For christ’s sake. What behavior have you imagined me engaging in that makes me “the people you’re talking about”? Is there something not polite enough about how I indicate I want to pass? Should I telepathically communicate with you or what? Or are you like most people who have simply decided that anyone who wants to pass them is an asshole? Or maybe it’s just that I want people to have some common courtesy for their fellow drivers. What an asshole I am.
ntucker just wants to fight :rolleyes:
So give it a rest, already. You’re definitely the Joker this rant is about - tell me, do you drive a Camry? :dubious:
And, you’re mucking up a beautiful rant. So stop it, already.
El_Kabong, this was magnificent - keep up the good work!
woo hoo!
Didn’t mean to detract from El_Kabong’s completely justified, entertaining rant. The whole multi-lane driving etiquette thing was a tangent. The guy in the camry was an asshole, and no, I don’t drive like that.
Quit dissin Camry’s.
Mine’s 11 years old, has 175K miles on it, is a 4burner, not a 6, and can run the Belt from 59 to Westheimer as fast as the new Jags and faster that the pencildicks in the Hummers.
Of course, I also used to drive a '65 Barracuda with the BIG engine, and never learned to slow down…
Elderly Auntie Dee Dee, holder of the land speed record from Sugar Land to IAH, in less that 38 minutes. In the Camry.
I’m just waiting for the next time I get the tailgate treatment. Want to try out the ‘washing windows’ defense. Just hit the winshield washers while he’s back there, he’ll get a nice face full of the stuff too. he he he
Hey, some bozo tries to use her (yep, in this case it was a female driver) car as a weapon, and what did I do? Did I give her the finger? Did I pull out my concealed-carry handgun and start blazing away? Did I slam on the brakes and provoke a rear-ender? No, all I did was slow gradually down to 5 mph under the limit, come home and write a little rant.
[Walter Sobchak]Calmer than you, man.[/Walter Sobchak]
Interesting, the number of responses from Houston, which is where this little drama took place. Apparently this problem is more common than I thought; after it happened to me twice in two weeks, I assumed it was some sort of wierd coincidence.
WOW. People, what happened to cleaning your windshield? Nobody here is 8 years old and on ‘the bumper car’ ride.
The tailgaitors: You don’t want to be at fault for an accident do you? rear end accidents are 100% the fault of the person behind as a matter of Law (in NJ anyway). Do you like your house? Your savings? Did you Really want to have the money to send your kids to college? Then Slow The F-ck Down.
Breathing: It Beats The Alternative.
Speed Breakers: Are you tired of having a functional spine? Do you need to see what a f-cking quadrapelegic has to go through to get dressed in the morning? No? Then Get Your God Damned Foot Off That God Damn Break. What does it take to teach people that in Physical Therapy, Nobody Cares?
Here we go again.
No, ntucker is dead fucking right. Assholes who drive in the left lane are clueless idiots or complete jackasses or both. Just because you think you’re going “fast enough,” and that nobody “has any business passing you as fast as you’re going” doesn’t mean you’re not an idiot.
Move the fuck over. Drive on the right, pass on the left. Simple.
In some cities, and especially in England (which has the most sensible legal take on this issue ever,) you will get your ass pulled over and ticketed for “undertaking” (passing on the wrong side) or driving on the wrong side. Would that every city in the US enforced this simple bit of etiquette.
Please note that if you’ve stipulated that you specifically move over, this rant is not directed at you. I will note, however, jinwicked, that 10 miles an hour ofver the speed limit ain’t shit, and should not keep you in the passing lane for the majority of your driving time. In every city in which I’ve ever driven (Atlanta, DC, NYC, Dallas, Chicago, etc.), 10 miles an hour over the speed limit was standard cruising speed, because that’s usually the upper limit of the “grace period” police will give you before you run the risk of a ticket.
In short, if you’re doing 10 mph over, you aren’t the fastest thing on the road. Not by a long shot. Keep the fast lane clear.
If I follow your logic then all the cars on the road should be in the right 2 or 3 lanes, and NO one in the left/fast lane unless they are passing? Maybe that’s how it “should be” but you’ll never see that happen. Traffic is going to find an equilibrium among all the lanes.
