I’m suddenly reminded why auto insurance companies offer a discount to drivers who manage to reach the age of 25. Do you know what the deductible is on your auto insurance? $1,000? $500? $250? Someone else is going to pay it, so it doesn’t matter?
SAFE driving is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, then it doesn’t matter.
Would you be as interested in playing chicken with 4,000lbs vehicles if you knew it was going to cost $500, or $1,000 every time you lost? And what do you get if you win? A chance to drive a rental car?
I recently had the pleasure of telling my husband about people’s perception of BMW drivers. He is the textbook example, but had never heard that it was “a thing”. We googled “BMW drivers” and I laughed my ass off at that first page of results.
I suggest pulling the AK off the gun rack mounted on the back window of your truck cab and lighting up the bully’s bumper and rear tires. As you drive by, give several hearty middle finger salutes and fling a can of piss disguised as Miller Lite through the open passenger window. That’ll learn him.
…or just let the dude in and have a happy day.
Good driving is not about “everyone on the road should play fair and if you don’t you’re gonna have me to contend with, asshole”.
Good driving is about “I am going to try to play fair and I am also, in addition to that, going to try to make my driving inconvenience the smallest number of other drivers possible”.
Going around “punishing” various licensed idiots for their bad driving behaviors is dangerous. Not just to you and the idiots, but to the rest of us. People like your above-described BMW driver, if blocked from completing their ill-gotten merge, tend to do abrupt things trying to do it anyway and/or horn their way into some other tiny space. Or, annoyed by your brights in their rear-view mirror, they stand their vehicle on its nose to teach you a lesson, and maybe you rear-end them or, more likely, you stop in time but someone in the chain of tightly packed cars behind you doesn’t.
Which, umm, enlarges the category of licensed idiot drivers if you see what I mean.
When I went to the OB earlier this week, I parked my car next to two BMWs in the parking garage. I thought, “I hope I get my car back in one piece”. Fortunately, I did.
The one time I ever dinged a car–a time I learned an important lesson about how to parallel park–it was a Beemer, and I was all OH SHIT. But the owner called me that night using the number I left on the note, and he was not only civil, he was almost pathetically grateful to me for leaving a note, thanking me repeatedly for treating him decently. In terms of interaction with someone whose car you dinged, it could not have been pleasanter. So I may have a skewed perception of BMW drivers.
Traffic flows more smoothly if people use the available space and merge at a similar speed near the choke point.
Please note this does not apply to morons who use a turn only lane to skip a lineup of traffic, merging back in at the last second. They’re morons, you still let them merge because the punishment only holds up those trying to turn in their turn only lane but still…morons.
