We’re a city of terrible drivers
I know we live in a tourist town with lots of out-of-town, out-of-state … even out-of-country drivers. And many times they are driving cars that are foreign to them, reading signs that might even be foreign… and goodness knows that for some, driving on the right side of the road is COMPLETELY foreign.
I do not wish to pick on a particular group of drivers, just driving in general.
With our traffic issues, I think we all need to be more considerate than ever and try to be part of the solution instead of being part of the problem. But I’m afraid it’s quite the opposite to my mind. When did it become OK to just stop in the middle of .. say… Orange Ave (during heavy traffic I might add) because you JUST realized that you are in the right lane and you NEED to be in the left turn lane… in less than 50 feet. I mean does a mistake on YOUR part justify punishing the rest of us?!? Your stopping in the middle of the road creates a bottleneck that extends back for a 1/2 mile as all of the cars STUCK behind you in the right line finally figure out that we’re going to have to go AROUND you to get where we’re going. Meanwhile, you sit there… blinker on…. neck craned as you peer hopelessly at the traffic and wonder how you’re going to get over.
Here’s a thought… If you make a mistake, inadvertant or otherwise, go on THROUGH the intersection and find a logical place to turn around. If you make the mistake, you should be the one inconvienenced, not the rest of us.
It’s bad enough out there with the tourists making sweeping-four-lane-at-a-time-right-hand turns…. we don’t need oafish locals making things worse.
For the record, this happened to me three times today. I think it’s a new record. Makes you wonder who teaches people to drive nowadays… seems like there’s hardly any courtesy at all.
And to the fellow in the tricked out black truck who thought he could make me feel intimidated while I was allowing another car to cross in front while we approached a red light…. you need to learn a bit of patience and courtesy.
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It sounds like you could use a little patience yourself. Maybe if people would not continuously assume the importance of their travel far outweighs all others and just take 2 seconds to stop and let someone in when they see a wrong lane strandee, then we could all get on with our lives instead of backing up traffic for miles. Maybe that person was in a strange part of town and didn’t know where the next logical place to turn around would be. You said yourself that you let someone in, which is great, but then you turn around and chastised the same person who you helped. You should instead chastise the other jerk drivers who always just refuse to just let a dude in.