On the way to seeing Transformers, there was a significant back-up on the road. The theater we go to was once a drive-in. They tore down half of the drive-in to put a regular movie theater in right next to the drive-in. During the backup, I had wondered if everybody was going there to see the transformers movie.
Things were slow, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that nobody was yielding. Get used to the lane you are in, because cars are tailgating each other left and right. Since I could see the theater from where we were (and had no idea how long it would take) I hopped out to buy tickets, thinking the theater was packed.
It wasn’t, the backup was from all the people going to the drive-in (you pay at a tollbooth-like kiosk) which was slow enough for cars to get backed up several traffic lights back. Everything was at a standstill, yet everybody starts blatting their horn.
I don’t understand this behavior. The movie patrons jammed up an intersection, leaving some cross traffic stuck in the intersection only to have more irate patrons honk (but nobody has anywhere they can go). During all this, I actually saw a van jump the curb and tear down the sidewalk at 35 mph just to get a few dozen car lengths ahead of everybody else.
The phenomenon reminded me of a (less obnoxious) situation that happened once after an event. Some guy in a car ‘beeped hello’ to another passenger/pedestrian on the way out of the parking lot. I suppose another guy thought it rude to let the beeping go unanswered, and in about 30 seconds every car in the lot was beeping its own little random morse code. Kinda funny.