If you or your vehicle are unable to drive the speed limit, you shouldn't be allowed on the road during commuter hours except in a dire emergency. No, I'm not talking to you, drivers of buses and large trucks; I take no issue with you. I wouldn't want to drive something that large on back roads, either. Trucks and buses, however, are rarely a problem for me.
I left the house this morning in plenty of time to make my commute without needing to speed - but I still arrived more than ten minutes late. What happened? I got behind a series of idiotic, toad-licking morons to whom the concept of driving a car on a road seemed totally unfamiliar.
It was a clear, sunny morning. The roads were dry and there was no wind. So if the speed limit is 50 and you're doing 35, I have one question for you: WHY?! I don't understand.
Are you out for a Sunday drive (on a Wednesday...)? Then let those of us who actually need to get somewhere go by. Is your car broken? It shouldn't be on the road. Are you that scared of driving? You shouldn't have a driver's license.
I've grown accustomed over the summer to commuting on the interstate. I enjoy it because when I come up behind you doing 60 (in a 65) in the passing lane, I can usually get the point across that you need to move over. On the interstate, you're not much of a problem. On my back-roads commute to school, however, you are a huge problem.
Only one vehicle out of five this morning had an obvious reason to be going as slow as it was, and that was a pickup truck with two kayaks in the bed. You don't want to drop those kayaks, fine, I understand. But if you're doing significantly less than the speed limit, you should still pull over and let the tail of thirteen cars behind you go by. It's not our fault you can't tie your shit down properly.
Here's another problem I see all the time. You're terrified of cop cars. It really pisses me off to be driving along and have someone in front of me slam on their brakes just because they saw a cruiser somewhere. There are two things you don't realize. One, if you're going that much under the speed limit, a cop can actually pull you over for obstructing traffic. Two, cops look for brake lights when they're trying to catch speeders. You will more often get away with cruising merrily by a cop at speed limit + 5 than you will with slamming on your brakes and doing speed limit -1, because you drew attention to yourself with those bright red lights.
I'm also accustomed to getting stuck behind tractors and other farm equipment, living in the very rural area that I do. That doesn't bother me. The farmers need to go about their business just like the rest of us. However, just because you're crawling along behind a tractor doing 7 miles an hour in a 40 doesn't give you the right to pass if there's oncoming traffic.
One morning at the end of last semester I was headed north to school for a day of finals. There was no one in front of me, and I was approaching the bottom of a hill and the entrance to a curve. Needless to say, the line in the road was a double yellow, as there's no more than 30-40 feet of visibility into that curve. A tractor was on its way down the hill in the other lane, followed by a long line of cars. Suddenly the first car in the line veered out and came at me in my lane doing well over the speed limit.
My reflexes are good, and I barely avoided a head-on collision. When I passed the tractor, I caught sight of a couple of horrified faces in the other cars waiting for their chance to go around.
Now what would you have done, stupid driver, if you'd hit me? My first guess is that you would have yelled at me, because this is Massachusetts and that's what happens here. Dane Cook's line "Why did you stop at a red light and let me hit you doing 80?!" is not a joke in this state, it's everyday life. Anyway, I was doing about 45, so you were probably doing at least 55 to 60, meaning we would most likely have both ended up in the hospital. Was your destination so damn important that it was really worth it to risk seriously injuring or even killing us both to get there 30 seconds earlier? Do you realize that if you'd been killed, you wouldn't have made it to that destination at all? Could you be any more of a dickweed?
I'm not even going to get started right now on the topic of rotaries, because that's another letter in itself, to be written another time. So, Awful Driver, the next time you go out for a jaunt at 8am doing 15 under the speed limit, think about it. I'm sure it's nice not having anywhere to be, but that doesn't make it right or polite of you to rub it in the rest of our faces that we have to work for a living.
Sincerely,
KK, Who Needs to Be Somewhere
