Scott en Aztl‡n
People should be taught to drive more aggressively.
One time, I was driving in fairly heavy but still free-flowing traffic (middle lane of 3 going at 80km-h, fast lane at 90km-h). I was in the middle lane, and we pbutted an on-ramp (traffic merges into the slow lane) where the merged traffic was doing about 50km-h. A car that had just merged had its indicator on.
So the woman driving in front of me in my lane (about 10m behind the driver in the adjacent lane who was indicating) slammed on her brakes, going down from 80 to 35 nearly instantly. This, apart from nearly causing me to crash, caused a big middle-lane clump. It even caused people in the fast lane to slow down (let's not even begin to try and understand the mentality of that).
Fortunately, traffic was not quite so heavy as usual, and it managed to recover. But it occurred to me that this sort of event is exactly how traffic congestion starts every weekday... when traffic is heavy enough that the clump and the 35km-h becomes the upper limit until there is a let-up several hours later.
The worst thing is that the woman probably had no idea just how dangerous her manoeuvre was, and had no idea that she could have just caused 50,000 people to waste an extra hour of their time than if she hadn't done that.
If questioned on the matter, she would have said that she was being considerate and letting the other driver in. If it were pointed out that she were being considerate to 1 person and inconsiderate to several people behind her, she would dismiss the people behind her as being selfish.
It isn't rocket science to know that traffic flows best when the people who have the right of way, actually use it. If some jerk tries to move into my lane when I have right of way, I don't move out of the way. If the guy wants to write off his car and pay for me to get a new car, he can be my guest. Funnily enough, nobody has taken me up on that offer yet.
