We’re incited to anger by the news every night, by the paper in the morning and by the glurge on the internet. Since beating one’s children and kicking the cat is frowned upon, people take their rage to the road, where they are relatively anonymous and can act out without actually assaulting someone. On occasion, of course, things go decidedly bad. I go the speed limit or at least with the flow of traffic, I stay in one lane as much as possible, and while I do mutter imprecations at the assholes I see, I don’t reciprocate. I do have to remind my wife occasionally–when she decides to glare at someone and shake her fist-- that a lot of people carry guns and have hot tempers.
No… it’s not just Colorado. Around here, people have been absolutely insane behind the wheel ever since people started driving a lot again after the pandemic.
Their driving styles seem to be a combination of “I’m too special to pay attention and drive safely” and “What I want and where I want to go is more important than you.”
It’s essentially extreme vehicular self-centeredness, as if the rest of the world doesn’t matter as long as they get where they’re going when they need to be there.
If the idiots in front of me slowing me down and the assholes behind me that keep tailgating me would just trade places… 
Not 15 in a 25, but 35 in a 55…
I called him Jerry, my father in law. That’s just how he drove. He was never in a hurry and neither were you if you rode with him.
Funny story: Jerry took care of this other old guy. This guy, Sy was probably 20 years older than Jerry. One day Jerry was giving me a ride to the next town over ( 5-10 for anyone else 20 for Jerry) When he told me how he was driving Sy to the same town and Sy was gripping the arm rest and gasped out, " You drive SO fast!" I laughed helplessly the rest of the trip.
And that ladies and gentlemen is how Sy lost his license. 'Cause he would drive 15 in a 55. The traffic that stacked up between those two was epic.
Yeah, I forgot about that.
ISTM there is less policing. Certainly the police are out there catching speeders because that is easy and equals money.
In Chicago, where I live, there used to be traffic cops at many busy intersections during the day. I never, ever see them now except for (maybe) a big event happening. You’d see patrol cars a lot cruising around which seem far fewer these days. I never see them go after asshole drivers. Riding on the shoulder. Running red lights. Overly loud cars (the car itself or the passengers blaring music at high volume). Any of that.
Since people seem to be able to get away with more they just keep doing it.
Ignore the video, just listen to the audio.
I used to love to drive fast but I’m not a kid anymore. That and I’m still waiting for the points to disappear from when I was ticketed for going 30 mph in a 25 zone. (The insurance surcharges will probably never go away)
Today, I drive in the slow lane. I drive 25 in a 25 and I enjoy the view. If there’s a double yellow line, I try to stay close to the curb… and if you need to pass me on the left, pass me on the left because that’s your ticket. Who knows… maybe you were playing with your kids with a toy airplane, a giant ant tore off your arm, and you need to get to the hospital. Any cop that stops you might even give you a police escort. I won’t get in your way.
II used to like to drive fast too. I still like it but I do not do it (within some reason…I won’t fuss about 60 in a 55 and getting busted for 30 in a 25 is just shitty). But maniac speeds…no.
I figured this out on long drives from college back to home. Long…boring drives across the midwest. This was when I had nothing but the radio and there is not a lot of choice in the middle-of-nowhere and what is there isn’t my kind of entertainment.
So, one thing I would do is mentally calculate how long it would take me to get home at different speeds and I soon realized faster doesn’t help much except over very long distances. And even then it was not a whole lot given some reasonable speed range for a car. Then, I realized with traffic jams and stop lights and whatnot the time savings is mitigated even more.
In the end, speeding just really is not worth it. You gain little and risk a lot. So, I stopped and wonder of wonders, it’s worked out just fine.
Honestly, I don’t remember seeing cops regularly at intersections since like the 80s here.
But of all the “thing were better then” types of old codger complaints, this is one I actually agree with it. It does certainly feel like driving is a lot more “who in the hell cares that the light is red?” around here, and then people complain about shit like red light and speed cameras (which I dislike, as well, but am slowly coming around to understanding why some civic leaders, like in my neighborhood, do actually like them, when two pedestrians in separate incidents got run over and killed here on my stretch of Pulaski in the last few months.) I drive my kid several miles to school everyday, and it is an absolute zoo out there, with people using bus lanes and driving through center turn lanes to get ahead of other cars, running red lights willy-nilly at full speed, blocking the box, etc.) It drives me absolutely batty.
