the worst that could happen is I sideswipe her and she [please god] moves back into her own lane – much better than a head-on with a bridge. So I start to move back and…oh now you see me.
I pass her and she gives me the “oh I’m so silly” wave. Thanks, what a sweetheart you are. Excuse me while I pull over and vomit.
FairyChatMom, I got to be a witness at an accident situation that was similar to yours. I was driving down a long, sloping hill that gets slippery every danged winter - the speed is 70 km/h on this hill, but you can only realistically go 35 or so. So I’m puttering safely down this hill as fast as I can go, and a winter-idiot comes up right behind me and begins tailgating me (there is a free left lane, and no other traffic). I turn to my friend in the car and say, “I’ll move over so he can go have his accident somewhere else”, and I move to the left lane and he speeds by me in the right lane.
He speeds up and heads on down to the lights at the bottom of this hill, realizes that he’s not going to make the green light, stomps on the brakes, does a 360, jumps the median (for oncoming traffic), and ploughs into a car waiting for her green light from the other direction. What a show! I pulled over, my friend called the cops on his cell phone, and we waited to be witnesses for this guy’s accident. I talked to him a little bit, and asked him why he had been tailgating me and driving so fast for road conditions, and all he had to say for himself was “I wasn’t going over the speed limit.” How clueless do you have to be to not admit that you did something wrong when you have actually HIT someone else doing it? I would think that would be enough proof for most people. :rolleyes:
That’s a goodie, Featherlou…I would love to see this guy in court when he tries to defend this inane act.
Originally posted by Daowajan
And wouldn’t we love to be present when this guy tries to defend his attitude to his employer (who will have to pay for the damage to the truck, and perhaps the damage to the overpass), and to a judge? (Hey, maybe the signs, as Al Jaffee once suggested, don’t apply to illiterates…
They’ll probably take it out of his hide! Well done, Daowajan! 
It happens all the time, and it really irks me.
So, you’re merging into traffic, coming onto the highway, when the guy behind you on the ramp jumps out before you do, and speeds up to come beside you. Now, you can’t merge into traffic because HE’s taken your spot, even though he was behind you.
Inevitably, that person will always look at you as if to say, “What’s your problem?” Jerk.
But what really gets me is the fact that it happens so often. I’ve seen people jump over grass medians to merge into traffic before the cars in front of them.
Bridges ice up prior to the adjacent roads, so slowing is reasonable. If slowing, then warning flashers are reasonable.
My top five:
-
Once, while in the back seat of a car, I said to the driver, “You are driving the wrong-way down a one-way street.” She turned her head and shoulders around to argue with me, while continuing to drive the wrong-way down the one way street. Fortunately, the front seat passenger stepped over and hit the brakes, and the oncoming traffic swerved.
-
Folks heading north from Toronto on Highway 69, which is a somewhat winding road with small hills, one lane each way, no divider, rock cuts (small cliffs), and which and passes through a snow belt near Parry Sound. These people from the city are used to straight, clear surface, multilane highways, so some tend to drive far too fast for the conditions on 69, and when passing, don’t realize that there is traffic around the next corner or over the next hill coming at them at a fair clip. I used to have to head down to Toronto from Sudbury against the weekend traffic, and on average I had to pull over to the shoulder once every couple of round trips due to some fool misjudging while passing and not being able to get out of my lane in time. Of a similar nature, I have a beef with some trucks on the steep hills of Highway 17 along the North Shore of Superior, for some of them pull out into the oncoming lane when starting to climb so that they can maintain their momentum. I realize that taking a run at the hills makes it a lot easier for them, but that is no excuse to put others at risk, particularly when it comes to forcing oncoming vehicles (me, damn it!) to slam on the brakes and hit the shoulder.
-
The little old man in Toronto who turned left into his driveway, not realizing that the opposing lane was blocked with rush-hour traffic, including me. The only good thing about him crashing into me was that at least it prevented him from hitting the school-children walking home on the sidewalk across his driveway. He was driving by routine, and was unable to respond to changing circumstances. He should have given up driving before that point.
-
Kevin Jinks, yes, Jinks, who turned 16, had his driver’s licence for two weeks, went out for a cruise in his dad’s brand new Delta 88 (a large car), and decided to show off when he saw a blonde in a red sports car. That’s when he flattened my K-car, which was stopped in traffic. His engine block was pushed into his driver’s compartment, but he wasn’t seriously hurt and I was able to extract him (I only ended up with whiplash). While waiting for the cops, he introduced himself to me and asked me how he should tell his father what he had done. I resisted the urge to laugh at him. Like quite a few young men, he was not mature enough to drive.
-
My all time favourite was my ex-SO, a strict vegan, who when passed by a moose bus with a kill on the back platform, covered her eyes with her arms. Unfortunately, she was driving and pulling a trailer at the time. I reached over and steered, wondering when she would calm down enough to at least take her foot off the gas. Sheeesh! I love her dearly, but sometimes I think she dances to the tune of a different drummer. (On another occasion she spun out into a ditch with me in the passenger seat while we were on the way to her family reunion. At the reunion, she got annoyed with me when with a straight face I complained to her family that she was trying to kill me.)
I didn’t convey it well enough, but the whole road was icy. Which means you need to avoid acceleration and deceleration as much as possible, period. Since at that stretch there were multiple bridges sometimes only 100 ft apart, he was endangering himself much more by slowing down for the bridges (and speeding up between times). He should have slowed down to an acceptable speed for the bridges and maintained that speed. Of course, we’re also talking the difference between 15 MPH and 10 MPH.
