“Don’t get me started,” amirite? As we can all attest, it’s just about impossible not to encounter ding-dongs of varying levels of ding-dongosity whenever one ventures out onto the roads. No matter how brief the trip, you’ll probably have at least one interaction with another motorist that causes you to experience at the very least mild dismay, at the very most complete brain-bogglement — or, somewhere in between, annoyance and full vein-throbbing outrage.
Obviously, what you want to do in these situations is yell, “HAY, watch it!” (top image) and floor it while holding the horn button down (bottom image). It’s in the manual. Image: Etsy seller
Hopefully we’re all able to keep our emotions in check while we’re on the road (unhinged is never a good look), but it’s only human to feel frustrated when the other drivers you’re counting on to be safe, aware, and courteous (or at least not-dangerous) aren’t holding up their end of the bargain. And so we ask, what bad behaviors do you find most irksome when you’re behind the wheel? Obviously street racing, drunk-driving, or otherwise being willfully reckless are total no-goes–we’re talking about the day-to-day stuff isn’t wantonly illegal but just makes you nuts. Like driving down the street with daytime running lights and no taillights. Come on!
To the comments!
Top image: Guillermo Spelucin/stock.adobe.com
#1 is people who stop at an intersection/stop sign to pickup some passengers – and those passengers aren’t even there. Frequently done when there are parking spaces available. #2 is people who don’t pull over at all to discharge passengers, so every one behind them has to wait for the passenger to get out, collect their 1000 small packages that aren’t in bags, etc.
In southern Missouri the best (worst? Best/s?) Is when the person in the lest lane is driving beside the person in the right lane 5mph under the speed limit. Also three lane roads everyone will drive in the middle lane because no one knows how to merge into traffic. There was even a psa campaign to teach people how merging works but it didn’t help.
I thought it was all the stupid shit that everyone else does around me. Even the things that I do around them. Are you trying to trigger me into a road rage incident, punk?
The semi truck drivers taking miles to pass each other for no good reason seems to be a big one for a lot of folks here.
Let me try to explain it. As a truck driver.
Devils advocate if you will.
Commercial truck drivers have to pay a lot more attention to their surroundings than you little people with your little cars and little lives 😉
We have to pay good old fashioned attention to road signs and such. There are a lot of signs we need to look out for that you normies probably don’t even notice (clearance height under a bridge for example).
It takes a lot longer for us to change lanes or merge safely so it’s best for us to travel in the second lane from the right to avoid merging traffic from on-ramps and “disappearing” lanes on the highway (those “lane ends” in… signs that seem to be Latin to y’all).
Hold on, hear me out you insignificant highway plebeians 😉
Tractor trailer drivers have to look out for each other, and we do. When there are other tractor trailers around in traffic it further complicates the merging and passing distances necessary to be a safe driver.
This is not helped by everyone else’s dangerous insistence on not getting stuck behind us no matter what (I’m talking to you “gap racers”).
There’s a reason I leave so much following distance in front of me. It takes longer to stop. ( there’s a saying in trucker speak that goes something along the lines of “if you cut me off, I’m not gonna swerve and roll this thing, I’m going straight through you”).
Truckers understand each other differently than regular traffic. Another trucker and I both see the lane ends sign long before we get to the end of the lane and so, give each other plenty of room even if that means being annoyingly slow to all y’all in your Micro Machines.
What looks like my inability to pass is really me paying attention to the road a quarter mile ahead and the other trucks possible necessary future movements within that quarter mile.
I don’t know their intentions or where they are going, are they taking the next exit?
All I know is they may have to get over unexpectedly and so I have to pace them and only pass when the road signs and possible oncoming merging allows me to do so safely.
So yeah, if I’m on the left ready to pass another semi but there’s an interchange or something coming up I slow down to give them plenty of room to get over into my lane if they have to (none of y’all seem to know how on ramps and blind spots work).
Sure, I could just get behind this other truck, not try to pass them. But then you have what is basically a trains length of tractor trailers in the merge lane as idiots roll onto the freeway, bumper to bumper at 45 mph until you notice us at the last second and zoom ahead of us instead of just zippering in behind us then passing safely on the left (“gap racers”).
And naturally every time I have to get over to the left to avoid the chaos of the far right lane there’s another gap racer zipping around my trailer two feet from my bumper, ignoring my 15 blinkers then camping in my blind spot.
So.. what you perceive as a slight traffic annoyance (some of you went so far as to indicate that we do it on purpose, for fun?) is actually just us doing our jobs to the best of our abilities, and trying to drive as safely as possible at highway speed, with 40,000lbs of cargo in a 53’ trailer right along side your Prius as you tap and retap at your smartphone buttons (I can see inside all of your cars, everyone has a phone in their lap, stop pretending you don’t, I can see it).
There’s a lot more going on in the semi passing a semi situation y’all are griping about than meets the eye.
But most of the time, when this happens, it really is just another oblivious moron behind the wheel.