If I’m already going considerably faster than the rest of the flow of traffic then I am going to drive in the fast lane, instead of weaving in and out the left and second-left lane. If I switched lanes every time I passed another car I’d get pulled over and checked to see if I was drunk. That’s just stupid and impractical. I’ll move over when one of you types that thinks you have every right to cruise in the fast lane instead of me because you’re going 20 mph over the limit rather than my 10 or 15 mph over the limit, ride up on my ass, and then I’ll move right back. No harm done to you, none done to me. So you had to wait a second for me to move out of the way. Big deal. But when you say “keep the fast lane clear” it sounds to me like “keep it clear for everyone but me.” I prefer to NOT drive in the fast lane because of people like you, but if it’s the most practical option given circumstances, which it often is, then that’s what I’m going to do. I regularly get stuck in the FAST LANE behind someone going the speed limit, but you know what, I don’t feel the need to be nasty about it or scream about how he has no right to be there. I just wait for them to move over and if they don’t, I change lanes for a ways. I just fail to see the need to get nasty about it. It’s not like I’m personally slapping you in the face and saying take that, I’m deliberately driving here just to piss you off.
I just don’t understand the venom. It’s just a damned road. As long as I get there on time and no one gets killed, I’m good.
Oh, dear, another tailgating/flow of trafic/OK to speed/stay in lane thread… can’t we deal with something noncontroversial and unlikely to stir fierce confrontation, like gun control, or abortion? 
What I can’t get over in the OP is the idea of aggressive driving in a Camry. I drive one, a cashmere beige one even, it’s so a mild-mannered gentle-souled machine that I’d look like a damn fool attempting to impose my will on other drivers in that vehicle. Could the person have snapped under an excess of meekness in their ride? (BTW I can understand their not passing – if they were in a pre-1999 4-cyl Camry base model with AT, they can’t count on the passing acceleration or the handling)
I have located the problem. For no reason whatsoever, you’ve decided that anyone who wants to pass you must be a jerk. No wonder you don’t mind pissing them off.
Nope, you’ve got it ALL wrong ntucker, what she’s saying is that the lone gunman doing 20mph over the limit should not expect to have the left lane CLEAR, as other people will be using it. If she is passing the people in the right/middle lanes she has EVERY right to be in the left lane, regardless of her raw speed. If someone is going faster than her, courtesy dictates that she should move out of the way, which she DOES.
I’m failing to see what the problem is.
My 88 Camry was a mean machine that broke down all the time and hated people. I think it had the soul of a Ford.
If you’ve driven in Chicago, you know that the left lane is not commonly clear. For hours in the morning and the evening, it becomes a faster driving lane - or during the worst hours, a creep-along lane. Theoretically, it’s a passing lane in that it’s usually moving faster than the others, but that’s subject to the intricacies of the traffic flow.
There are enough times when driving (fast) in the passing lane is the way to go, because it simply isn’t possible to move to the right without having to force someone else to slow down and let you in, or would involve traveling in the right lane no more than a car length or two before pulling back into the left lane to pass again. I always move over to let people pass, but in cramped driving conditions it can be damned tough to do this swiftly, and some drivers seem to have a fit when this happens.
And yes, I do think it’s rude in such cases for a driver to pull up behind someone in the left lane and acting like they’re stuck in a remake of the movie Speed, flashing lights/tailgating/honking like they’ll explode if they have to decelerate for even a moment, while the hapless driver ahead (passing other cars in the left lane, not just cruising there for the hell of it) looks for an opportunity to move over.
Yeah, a cop will ticket you for undertaking, but, whereas one should drive in the inside lane (the leftmost here) I’ve never heard of anyone getting a ticket for being in the wrong lane, and that problem is rife here. Strange, of course, because if people drove in the correct lane no-one would ever have the motivation to undertake.
Of course she does. Nobody is disputing that. What I don’t understand is what circumstances warrant her “just go around” attitude, and why she’s assumed that someone who simply wants to pass must automatically be a jerk who just wants the fast lane for himself.
I don’t advocate anyone having the fast lane to himself. I don’t see what’s so difficult about sharing the fast lane in an efficient manner, using it only when you need it. There is a (small) finite number of lanes, and if you don’t cooperate, you end up with a four-lane mass of traffic going all the same speed, which is ridiculous.
“You only call it a cow college because it was founded by a cow.”