Comments on: clueless drivers

By: Dan

Dan — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 22:51:47 +0000

Have to agree with the coastal differences. Having lived from Hawaii to New Hampshire I’ve noticed collective driving styles between “east and west”. Out west drivers tend to do there own driving. In the east most people feel this need to hitch up their car to the driver in front of them. It’s kind of “clueless” in it’s own way. They can’t see anything around the truck in front them and don’t dare take their eyes off that bumper in front of them, or take the foot off of the brake that’s constantly flashing. Too much unchecked anxiety, I’ll take the west for sunday driving thanks.

By: Dirty Davey

Dirty Davey — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 02:57:29 +0000

You must drive a Miata, cos that’s about the only thing that can’t see over or around a Civic.

By: david carlton

david carlton — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 00:18:45 +0000

Suggestion #7: don’t drive an SUV, so, if I’m behind you, I can see whether or not there are any cars in front of you! :-)

By: Dirty Davey

Dirty Davey — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 23:46:11 +0000

Suggestion #6: don’t tailgate the car stuck behind a slow driver. They can’t do a damn thing about it.

By: John Cowan

John Cowan — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:30:14 +0000

New York City Suggestion #1: Leave your @#$% cars at home. They clutter up our streets. When you come here, walk, take taxis, buses, or the subway. If you’re a geek (and if not, what are you doing here?), you can figure out the system easily enough — I managed to when I was eight, and I wasn’t even living here at the time.

By: malvasia bianca » Blog Archive » dealing with annoying drivers

malvasia bianca » Blog Archive » dealing with annoying drivers — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 22:10:15 +0000

[...] Jordan responded to my earlier post by adding: If you would like to be driving 5 mph faster than you are, but someone is preventing you, stop and think about how much difference the extra 5 mph makes to your overall life goals. If the answer is â€œnot very much,â€ then try to keep from getting angry. Angry people are bad drivers. [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 15:23:09 +0000

I believe that the cops, in general, give tickets to cars that aren’t acting like other cars. Almost everyone violates the speed limit all the time; the infraction that gets ticketed is breaking the contextual rules about speed.

So that’s the pro: when you let other cars keep you company, they help establish a suitably non-law-enforcement-affronting pace.

Obviously, this only works if you _are_ paying attention to what the other cars on the road are doing. But it’s a very good reason to pay attention!

By: david carlton

david carlton — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 04:56:04 +0000

Right, you should only worry about suggestion 3 if there is traffic behind you: if you look in your rear view mirror and see empty road, great! It’s amazing how much people worry about keeping up with the car ahead of them – in my experience, if you try to stick close to a fixed speed (without, of course, acting clueless) in moderately-loaded traffic, you’ll find many wonderful vast gaps in traffic, with your experience periodically interrupted by packs of cars surging past you, or packs of cars that you encounter and pass. Why people default to staying close to other cars instead of staying away from other cars is a mystery to me…

(Hmm: what are the pros and cons of defaulting to staying a given following distance from the car ahead of you? Not sure.)

By: How to drive, by David « Quomodocumque

How to drive, by David « Quomodocumque — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 04:34:56 +0000

[...] How to drive, by David 18Aug07 David has a great post today featuring suggestions for fellow California drivers, written with the attention and rigor he usually applies to software engineering. Suggestion 1: You do not have a god-given right to stay in one lane in perpetuity. [...]

By: Jordan

Jordan — Sun, 19 Aug 2007 04:27:31 +0000

These are good, but I disagree with suggestion 3, at least in conjunction with suggestion 2. The presence of two separate suggestions indicates that there’s something you have to think about if there’s a lot of space in front of you, even if there’s no one behind you. I disagree, and I think that people working hard to catch up to the wave of traffic in front of them helps keep the highway congested!

Suggestion 5 is my favorite, but I fear your ideal of a communalistic driving experience is still very far from being realizable. Someday we’ll be able to display messages on each of the four sides of the car via steering-wheel text-messaging, and then we’ll be getting somewhere.