The automobile is one mankind's greatest inventions. It allows unprecedented personal mobility and freedom, and the relatively-inexpensive, easy-to-operate, easy-to-maintain nature of the modern vehicle makes it so almost anyone can cover long distances in a short period of time, without requiring physical strength, personal fortune, or technical knowhow. That being said, I'm starting to rethink the whole thing, since so many people just can not fucking drive!
Heading to and returning from martial arts class Tuesday night, I actively avoided
four accidents. Literally, four different people would have crashed into my car, or caused me to crash into them, if I had not seen them coming and gotten out of the way. And I'm not even counting the lady in the Subaru SUV I saw hit another car while leaving a gas station, the Lexus SUV I saw slam on the brakes and swerve two lanes to the right to make an exit ramp at the last possible second, (it had to stop on the shoulder and wait for a clearing in traffic to merge), and the moving van that sat diagonally blocking two lanes of traffic on a three lane street, while cars backed up out of sight and the idiot truck driver waited for the one remaining lane to clear so he could turn left.
I don't know if people really are getting worse at driving, or I'm just in a statistical rut of seeing more than my fair share of idiots, but damn it's dangerous out there.
1) Heading to class, I was approaching an on ramp down a two-lane street. One lane of traffic flows in each direction, and as such if you want to make a left turn you have to wait for both lanes to be clear. I was driving about 27 in the 25 zone, in bright daylight (I hate daylight savings time), with my signal on, intending to turn left onto the on-ramp entrance. Just before it a woman in a big silver SUV was waiting to turn left, and after looking left and right, she pulled out directly in front of me. I mean directly; she wasn't more than fifty feet away, and for an instant I figured she'd seen me, seen my signal, estimated my speed, realized I was going to turn, and planning to stomp it and zoom through the space ahead of my silver sport car. It would have been kind of reckless, but she could physically have zipped through the space without forcing me to slow down, though her actions could easily have panicked another driver into swerving right and hitting her anyway.
She didn't zip though, and apparently didn't see me at all, since she rolled at usual creeping death SUV speed, and only looked over when the shriek of my skidding tires and blaring horn alerted her. I stopped about ten feet from her passenger door, with her vehicle blocking both lanes of traffic, and only then did she throw up her hands in a panicked kind of gesture and floor it.
I stopped for gas before class (How did gas jump like 30 cents a gallon in the past week? Did Bush invade another Middle Eastern country, or what?) and saw the aforementioned woman in an SUV hit another car trying to turn out of the driveway, and the moving fan fun. The rest of the drive to class was uneventful, though I always expect some crashes going through downtown Oakland; there are just too many stop lights at every block and one-way streets. I didn't see any today, though.
2) I've got the nagging feeling #2 was on the way to class, but I've grown so inured to people driving insanely that it's all a blur. After class though, I was driving home and saw the aforementioned SUV swerve from the #3 lane across #4 and #5 onto the shoulder (he would surely have hit any cars in them, if they hadn't been vacant) trying to make an exit. If there's one thing they should teach people in driver's ed, it's to just miss your exit, if you see it too late. You go a mile, you exit, you turn around, you come back. What's the big deal? Swerving causes hella accidents. And if you don't know where you're going, you stay in the right lane in the first place, where the exits are. Is that so hard?
Anyway, about five minutes after that swerving idiot I was approaching a freeway merge in the right lane. The right two lanes exit, and there was, you guessed it, an SUV in the lane to my left. He was going about 70, I was going about 72, and not in any real hurry in the 65 MPH zone. As we got near the exit, the right lane gained another lane to the right, and as we passed a sign informing us the exit was coming up in .5 miles, the SUV jerked to the right, straight at me. I was already merging right into the new lane, so he would have missed me anyway, but he must have seen me at the last minute since he jerked back and braked hard enough that he soon vanished in my rear view mirror.
It sounds like I'm singling out SUVs, but it's just how things happened. They are dangerous vehicles; I don't know if the drivers are as clueless as
some news reports would have us believe, but they make up about about 40% of the cars on the road up here, and involved in about 85% of the dangerous driving I see. I've learned to watch them closely when passing them, or changing lanes, since SUVs never see my sports car to their side. The trucks are up high and can't see a sports car with a glance over their shoulder, and few drivers are competent to correctly-align their mirrors, and check them before changing lanes. The one tonight though, I didn't worry about since I'd been behind him for at least a mile, and only very slowly gaining on him. There weren't any other cars in sight either, so he had to have noticed my headlights behind him. I could see the blue glow of a TV screen in his windows, so we'll assume it was some parent distracted by their kid and the TV, or possibly someone stupid enough to try and watch TV while driving.
3) Not five miles further on, I was in the left lane near a freeway merge. Another single lane comes in there on the left, the fast side of the freeway, and I've driven that exit before, and know there are about 10 signs telling you to watch to the right, to merge into traffic, to beware of cars, and so on. So I'm tooling along in the left lane at about the speed limit, in moderate traffic, and I see a car coming along on the left as the other lane slowly merges towards mine. It's not an SUV for once; it was some kind of crappy Chrysler mid-size sedan, and as I watched it gradually moved towards my left side, as the lane merged into the main freeway. I had a car about six lengths ahead of me, and another about five behind me, and I kept thinking, "Any minute now, that Chrysler is going to speed up or slow down and get ahead of or behind me."
I didn't care which, the road wasn't crowded at 9:30pm, a fact I made sure of by checking my right side mirror. No one over there, and that was a good thing since over the next five seconds the Chrysler slowly merged into my lane, eventually taking up exactly the spot I'd been in. It was kind of eerie; nothing blocking their view, I wasn't behind them in their blind spot, my headlights were on, a car was behind me so I should have been clearly visible in their lights, etc. Nothing, no reaction at all, and there is an absolute certainty they would have banged into the driver's side of my car if I hadn't seen them coming and changed lanes.
The funny part was that the car behind me saw it and as I got over he honked twice. The fast pair of blasts of noise must have unsettled the Chrysler driver, since it slowed down rapidly, dropping to about 55, which enabled me to effortlessly slide back into the lane I'd been in, in the position I'd been in. I just feel bad for the guy behind me, since he was then stuck way below the speed limit, behind the idiot in the Chrysler, while I zoomed on into the night.
4) Actually, the really sad part is that I know there was a 4th incident, since when the SUV almost hit me on the way home I laughed and told myself, "That's three!" And then the Chrysler came along five minutes later. That I can't remember the fourth near accident in 45 minutes of driving is either a bad sign about my memory, or the quality of drivers on the roads today.
Labels: driving, SUVs