As a commercial truck driver, I can tell you there is no excuse for another commercial truck driver to camp on my left for so long, leaving me no evasive escape from the chaos of the right lane. Either pass me or get in line.
In trucker speak this is what we call an asshole.
I see what you’re saying, and I have definitely observed this behavior of actually negotiating traffic. I try to be pretty aware of when trucks need to change lanes.
What I think people are talking about is cruising along on the interstate, doing my typical X over the speed limit. It might even be a little crowded, there could be a lot of cars moving along nicely. Ahead are two trucks in line in the right lane. Then the rear truck pulls out to pass probably cutting off a car in the left lane, going 1 mph faster than the other truck. 5 minutes later they complete the pass. Meanwhile traffic has backed up and created a jam of 20 cars, just because they needed to go 1 mph faster.
After the pass, they both just continue along in the right lane.
That was my extremely long winded point.
Those guys are assholes.
1 mph faster? Try .000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 mph faster.
I can push that button over and over again too.
Watch. 000000000000000
Nailed it!
I actually don’t mind this with semis so much, but when a four wheel car takes 2 miles to pass a truck and then stays in the left lane for two more miles because another truck is 5 miles down the road really bothers me.
I have three pet peeves:
First, oblivious drivers who must use every last inch of the on ramp/acceleration lane before merging into the right lane of the freeway, usually while accelerating slowly and not paying attention to the cars behind them or the traffic in the right freeway lane. Very dangerous.
Second are drivers who pass me and then slow down to below my cruising speed, forcing me to slow down or pass them about a minute later.
Finally, drivers who make extremely slow turns at intersections, especially right turns when they don’t have to cross oncoming traffic. They are often older drivers.
Worst is crawl to end of ramp and stop. That’s scary sh*t
The goons that try to tail me by pulling out a car length behind me when I’m leaving my house.
•I saw the pile of cigarette butts next to your car when I passed it.
•Leaving your headlights off just makes you more obvious.
•I just took four right turns in a row, we are passing your pile of cigarette butts again.
It’s just insulting.
Here’s an odd one. I used to get off work around 3:00 AM. At that time I was very careful of speed and would use my cruise control to stay on 70. Several times a police car would settle in the fast lane and match my speed. There was no other traffic so it wasn’t a roadblock situation. They wouldn’t make eye contact. They would stay there until my exit, ten miles later. I still wonder what that was about.
Also, why will one truck pass another truck on the highway by going one lousy MPH faster? Are they both on their governors and won’t back off or are they messing with people because they can?
Haha.The cops were sitting back there trying to will you into making mistakes
3 really bad behaviours I see constantly in Vancouver:
1) Abrupt lane changes without warning or signalling. This usually occurs on four lane roads and someone travelling in the inside lane gets stuck behind someone turning left. You really have to watch for this because ppl will cut u off or crash into you just so they can get around someone turning left.
2) U-Turns in the middle of the street. See this a lot – ppl will slam on the brakes mid-block and cut off traffic while they do a 3-point turn in order to go back the way they came.
3) Not stopping at red lights before turning right. They don’t even slow down. As a pedestrian, really have to watch for this.
I have lots of peeves, but the most consistently frustrating are drivers that don’t accelerate to the speed of traffic when merging onto the freeway. Unlike most bad driver behaviors, this one forces me to engage in an unsafe activity (that is, merging at something less than the speed of traffic).
To add to that. Once they’re on the freeway they accelerate so slowly as to be a rolling roadblock. You’ll pass them, get up to cruising speed, and a mile later they pass you going 20 mph faster.
My pet peeves vary depending on where I’m driving since every place has their own stupid flavor. Lack of signaling is a global problem.
Around the SF Bay Area, it is Toyotas being left lane blockers and Nissan Altimas driving like complete idiots because they don’t have licenses or insurance and their car is in danger of being repossessed again.
Driving in Oregon, it is the fact that no one can do the speed limit, so it takes 20 miles to pass one car on I-5. Yes, the revenuers in Oregon are always out in force, let me take that risk, I’ve got places to be.
Around NYC, it is cars with fraudulent out of state registrations. For whatever unknown reason, that car with Georgia or South Carolina plates is likely to drive like five times more aggressively than the average NYC psychopath driver (and I say that as someone who finds driving in NYC easy once you zen with psychopathic defensive driving). NJ and CT plates just drive like standard issue idiots, GA or SC are unhinged idiots.
I’ve driven in 45 of 50 states, but don’t have recent enough experience with others to do a region by region cataloging of the regional stupidity of choice.
1. The people who get angry and tailgate you because you let someone merge in front of you. Especially when you are already in the left lane, going the speed of traffic but with more than 1 mm to the next bumper. Sometimes they pass on the right and grief the person ahead of you instead. Good riddance.
2. Further to point 1, driving with the brights on or just really harsh and improperly aimed lights. They seem to be the same people as #1, and they just really, really suck.
