Right ON. You get to the intersection first, you take the right of way. Don’t waste 10 seconds of BOTH our time making me try to figure out why you aren’t following traffic rules… whether it’s just out of golden-hearted niceness, or if you forgot it’s your turn and you’re about to dart into the intersection.
Nice is waiting for people to get off the train before you get in. Nice is not farting in elevators. Breaking traffic rules is not nice, even if you think you’re being nice.
This is one of the few things that really pisses me off as well. Its simple common fucking courtesy to acknowledge when someone does you a kindness.
I tend to avoid waiving if at all possible, because of the likelyhood of misunderstanding.
When I go jogging (or better - running) I often get “waived” across an intersection by a well meaning motorist. But when I pause, or stop to take a look in other directions (the waiver is not the only traffic in the world, you know) they often get impatient, and drive right on through. Better yet, I can’t count the times that a passenger or back-seater will see me, and waive me through while the driver is looking the other way!
So my habit is not to waive, not to trust the waiver.
I believe in car-ma. 
I let people in so that my car-ma will cause someone to let me in when I need it. I always wave or nod, or mouth “thank you” at them if we have eye-contact. And I appreciate it when they acknowledge me. 
Funny because when I do that, there is a lot of waving. Are you saying it is not thankful waving?
He’s gone all Sharon on us.
I’m trying really hard to get rid of the mental inmage of two unyielding assholes meeting. :: puke ::
I have an eerily similar fantasy about everyone being issued a remote that would activate a giant claw in the sky, which would pluck bad drivers off the road and return them to their starting point.
Note: Although I make it a policy to give the “Thank You” wave (sometimes, as others have said, more than once to make sure the other driver saw it) and resent those who don’t, failure to give the wave would not, in itself, be an offense punishable by The Giant Bad Driver Sky Claw ™.
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Here’s a wacky notion:
If we assume that everyone else is an ungrateful piece of shit who refuses to acknowledge our Amazing Feats of Great Kindness, then a wave is the only way we can feel better about our Noble Sacrifice. Hooray, we’ve broken them out of their ungrateful shell, and they love us!
If, on the other hand–and I know this is counterintuitive–we assume that people are generally grateful for the assist, that they’re just trying to get where they’re going, and that perhaps our display of charity is not something Nobel Peace Prizes are awarded for, then all of a sudden a wave becomes unnecessary. A lagniappe. A nice response perhaps, but only a gesture of the gratitude they feel. It’s probably not much gratitude, but it’s not like we just rescued Timmy from the well.
A small act deserves a small gratitude. Take that gratitude as read, whether or not you receive the kind of nod, wave, or semaphore you feel commensurate with your Heroic Deed, and you can go on your merry way.
You know you did something nice. Not a big deal, just a small kindness. How hard is it to assume that other people are generally appreciative of that, rather than assuming they hate you and all you stand for?
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Then let me second it. Women are by far the worst offenders (IME).
I always wave, when someone does me a traffic favor, but I’m in a small, low car, and I’m sure the SUV drives only see my roof, and maybe part of my back seat.
When I’m doing the favor, I rarely get the wave, though I can see the driver. I think.
I blow a kiss when a driver lets me cut in, pauses to let me turn in front of him, etc.
We played tennis today. There were 4 courts side by side. A man and his two kids came to practice in the middle of our game. The kids were around 8 and 6. Of course there were times when they hit the ball into our court, interrupting our game. Can’t be helped. We stopped and picked up the ball and threw it to them.
Never once did any of them say “Thanks” or “Sorry.”
I mean, geesh, can you at least acknowledge the fact that we did you a favor. I was half tempted to just throw the ball to the back fence line instead of tossing it to the player, except I didn’t want to show poor form in front of the kids.
BTW, number of times we interrupted their practice with errant balls? Zero.
I totally agree. I fucking hate it when someone does that to me when I’m waiting to turn right at an intersection. It would be adequate to just stop at the stop line. But so many people ignore the stop line and pull into the pedestrian crosswalk. Boils my blood, it does.
Another egregious bit of driving behaviour. Unfortunately, not illegal. But it should be. Wouldn’t you experience a HUGE degree of satisfaction if you saw a law man at the head of the line? Not even handing out tickets, just making people wait for 15 minutes. I would not mind my tax dollars paying for a program like this.
You know what gets me? If I’m driving along in the left lane of a street with 2 lanes going in the same direction with someone else driving in the right lane a car length or 3 ahead of me. If I see that there is a parked car coming up in the right lane and if I see that there’s a line of traffic coming up behind me, I will intentionally stay put relative to the car traveling to my right (obviously giving them enough room to merge), anticipating that they are going to need to change lanes due to the upcoming parked car. Most people take advantage of this and change lanes in front of me. There are a surprising number of people who will pull up right behind the parked car and then put their left turn signal on.
