Driving - Is it only for asses now?

If you drive in DC, I probably hate you. Sorry. Quit turning without signaling.

Also, quit running blood-orange lights; where the hell do you have to go to so quickly?

Also, go some damn place when the light turns green. You probably shouldn't have gotten in the car if you didn't want to go somewhere, so unless you're contending with dementia, pay some damn attention.

If you're suffering from Alzheimer's I apologize for honking at you the other day. My guess is we can just forget all about it.

Go buy this shirt. It's awesome.

Seriously, DC drivers are among the worst in the known universe. I've thought long and hard about why this is. I've driven in New York, Boston, Chicago, L.A., and many many spots in between. The best drivers are in the Pacific Northwest. Out there, people will slow down to accommodate your lane change if you put your blinker on. I KNOW! It confused me at first too.

In Boston, you are going to get cut off. Some optimist is going to hang a Louie the immediate second the light turns green - possibly before. There may be shouting. It's all in good fun.

In the Big Apple, taxi drivers will move into your lane. They all suffer from selective visual line neglect. The lane lines are more suggestions than law. If a road has four lanes, you can get five cars abreast once you get over 20 miles an hour. Even one way street signs are a bit elastic. You cannot, however, park there, wherever there may be. Don't even try it. You'll get a ticket.

In most of the southern towns, people are driving as though there's a gas shortage on and they'd like to stop and smell the roses, besides. Apparently you only drive fast if your car is decorated like a pop-up window in the South.

But DC, which may or may not be a southern town, depending on who you ask, has the worst drivers, I assume, because people are here from everywhere. North, South, East, West, Ethiopia, the Middle East, the Balkans, Detroit (where, I neglected to mention, driving is divided into tooling around town kind of heedless of traffic signs and driving on the freeway as close to the speed of light as physics will allow). The consequence of this diversity is that you never know how the person ahead of you is about to screw up their driving. Are they from a part of the country that thinks it's okay to wrest your right-of-way off you if they can turn left before you hit the pedal? Are they from some portion of the universe that applies the 5 second rule to red lights? Maybe they're from Texas and just don't give a rats ass where they end up today. The joy is in the journey, so why worry about when we get there?

My wise stepfather lectured me about driving by saying you have to avoid being surprising. Broadcast what you're about to do in as many ways as possible. Don't cede your right of way except in extreme circumstances, because most people don't expect you to. Use your goddamn signal. Accelerate out of corners, because other people taking turns generally don't expect to find two tons of steel and asshole hanging out in an intersection.

That's the problem with DC. There's probably the same percentage of bad drivers here as anywhere. It's just that they're being bad in so many stupid ways.