Considering that George Carlin’s famous quote is from 1984 (if not earlier), I don’t agree that anything has changed.
One thing I rarely see that I wish were more common: When you are on a road that has two lanes going in each direction and you see the light changing to red, wouldn’t it be nice if the person who is in front of you in the right lane would do the kindness of moving to the left to let you make your right turn on red?
This is not obligatory, but it really is a kind act. I see it happen only once every month or two.
Turning right on red is not obligatory either, but it ought to be!
OR if in the left turn lane, pull up into the intersection on green so that more than he can make the turn because what he will do is wait for it and as it goes from yellow to red, gun it so HE makes it through.
I assume you’ve turned on your blinker well in advance of the intersection so the driver in front of you has time to move into the left-hand lane? Because I’ve been that guy who’s in the right-hand lane when the person behind me wants to make that turn, but didn’t let me know soon enough so I could at least move over to the left so he could squeeze by me on the right. Instead, he’s on my ass, trying to crowd between me and the curb so he can save 20 seconds on his journey.
Just because drivers sucked even back then doesn’t mean they suck the same now. This graph going into 2021, at least, does show a significant uptick in traffic falities after the main wave of COVID vs what would normally have been predicted for those years:
I assume there must be a similar graph available that is more current, but I don’t have the time right this sec to scare it up.
ETA: OK, there’s this that I haven’t read through:
Dropping, but still over pre-pandemic levels, from what I could scan.
Yep. Well in advance. But I don’t get grumpy if someone doesn’t move over–it’s an optional kindness that I like to see that simply shows consideration. If it doesn’t happen, I’m not going to get bent out of shape.
So much of life would be way smoother if people just thought about being kind for the next person. Instead of some nonsense like the peer-pressure “pay it forward” thing in the Starbucks line, just pure caring for another human being who crosses our path would make a huge impact in everyone’s daily toil.
I’m really trying to do my part on that. My commute suddenly went from “nothing” to “over an hour” last year, and I realized that unless I changed my own habits and responses to unpleasant behaviors on the road, I was in danger.
I have an idea, and it’s not quite for this thread, that many or even most people had a sort of existential scare during COVID at a time and place in their lives that they weren’t expecting it. As in, they were in a sort of slow-burn fear for their life for a long time there, and as a result, the net effect is that people have sort of turned inward and become more self-centered. Or something along those lines anyway.
You see it on the roads, you see it in the weird and hostile customer service interactions, you see it in airports and on airplanes, etc.
The difference for me is illustrated by:
Pre pandemic when I slowed down to make a right turn on into our neighborhood from a two lane arterial road, people would pull out into the opposite lane to pass me, rather than slow down for 10 seconds.
Post pandemic when I’m turning LEFT across oncoming traffic to turn into our neighborhood maniacs will pull into the opposite lane and pass me. They are playing chicken with the oncoming traffic to get past someone who is waiting for a gap in that same traffic flow.
I’ve also had someone drive onto the sidewalk to pass a car that was waiting to turn left. I was walking on the sidewalk with my dog and had to dive out of the way into someone’s law dragging the dog airborne with me. There is no curb, the sidewalk is separated from the road by a strip of “grass”. Because of the salt during the winter there isn’t really grass, it’s just dirt. The dirt is full of tire tracks. Drivers are just treating it as an extra passing lane between the utility poles. I never saw this 5+ years ago. Now it’s routine.
On out town’s Facebook page there is a lot of support for the drivers doing this shit. Along the lines of, this is not a walkable town, accept it and you will be safer.
That post reminded me. Traveling on a main road turning onto a county road, the asshole behind me did not slow down or even move over. If I didn’t make the turn faster than I wanted, he would have hit me and probably rolled me. I signaled in plenty of time and my brake lights work but he was, “I’m not slowing down or moving over motha fucka! I will ram your ass into next week.”
Oof. He wouldn’t do well in Vermont. At least not the way all Vermonters drove there 15 years ago. It seems when you were issued a Vermont license plate it gave you leave to pretty much stop dead before making a right turn into a side street or driveway. I learned to be wary of them even in adjoining states.
It sounds like the rest of the country has just caught up with standard Masshole driving behaviour around Boston.
I’m headed down there in a week to be the designated driver for a surgery recoveree. Not looking forward to it.
This thread highlights another reason to live in a more sparsely populated area: drivers are still assholes, but there aren’t as many of them.