Do they not see the parked car until they’re right upon it? Do they see it and not process the maneuvering required to deal with the situation? Do they see it and not feel comfortable changing lanes when there’s a moving vehicle within 1/4 mile of their present position?
Some people see the parked car in plenty of time, put their turn signal on, start slowing down, look at the gap in traffic that I’ve left them, keep looking at the gap… What the fuck are they doing? Just change fucking lanes already. Note - if there’s no one behind me, I’ll have long since pulled away from the situation so that there is no such discourse. It’s only in moderate to heavy traffic that these situations come up.
I expect people to change lanes in front of me in these situations. In fact, I leave enough room for them to do so. However, some people seem to need an engraved invitation to complete this basic driving maneuver - guess what? I’m not waiting for you. You got a window of opportunity to get in front of me. Sucks that you’re going to wait behind the parked car now.
We have the same problem with mergers here, qwest. A proper merge is effortless and no danger to anyone involved; an improper merge is one of the most dangerous manouvers out there. People here will come to the end of their merge lane and slam on the brakes, and then sit there, waiting to get into 100kph traffic from a dead stop. Congratulations, asshole - if you were lucky enough to not get rammed into next week by the guy getting up to speed behind you, you are probably going to have people going around you on the left in a highly illegal and dangerous move now. It’s not a case of no room to merge, either. In my 17 years of driving in Calgary traffic, there has been only one or two occasions when there was physically no room for me to merge in (usually because of clueless assholes that ignored my signal light and the fact that they are obligated by law to move over or make a space in a merge situation, and kept pace with me until my merge lane ran out).
I don’t wave “thanks” for people doing what they’re supposed to do, either, and I don’t expect any back. In fact, it kind of bugs me when people wave at me when I’m just driving properly. Don’t thank me for being competent; just try to emulate it yourself. That’s all the thanks I need.
I will sometimes wave thanks even if it’s just to reinforce behavior that people are supposed to do anyway.
But it’s infuriating here in this town the way that people won’t pay attention to the square and will break all the rules, then act like if they wave “thanks” when you don’t plow into them that I’m supposed to think that’s super.
::slight hijack::
(Bolding mine)
Professional driver here … For you, and others who do is:
Please do not flash your high beams (brights, whatever).
The universal signal is to momentarily dim your headlights. If you can not figure out how to do this safely without turning all of your vehicles lights off, we’d all just as soon you didn’t bother, thankyouverymuch.
Explaination: When I am looking in my mirror focused on your lights trying to guage the distance between your vehicle and my trailer and you hit the high beams you blind me. For the next twenty or thirty seconds I can not see you, the lines on the road, other vehicles, or much of anything else. For those few seconds I’m sitting in a 80,000 pound guided missle headed down the road with the ‘guide’ relying only on memory to remember where the road is and where every other vehicle is and avoid hitting those other vehicles.
(If you see other trucks doing this you can bet your last dollar that the idiot is a rookie. Also, he/she/it is probably getting an earfull on the CB to boot. My own CB rant usually lasts until the other driver is out of range …)
Thank you for the thought. It really is sincerely appreciated.
However, I hope that you will understand that I will not thank you (flash my tail lights) for blinding me.
::/hijack::
On topic:
I wave. I see many others who do not. No big deal here.
I’m ususally way to busy avoiding the other idiots on the road to take much notice.
BTW, if you ever get the urge to become mildly self abusive and want to experience a whole new level of ‘rude’ behavior from other drivers, try getting around in a big rig some time.
And don’t even get me started on RVs - I spent all day friday (opening of the Labor Day holiday) in RV hell. But that’s a rant for another day …
Lucy
Go ahead. 
No, really.
This thread reminds me of a upper-class character I once saw in a book. The character had had a large amount of money returned to him. He offered no thanks or reward. He said: why should I thank him for doing what he *should *do?
I was quite shocked at first. But when the world is looked at under the black and white lens of the character I had to admit he was right. One *should *return a large sum of money that is not his. It should *not *require a thanks because it is the *right *thing to do.
If we use this black and white lens to look at the world, we can see this easily applied everywhere. Why should I say please and thank you to the people who work for me? They are *paid *to do what I ask, that is their reward.
We could extend this reasoning pretty far. But when we step back and look at the world we find it isn’t usually black and white. We find it is all kinds of shades of grey and colors too. We find that people respond to the little social courtesies. They aren’t required, but they are so easily done and the ROI is fairly large. Compared to the effort the return is big.
I understand that you may be right when you say that no thanks is required. I’m still going to wave thanks when someone lets me in.