We had a huge storm here on Friday with 80 mph straight line winds for about 20 minutes. As you can imagine, there were trees and power lines down all over and power was lost in a huge area. All eight traffic lights between work and home were dead. You will be shocked to learn that there are drivers who 1. Don’t know to treat intersections with nonfunctional traffic lights as four way stops, and 2. Don’t know HOW to treat those intersections as four way stops. It was a hair raising journey home.
We drove in a funeral procession for a close family member a number of years ago. The number of drivers who cut into the procession, sat on their horns and/or flipped us off for our slow speed was disgusting. One even got into the opposing lane and raced ahead to pass the procession on the left. Lucky there wasn’t a head-on collision.
Amazing how many people abuse yellow lights. They have a clear purpose – “come to a stop if you safely can.” They are specifically timed to allow people going up to the speed limit time to stop and allow enough time for those too close to the light to make it through before it turns red.
They never mean “speed up to get through the light” or “as long as I am 1 foot over the line before it turns red I’m okay.” Some people literally use them the opposite of their intended purpose.
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Exactly. The left lane is always the passing/fast (depending the state definition) lane in a multilane highway. No reason to ever be in it for a sustained time unless you are persistently passing others. I just got back from driving over 1,000 miles in Italy on their highways and it was amazing how much better traffic flowed because almost everyone respected moving back out of the left lane except when actively passing people. Even if they were going fast enough to be able to move to the right only for 20 seconds, they would move over then move back. It was great.
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Similarly, the so-called, “fast lane” is routinely regarded as the lane to cruise 10 miles per hour above the speed limit, whatever the limit happens to be. And, god-forbid it’s a four-lane highway because that just mean there’s often a “fast”, a “faster” and a “fastest” lane. I wouldn’t put it at the top of my list of dangerous conditions because I can choose to try tempting fate or not. I’m just saying, that seems to be the state of things in Drive-Time Land.
+20 in Chicagoland is the norm for the (farthest) left lane. They are flying whenever they can, probably because the bottlenecks are so frustrating.
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Thought of this thread on Sunday. Returning from Portland Maine after a fun day out with the girls. We were on Rt 1 headed south just past the Perkins Cove area when a car just cut across the highway to get to a business/parking lot on the right hand side. I had to jam the brakes really hard and swerve into the other lane to avoid that car - a collision seemed imminent. It took quite a while for my heart rate to come back to normal after that. Whoever was in that car was extremely lucky that cars in both directions were able to avoid hitting them!
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Bellevue, WA is #4 on the safest drivers’ list? I can believe that. Kids driving their parents’ very expensive cars to the mall! “One scratch on that Lamborghini, and you are grounded for a week!” 
And Uber drivers driving very carefully because chances are high the car one hits is a $300k car.
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