Also, emergency flashers are only for conveying that your car has an emergency; not for conditions that everyone is experiencing. Brake lights should have sufficed to warn people that he was slowing down.
You people are scaring me. I’ve recently gotten my learner’s permit, and the thought of morons like these “controlling” 2-3 ton hunks of steel is not comforting. I can only strive to not emulate these stupid incidents.
I must say, an idiot getting their comeuppance, while not harming others, is very satisfying, in a macabre way.
I also have my share of observations.
On a van, I saw a 30-something woman driving a Cherokee. She was a) using a cellphone, and b) looking down at the passenger seat, presumaby reading something. This is in the middle of traffic about 1000 feet from an intersection.
Also, one time when returning from Geno’s, I saw a rainbow. I also saw three accidents on I-95. All of them were people leaving the shoulder and hitting the guardrail. Plus, I later saw someone who had missed the lane when making a turn, and drove over the median, flattening a sign. The driver basically straddled it, hitting a tree soon after. My guess is that the rainbow had some sort of magical attention-grabbing force. Only the intelligent can resist it.
As some have mentioned before, some drivers don’t understand that pedestrians and bicyclists have right-of-way. Many times last year, I would try to cross a certain intersection after getting off the bus. The majority of motorists would look at me, stop for the stop sign(or more likely, not slow down at all) then keep going. Only a few actually stopped and let me cross.
Oh my God… I’ve seen that guy too! No shit! I was right behind him one morning on 520, heading east. He was practicing his goddamn trumpet right in the driver’s seat. Except on this day, the weather was fairly nice, so he was pointing the trumpet to the left, out the open driver’s side window. Unbelievable.
I didn’t even honk, because I was so flabbergasted at what I was witnessing.
I hate to be so politically incorrect, but I gotta agree. Several years ago I was driving home from a friend’s house on Christmas Eve, and fortunately there weren’t a lot of people on the road. The road I was on has only one lane in each direction, and a number of intersections, some with stoplights. One particular intersection was with a pretty small street which only bothered to have lights because there was an elementary school on one corner, and because the school was closed for the holiday, the lights were in flashing mode. The car in front of me stopped for the yellow flashing light, and no shit, sat waiting for a good 15 minutes waiting for it to turn red and then green… which of course it didn’t do. I guess he got sick of listening to my horn because he did finally go. The culprit? A little old man in a hat driving a brown Dart - covered in bumper stickers like “You bet your dupa I’m Polish” and “Happiness is a Polish Pope.”
Now, I’m not about to suddenly believe that all the jokes I heard as a kid were true based on one driver, especially when the Old Man-Hat-Dart thing automatically means trouble, but my fiance is also Polish, and his bad driving habits are too numerous to mention. At least once per trip, I think if he doesn’t kill us outright, I’m going to have a heart attack. I drive most of the time, but when we go to visit his family or friends, I swear he also deliberately takes a different route every time so I can never learn how to get there.
~ Randi
Tailgaters, in any way, shape or form. Take them behind the barn and put them out of our misery.
You can have fun with 'em, though. Several years back, I was doing 50mph down a main road, with some jerk not three feet behind me. This was during winter, and the road was wet… You know those “bridge freezes before road” signs? They’re not kidding. I happened to come up to a bridge, which was a little slick from the refreezing water, and I tapped the brakes while going over it. The jerk over-reacted, slammed his brakes on, and went wildly sliding – did a 360 and nearly went over the edge.
He kept his distance after that. Wonder what condition his boxer shorts were in.
A few years ago I was heading north out of Taos, New Mexico late in the afternoon. Since the road was just two lanes and it was as much of a rush hour as they get out there, a bunch of cars were in a line.
Well this guy in his beat-up little pickup truck just couldn’t stand it and pulled out into the oncoming lane to pass. He passed a couple cars as some oncoming cars approached. Instead of ducking back into the line, he speeds up… the oncoming cars get closer…he speeds up more and then instead of ducking back into the line of cars he swings onto the dirt shoulder of the oncoming lane throwing up a huge rooster tail. The oncoming cars pass, and he swings back over into the proper lane. And it’s not like nobody uses the shoulder for walking or biking, either. That one sticks out.
Just remember, 49% of people are below average. And 20 or so percent above that arent too spectacular either.
Driving home late one night. Came to a traffic light that was yellow just turning red. Stopped for it.
The jerk behind me decided he didn’t want to be bothered with the whole stopping for traffic lights thing, so he passes me and blows through the light just after it turns red. What he didn’t see was the cop waiting on the cross road for the light to change. The cop makes a righ turn to follow him, and half a mile later I pass the two of them pulled over on the side of the road.
Yeah, stopping for that red light would have been such a pain…
In the distance, I see an LOL (little old lady) leaving a parking lot driveway, slowly creeping toward the road. Creeping forward… I get closer… She’s still creeping forward… A moment of panic when I reach the driveway, as I realize she’s not stopping… I stomp on the gas and escape…
But, sure enough, she hits the car behind me.
I saw Doctor Jackson’s post and had to laugh. Don’t know if was the same woman or not, but that finger was in so deep, I think she was trying to scratch the back side of her eyeball.
We have a lot of snowbirds here during the winter, and a couple of days ago, I watched the old geezer in front of me make a left turn, with no signal, from the right hand lane. This street is, count them, not 2, not 3, not 4, but 5 freaking lanes wide. 2 left turn only, 2 straight only, and, 1 straight/right turn lane. He cut through the other lanes and into the inside left turn only lane. He got a few horns and the special salute. I was amazed he wasn’t T-boned. He actually shook his fist a one of the other drivers.