I’m turning left, and just as my unprotected left light (ball, not the arrow) turns green a car comes from the opposite direction and wants to turn right into the same street I am. No problem, since my light is unprotected, I know I need to yield to them, so I stop in the intersection. They stop to apparently yield to me. I roll my eyes (because they clearly don’t know the road rules) and start to go again.
So do they. I stop, so do they. So I go again and so do they. Fortunately on this particular street there are two lanes so we entered the side street in tandem formation until I left them in the dust. But come one, asshats! Yield or don’t, but stop playing games!
*No, after you. No, I insist, after you! *is a very dangerous game at intersections. IMO tis better to be decisive and be thought a pig than to waffle.
Having said that, just about zero percent of my fellow drivers can make a left or right turn onto a two-lane roadway and remain within either the left or right lane as applicable. Very close to 100% will almost always turn wide and cross over into the other lane. So doing the formation turn to end up line abreast in the two lanes on the cross street is almost a guaranteed collision around here.
I get irrationally annoyed when in a place where next-in-line service COULD be used, but isn’t. It seems like box offices and bus stations in particular need to absorb the lessons that department stores, banks, and so many others learned long ago. Making people choose a line to wait on where they can so easily get stuck behind the customer with (insert issue here) and watch as other lines move swiftly is just cruel.
I get that some places, like supermarkets, don’t have the floor space to make it work. But if there IS room to do a single serpentine line that is in eyeshot of all the available service windows, why why why not do it?!!!
Mythbusters recently tested that in a grocery store environment and found that it really made no difference. They even through in price checks and other delays.
Grrrr… I was in a self-service grocery store line behind someone who really needed to be use a human checker. She did everything, including bagging, one-handed, and she had the use of both hands, because she was using her left hand to hold onto her purse, which she couldn’t either put over her shoulder or in her cart. Then, she stopped in the middle of ringing stuff up to take a phone call (which she did with both hands).
I get that stuff happens. Some people have been pick-pocketed before, and so they have a lot of anxiety over it happening again, and some people are waiting for the phone call about how dad’s kidney transplant went, but those people need to USE THE HUMAN CASHIER. There were three self-service lines, and maybe eight cashiers.
First, at places that have more than one door side-by-side (like malls, theaters, some restaurants) there is absolutely no reason to stand and wait your turn to go thru the one open door. OPEN THE OTHER DOOR AND GO!
Similarly at toll plazas - why is there a line of 5 cars at one booth and none at the identical adjacent booth? Neither is Cash Only or Pass Only, but it’s as if the herd mentality blocks the common sense.
My other door issue is perhaps totally irrational, but it happened today. I was at my doctor’s office to get some lab work done, and as I waited, I watched a perfectly able 20-something (who happened to work there) hit the buttons and wait for the doors to open. Honest-to-goodness, how lazy are you that you can’t pull or push a door? What was especially aggravating was the 2 sets of doors from outside were open together for long enough for a wheelchair to get thru - and it was below freezing out this morning!! So all of us in the waiting room were treated to a blast of cold air unnecessarily because Her Majesty couldn’t be bothered to open one door at a time… Kids these days. [/geezer mode]
There are two reasons she might have done that. Some of those doors function better if they are button-opened every time. I remember 32 years ago, the hospital where I volunteered had signs on the big interior doors instructing everyone to use the buttons because pushing those doors open could cause a malfunction. I don’t know if there’s something about those big interior doors that hasn’t changed, but maybe she has worked some place where that was the case, so she thinks it’s better for all doors to be button-opened.
The other is that employees are asked to use the buttons occasionally to verify that they are still working. I had a friend in a wheelchair who would get very frustrated at non-functioning buttons, and then trying to open a door, or find an alternate path, when the button didn’t work. She’d always report it, but if employees used the buttons, they’d catch the malfunctioning ones before they frustrated someone who really needed them to work.
My mother had to see her doctor Monday afternoon, and by the time she was finished, it was after 4 PM, so we decided not to go that evening to get her new prescription filled (which the doctor had sent to the pharmacy - the pharmacy, by the way, which is a part of the medical provider).
I couldn’t get her prescription yesterday because I had my own appointment 15 miles away and I spent a large part of the day waiting there, as well, so we decided that we would go today to get her prescription, as well as a chest X Ray she needed (the X Ray is just next door to the pharmacy).
So we got there this morning, and they were all very confused. “We have nothing for her.” I explained that the prescription would have been sent over Monday and we would have picked it up that day if we had had the time. After much hunting and pecking on the computer, it turned out that yes, the doctor had, indeed, sent the prescription over, but it had not yet been filled, two days later. I was told it would be filled within ten minutes. It took an hour and a half.
I just thought up a good one. Those endless, mindless computer training sessions about nothing. How to manage your time. How to deal with people. How to use the software you’re already using…
That may have been the case this morning, but the same thing happened where I used to work, and as far as I know, there was no guidance about checking the doors. Seriously, when someone comes back to the building from a run and they can’t manage to open the door?? Stabby!!
