Imma Flick a Booger on Your Windshield.
Yes. You're a terrible driver.
Several years ago, when I was in nursing school, I had an interesting conversation with one of the members of my cohort as we both walked in to the University of Rochester School of Nursing. Like well over half of my cohort, my fellow student was from west of the Mississippi. Oregon, in fact.
As we walked in to the SON, I mentioned a particularly harrowing drive from my house that morning. We commiserated about the poor driving skills to be found around Rochester, NY. I can remember her saying, clear as day, “what’s up with nobody using turn signals here? Your cars have them, right?”.
Fast forward to today, and I’m living back in good ‘ol Ra-cha-cha. I’ve been back here for several years after a brief time away. Wanna know what? People in Rochester still SUCK at driving. Like an industrial vacuum driven by a nuclear-powered turbo-supercharger. That level of suck. Sounds like hyperbole, right?
Wanna take a ride?
Life insurance paid up?
I’m going to be totally up front with you all here. I failed Drivers Education. Yes, I did. It was only because, having a May birthday, I signed up for the summer offering at my high school and, perhaps unsurprisingly, had a hard time making it to class. Living in a lake town, given the option of hanging out with your friends on a boat in the warm summer sun, skiing, tubing and chasing girls, or spending the day with a couple of very tightly-wound DrEd instructors, what would you choose?
Still deciding?
I didn’t think so.
But, in the intervening 38 years since that summer, after receiving my driver’s license, I have had exactly zero moving violations, and zero collisions, so I guess that I figured out a few things about how to drive safely.
Now, what exactly is it that concerns me about Rochester drivers? Three things come to mind: first, cars have BLIND SPOTS, but Rochester drivers seem to relish in hanging out in that space where they can’t be seen, like ghosts waiting for the perfect moment to appear. Of course no one will ever have to make a sudden lane change to avoid hitting another physical object. Never happens.
Second, sometimes differing lanes of traffic have to merge into other lanes. I know, I know, that sounds like crazy talk, but it does happen. Don’t worry though. That car that just came down the onramp at highway speed can easily slow down before the lane ends. Changing lanes to let someone else in to the traffic pattern is a burden no-one should ever be asked to endure.
Third, there seems to be some sort of competition happening, particularly among those who pilot ridiculously large, black pickup trucks. The competition seems to be centered on the minimum distance that one of these vehicles can be piloted behind the bumper of the car in front of them. The grand prize for the closest continuous spacing for the longest, uninterrupted time? A free trip to the Golden Corral buffet for the driver and all 17 of the people they can fit in the cab of their truck. Or maybe it’s just that the owner of that vehicle is trying to show me how clean their headlights are.
In my 11 mile daily drive to work, I am treated to the joy of having to spend time merging on to one interstate, making my way along that interstate as it splits into another, then trying to exit the second highway shortly after that split, with the exit dumping on to one of two extremely busy surface roads. I have often considered mainlining xanax after that trip.
The problem, it seems to me, that underlies all three of my complaints is a simple lack of courtesy. As we pack ourselves, like lemmings, into our shiny metal boxes (thanks to The Police for that great lyric), we forget that there are human beings in all the other shiny metal boxes around us. Other people with hopes, dreams, friends and family, things to do and places of their own to get to safely. We cruise along in our well-insulated vehicles that have air conditioning and nice sound systems, all things that serve to separate us from the world outside and we forget that we are piloting an incredibly expensive and powerful machine that can kill. In an instant.
Showing courtesy to another driver by letting them into your lane, or by not trying to breed their tailpipe or blind-spotting them at highway speed is not, in any way, an act of weakness. It’s an act of strength. It’s a show of kindness and humanity that we all need to display behind the wheel. Our modern life has enough struggle and strife without having to add to it by having our daily commute turned into a crap shoot of life and death. And a lot of us die on our highways every year. 42,514 in 2022.
Oh yeah, Rochester, I almost forgot: learn how to use a fucking turn signal, for God’s sake. Those things are incredibly helpful.