Last night I had the ‘pleasure’ of observing the driver with the least common sence in the world (unless you know different).
6.30 pm in the rush hour, after sun set, the guy in question was driving in a beat up old car with no lights on, he was driving with only one hand on the wheel. In his other hand he was carrying a Chihuahua.
So Dopers, what driving have you seen that is more foolish than this? Please only include things you have seen yourself, and that did not result in any injury accident.
Well, there was the young asian woman who must have been about five-foot-nothing, driving one of the biggest SUV’s I have ever seen, shouting into her cell phone which she carried in the same hand she was using to palm the steering wheel, while she held a book in the other, which she was quite obviously trying to read at the time.
IMO, no one is a worse driver than the idiot driving down the highway at 65mph while their two kids jump around on the backseat, obviously not wearing seatbelts.
Driving down the highway, newspaper spread open across the steering wheel (so no view of speedometer and the rest of the console), and obviously paying some attention to what was written there. I decided to pass this guy and be sure to stay well ahead of him.
(Straying temporarily from the firsthand accounts requirement - hey, I provided one! - my husband has a better story of nearly being hit by a woman who had her (smaller-sized) dog in her lap, cell phone tucked under her ear, and who was flossing her teeth. He thought the hand motions were caused by her having a seizure, until she got up close.)
There’s a guy on my route to work who always has a book propped up on the steering wheel, sometimes with a cell phone cradled on his neck, while zipping around cars and usually getting about 6 inches from them before passing.
If I can get in front of him I’ll just cruise along at the speed limit, staying just close enough to the car in the other lane to box him in. It’s not nice, but it feels goooood.
A couple of months ago I was driving home along a four lane road that covered a very hilly region of town. I was in the left-hand lane, going the speed limit (yes, I’m one of those annoying people), when a car passed me on my left. Which means that it was actually in the fast lane going the wrong way, up a hill. The driver honks the horn, and he and his two passengers start waving at me in a “hey, see what we’re doing? Aren’t we cool?” kind of way. After cruising there for about fifteen or twenty seconds, the car zipped ahead of me and ran through a red light, nearly ramming another car at about 45 mph, and zoomed away.
What I wouldn’t have given for machine guns in my headlights about then. :mad:
My friend and I were driving down a busy street one cool spring day, and there was a man dressed up as a chicken, advertising some restaraunt, standing at the side of the road. The jackass in the car in front of us SWERVED ONTO THE SIDEWALK to attempt to hit the chicken-man. The guy thankfully jumped out of the way, but then, to my horror, a hand came out of the passenger window, and KNOCKED THE MANS COFFEE RIGHT OUT OF HIS HAND. Aformentioned jackass then takes off at about 80km/h, swerving through traffic, but not before I managed to see him high-five his passenger, a 12 or 13-year old boy! :eek:
Anyways, I wasn’t the one driving, so I took his plates and called the cops on his ass. Hee hee.
Well, there was the time I was with my Mom in the Santa Cruz (California) area just puttering down the highway minding our own business, and I happened to glance over to the lane next to us…
And there was a lady (in her car of course) eating cup-o-noodles style ramen (Maruchan brand to be exact), fork in one hand, cup in the other, newspaper spread over the steering wheel, and drafting by about six inches behind a big ol’ dump truck and plainly paying more attention to not getting soup on the paper than to anything else.
Driving with my Great Aunt Lidie (picture Miss Marple in a 1963 Valiant) would have been amusing in a screw-ball, What’s Up Doc? chase scene kind of way - if one didn’t value human life, that is. I was actually in the car with her when she realized she was going in the wrong direction, so she made a U-turn.
Out of curiosity, did you see this in North Texas, and was the driver tailgating when he unbuckled and turned around in his seat to tell his kids to quiet down while he was driving? If so, it was my brother.
What’s worse, he used to ride motorcycles, but he gave that up after riding down a stairwell by accident and totaling another bike in a parking space.
I’m in Australia so it is all back to front. Last week I was driving through an intersection in the left hand lane and the guy in the right hand lane turned left in front of me. I have no idea how I managed to stop and not hit him. He was so shocked by his own stupidity he stopped around the corner and just sat there for a while. Dickhead.
Maybe the worst was a young lady I was seeing for a while, who had her cell phone permanantly glued to her ear while driving. One time, she was on the phone to me when I heard a distinct thump, followed by a crunch, and was disconnected. Called back later to say she’d run over a curb and stripped the front bumper from her car. Another time, she called me while on her way down to her parent’s place in the Rio Grande Valley. About five minutes into the call she suddenly said, “Oh, I’ve got to hang up. I just passed a state trooper at about 85, and it looks like he’s coming after me.” The last straw was when another call got cut off suddenly, and she later called back so say that she’d knocked down “some Mexican guy on the sidewalk”. He wasn’t seriously hurt, apparently. From that point forward, I refused to speak to her if she called while driving.
OTOH, maybe I’m the worst. I seem to end up going the wrong way down one-way streets every once in a while. Fortunately, none of them so far have been jammed with traffic.
My former step-father used to read and drive all the time with my mother and me in the car. He would be speeding and whipping in and out of traffic at the same time. My mother would offer to drive but he’d refuse.
If you’re not passing someone you should be in the right hand lane. Especially if you’re travelling at or below the flow of traffic. That’s why there are two lanes there. It’s not your responsibility or right to enfore the speed limit.
On a two lane motorway (freeway), trying to get into the inside lane so I could get onto the next off-ramp. There was a big line of traffic in this lane, and this being Dublin, nobody would let me in, so I was indicating to pull over and slowed down to about 65 mph (the speed limit is 70). This woman in a Merc came up behind me and flashed and honked, but I wasn’t going anywhere until somebody pulled their head out of their ass and slowed down. So this stupid bitch overtook me by driving up onto the grass meridian, which was wet and only about 2 inches wider than her car, and slid past me, fishtailing, at about 80 mph.