Always dreamt of the day where these automatically deployed bollards would come shooting out of the ground to keep people from changing lanes during a turn.
There’s a T-intersection near my house with opposing traffic coming from the short parts of the “T” and combining onto the two-lane long part of the “T.” Watching everyone cross each other’s path to swing wide as they turn is infuriating. Just stick to the lane you’re supposed to turn onto and it won’t be a brake stabbing, confused dance!
There’s a toll plaza near me that’s notorious for this. The rightmost toll booth must be scary to drive up to because it’s always empty. The thing I love is pulling up to it and watching people from other lines break ranks to get behind me. Happens almost every time. It’s like they needed to see that it was safe before venturing to the unknown territory of one lane over.
Your two door issues are great too. What can be doubly annoying about your first issue is when you open up the second door. If the door pulls in towards you, some of the accumulated herd on the other side sees a new opening and happily trots through the door you’ve just opened, as if you are a helpful doorman and not a person in a hurry.
The bit with toll booth lanes is part just mindless herding and partly the legit fear of pulling into a lane that’s out of service.
The one with other cars lined up is definitely in operation. That empty one next to it? Maybe not. You can’t trust the signage or red/green lights to be correct as half of them don’t work on many toll roads.
5% (at best) of people are leaders. 95% of people are followers.
The fact there’s nobody in line there is pretty good evidence it’s out of service because if it was working, surely somebody of those folks in line next door would be in that other now-empty line? Or at least that’s how the followers think.
Another factor is vision. I see about 20/15. Lots of people see barely 20/50. They can’t even identify the blob that *is *the lane open/closed lights or the cash vs. credit vs. tollpass signs until they’re 3 times closer than I am. And that assumes they’re able to pay as much attention as I do. Somebody who can barely see or think about what they’re doing is well-advised to just follow the herd.
Your experience is probably more like mine than like those folks. But they represent the majority.
I’m about 20/40-20/60 without glasses, and I correct to 20/20-20/25. I get headaches when my eyes are uneven, though, so I wear glasses that correct both eyes to 20/25.
My husband is 20/100 without glasses, but he corrects to 20/15 in both eyes.
My vision still corrects about as well as ever, but I can see the beginnings of that slip-slidin’ away along with my hair and all the rest of that youthful goodness. Sucks but it beats the alternative.
Oh. Both of these bugs me. And if you have the Right of WAY. TAKE IT. Don’t wave me on. You don’t see the same traffic that I do (there are exceptions to this when you can stop to let people out in a bad intersection so to not grid lock things).
And the wide turning too. Stay in your lane for crying out loud. (exceptions given for large trucks in tight corners).
I hate it when pedestrians do that. By law, I can’t enter the intersection when they’ve got even one foot in the crosswalk. I must wait for them to cross. When they think they’re being nice and noble, really, they’re trying (unintentionally, I’m sure) to prompt me to break the law.
Upon more than one instance, I’ve changed my turn-signals and gone the other way, just because some nice (but ignorant) pedestrian keeps refusing to use his right-of-way.
Agree. But … speaking as a frequent pedestrian in many pedestrian-unfriendly environments. …
As long as I’m crossing in front of the car I’m at risk. Once the car has gone I’m safe. I’ll often trade my right of way for getting the car to a place where it can’t hurt me even if it tried. The right way to do that is to stay on the curb until the car has gone. The wrong way is to step into the street then wave them on. Sometimes the latter is unavoidable.
Admittedly that conflicts with my policy advice up-thread as between two cars. And admittedly that trains drivers to be even more piggish in expected peds to stay out of their way.
We have a lot of bike paths, some of which cross roads. There are stop signs for the bicyclists where the path gets to the road, where the bicyclists are supposed to stop for traffic.
Do they? Of course not! They go whizzing on through! Idiots have a freaking stop sign and completely ignore it. Oh, how I long for the day for a cop to pull one of them over and give them a ticket.
Oh, and yesterday, it was a flipping bus that exited the merge lane and had to cram back over, almost sideswiping me in the process. Can’t they invent transporters already?
When peds wave me on, I go. I’m averse to sitting in the middle of an intersection, and possibly getting caught there, especially if someone behind me has already also started to pull out. It may be technically wrong, but it’s not terrific to play “after you…no, after you,” so I act decisively.
I’m careful, though, because once someone waved me on while someone came up behind him and started to cross. I stayed where I was waiting for the other guy, and the waver stood there like a stick, and then when the other guy had passed him, her decided he’d better go, and he did, so I ended up waiting for both of them, even though by then my light was yellow. I was in the intersection, though (there was no arrow, but also for some reason no oncoming traffic), so I had to go, and an SUV behind me also in the intersection-- I had a very small car. I went through as fast as I safely could as soon as the waver had passed, and the SUV went through behind me and sped up to pass me, like the whole mess was because I wasn’t fast enough on the gas pedal.
