My frustration with Long Island drivers has been reaching an all-time high lately. I have never been incited to road rage as often as I have been in the past few days. Drivers are rude, impatient, angry, reckless, irreverent and just plain annoying. I may have just described myself.
If you’re a pedestrian, watch out because you will get squashed. I can’t even remember all the ridiculous things I have seen the last few days, but they generally concern drivers suddenly deciding they want to make a turn out of the blue, failing to signal ( except when they forget their blinker light is on and proceed to drive for 3 miles down the highway oblivious), cutting people off, weaving in and out of traffic, and especially, driving at obscene speeds. People also like to honk at you like it’s their job if you aren’t doing what they want you to do ie. turning on red, moving over, accelerating to 70mph half a second after a light turns green.
I think I’ve mentioned before that there seems to be no happy medium for driving speed. Either you are going recklessly fast or ridiculously slowly. It annoys me to no end when a driver decides to ride up behind me with a foot of space between us to tell me that I need to go faster. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all about sending signals to other drivers to tell them they are going to slow; I do it all the time, but when I’m in the left lane already going considerably above the speed limit and you’re riding my tale because I’m not doing 80 or 85 then I have very limited sympathy. And especially when there’s another car in front of me or general traffic that would mean if your car got in front of me you’d get nowhere on the road. I enjoy watching these people try and pass me on the right and then get stuck behind a slow car. I generally will move over for someone who wants to go fast, but when the road doesn’t permit it then I won’t do something completely stupid just so you can pass me.
Merging is another killer. I’m amazed by the amount of people who won’t let me merge onto the highway or merge in situations where you really can’t come to a full stop. Yes, it might be slightly annoying for you, but if you either slow down or speed up then you can avoid having to deal with me at all, so don’t be rude and not let me in.
Now, the unfortunate situation I’ve seen lately is that by far the worst drivers are the police. I don’t favor bad mouthing law enforcement but there’s a reason that cops have a bad reputation sometimes. I’ve seen more examples of bad driving from cop cars probably than anyone else. The other day I saw a cop on the phone while driving!!! That is very very illegal in New York, but hey, if the law is doing it then why shouldn’t everyone else right? More annoying still are the cops who turn on their emergency lights to get through a traffic light and turn them off 2 seconds later. I’ve seen several cops use their lights to get through traffic. Unless traffic is at complete shutdown standstill, I’m pretty sure you can wait like the rest of the population.
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