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Annoyance of the Day(tm) — Drivers that don’t know how to make a right turn
There are a lot of different types of annoying drivers — the ones that can’t drive while talking on their cell phone, the ones poking along at 25mph in a 70 in the left lane, the ones whose car clearly hasn’t had their emissions checked since 1982.
Today, my particular annoyance is drivers that don’t know how to make a right turn. If you ask me, it’s not a particularly difficult automotive maneuver: you turn on your blinker, brake a little bit, make the turn, accelerate out and continue about your merry way.
If you’re the car in front of me this morning, though, you take a different approach: don’t turn on your blinker, brake a little bit (with your brake lights out), brake a little more, brake a lot more, come to a near complete stop, swerve into the left lane a bit, dive into the turn without accelerating, and slowly continuing about your way, probably on your cell phone.
Hot tip #1: You do not need to come to a complete near stop to turn.
Hot tip #2: Fix your brake lights.
Hot tip #3: If you’re that worried about rollover, accelerate coming out of the turn.
Hot tip #4: Unless you’re driving a bus, 18-wheeler, or some models of Ford Excursion, your wheel base is not so giant that you need to swerve left before diving into a turn.
The latter is the one that annoys me the most — I can deal with taking a turn really slowly if that really is the fastest you’re comfortable taking it. But if you’re driving a Toyota Corolla, you do not need to do the crazy left-lane swerve to make a right turn. Please don’t. It really bothers me when I’m in that left lane. And I’m sure I’m not alone.
Mon August 14th, 2006 8:37 pm
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Painfully true… and yet, if we were to chase them down and ram them into a ditch, WE’D be the ones going to jail.
What I always tell myself- which doesn’t necessarily make me feel any better- is that you have to expect that most people out there WILL drive atrociously. The people who suck on the highways are the same people you hate in your pedestrian life; your incompetent coworkers who sit there and cry when their computer freezes up, your fellow supermarket shoppers who bash their carts into your leg because their gaze was fixed on the cheese sample table, and so forth.
How could we rational folk assume that those fools could transform themselves into polished veterans behind the wheel? There’s not much you can do, other than go out and buy the biggest, scariest SUV you can afford, and terrorize everyone in sight.
Here at work Big Dan drives a Big Truck and makes Big Turns. For example, when he’s making a U-turn around a lovely grassy median impeccably maintained by the city of Irving, he does not use the temporary, extra 3rd lane cut out of the median on the far left of the road for just such a purpose. He stays in the 2nd, middle, lane and U-turns across the U-turn lane, the median, and both lanes of traffic going the opposite direction. We complete our U-turn on a deserted stretch of road in Saskatchewan.
Be wary of jacked up F-250’s in the DFW area.
Dude, it’s unfair that you assume the driver was on his cell phone. He was probably rummaging through his purse instead.
CWW: I’m all for ramming into ditches, but I’d need a specific ramming-into-ditches car. I don’t want to scratch mine up. This could be the only reasonable excuse for buying a Hummer.
Mike: Big Dan sounds Big Scary. and don’t worry — I make it a note to always be wary of jacked of F250s.
Rob: …