Thankfully despite Ontario having a generally awful reputation I find drivers in my city to have a good grasp of lane discipline and good road sense. They don’t suffer mistakes or hesitation, and don’t believe in turn signals, but hey – the devil you know!
It seems like I have a new driving pet-peeve every week, all the time and right now it’s two things.
People making illegal u-turns in the middle of the street to go around road construction instead of turning around at the next light.
The other thing is stop sign etiquette. I moved into a new neighborhood last year and have learned that stop signs are apparently completely optional. If I had a dash cam, I’d catch 5+ people a day just blowing stop signs in my neighborhood. Oh, and people in my area tend to have personal golf carts they drive around. Some are plated, yet none of them stop at stop signs either. They just blow through them, and sometimes turn into oncoming lanes to make corners. I’ve almost taken a few families out.
Easy. People who pull out in front of me and then immediately turn. There is a spot on my home where this happens constantly. It’s a rural highway with very sparse traffic so waiting for me to go by would add like 3 seconds to their trip. But it causes me to slow down to avoid hitting them and then come to a complete stop a few hundred yards later. Absolutely maddening.
Very simple. Folks who either don’t use turn signals or even more frustrating, those who signal exactly at the intersection or a whole 20 feet before the intersection.
Oh, forgot one that really irks me as a law-abiding citizen: People driving “ghost vehicles” – ones with egregiously expired temp tags, no tags at all, and of course, worst of all, the “sovereign citizen” plates. If any of these schmucks hit my car, how would I even go about reporting them?
Of course I have a few:
OK, I haven’t seen this one yet so it may be confined to Northern Utah. Traffic backing-up on the highway because there is an added lane. Yeah, you read that right. There are places where there are routine traffic slowdowns where the highway goes from 2 lanes to 3 lanes and it is confined to those spots. Makes no sense…
I has confuse….
Any time there is a configuration change of a road, people slow down. The better designed roads add a new lane as an entrance ramp instead of adding a lane on the left.
Considering our highways were apparently designed by drunken badgers, this checks-out…
The new lane was added on the right, but it was done between entrances for reasons that defy all logic.
I have four. All are very common in the Seattle area:
Those who go 20 in a school zone outside of school hours.Pedestrians who crawl across the street in front of me with all of the time in the world. (Please, take your time, everyone can wait.)Double-footed drivers. (Do your brake lights mean you’re speeding up or slowing down?)Overly courteous drivers. (There was a funny Pemco insurance ad about this very thing years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvuGpAI1AfI)
Whining about other drivers. Loser behavior!
Pious shit.
I have two, folks who don’t understand free flow right turn lanes and will stop and wait for an opening, while I am travelling at speed behind them hauling loose anvils in the back of the station wagon, and people who pass you on the highway with a clear lane in front and yet pull in about 10 meters off your front bumper
I really hate the second one. People who get really close behind and wait until the last second to get in the passing lane. Then after passing pull back in as soon as their blind spot warning light goes out. Never mind that the passing lane is wide open. And the adaptive cruise control slows the vehicle down dramatically. Morons.
I have two:
Turning on to a four-lane road in a way that would cause you to flunk your driver’s test. IE turning left into the curbside lane or right into the lane nearest the center line of the road. These would both cause you to fail a driver’s test, but if you assume that anyone will make these turns the way they are taught, you’re going to have an accident, and probably really soon.
Left-lane bandits.
Oh, just when people act like selfish stupid douchebags. That’s it, really…
Honestly, everything that most drivers do. It’s entirely too easy to get a license in the U.S., and it varies entirely too much from state to state, so almost everyone does something they really shouldn’t. I’m not arguing for fewer people to get a license. I know that it’s damn near a requirement in most of the country because public transportation is a joke, and everything is too spread out to bike or walk, reasonably. But we should require people to actually learn enough to drive correctly before we let them, there should be more standardized requirements, and there should be required periodic practical exams to keep the license (like when it expires, you shouldn’t be able to just go renew it by proving you can still see, kind of, and paying for it). I don’t think most people are incapable of being a good driver, I don’t think we are requiring them to be.
But enough ranting; pragmatically, I know it isn’t feasible.
No one has asked me to do anything more than pay $25 online to renew my license for decades. Haven’t taken an eye exam since I moved to NY and had to get a new license after my previous one expired. Crazy.
In Arizona your license is good until you’re 65.. yes, if you got your license tomorrow it would expire in 2069 (nice)
I live in Massachusetts so I could write a book…
I grew up in New England and hadn’t been back for significant time in about a decade. Other than the left, all those exist everywhere. HOWEVER, the one not on your list that doesn’t exist everywhere? Speeding up significantly when being passed. My lord. I’ll be on cruise control coming to pass, and all of a sudden, it’s neck and neck! And it was super frequent! Argh!
Those drivers with the fancy lights and sirens that ride my ass.
Go around already!