1578 Traffic

Wednesday, December 5, 2007

I haven't the faintest idea what has happened to today. It's 8:15 pm, I'm already tired, and I have done NOTHING all day. I think maybe it has something to do with the weather. It's almost 10 degrees below freezing outside, and although my house is reasonably tight, I feel cold. The thermostat says it's 74 in here. How can I be cold? I don't understand.

Speaking of not understanding, something is going on with other drivers lately that I don't understand.

I mentioned to a friend a few days ago that I've noticed lately that if I am on a multi-lane highway, and decide to change lanes, and there's a decent space in the lane I want to move into, and traffic in both lanes seems to be maintaining position (ideal for changing lanes), the very instant that I put my signal on to indicate the lane change, the car behind me in the target lane speeds up!, closing up the space.

Why? We could go on in the same positions for miles, but the minute I want to move into that lane, the other person speeds up. Is it a game? Is it "Oh no you don't - you can't get in front of me!" Or maybe they speed up when they see the signal because they hope I'll turn into them and buy them a new car? I don't understand.

So anyway, after I had mentioned it, my friend started noticing it too. So it's not just my perception, and not just people reacting to my little car. It really is happening a lot more.

Driving to dinner last night (1.5 hour drive), I noticed other strangenesses. I was heading down route 9w, during rush hour. People weren't paying attention to the speed limit, but not in the way one would expect. There's a section north of Highland with two south-bound lanes. The speed limit is 55, but there were two people, one in each lane, about two car-lengths apart, who were doing 45. Everyone behind them who wanted to do 55 had to pass one on the right, then squeeze back to the left to get past the second. And the guy potting along in the left lane never seemed to notice.

So when we finally got past them, and the long line of cars was doing 55, we came to a car on the right that had been pulled over by the police, nothing interesting, just an ordinary stop with plenty of room, and amazingly, everyone slowed down to 45, and then stayed at 45! Wha...? I don't understand. I didn't understand slowing down, and I don't understand staying slow.

From Highland south, the speed limit is mostly 55, with a few 40 or 45 patches through hamlets, and one 30 mph section where the village cop's radar gun is on hair-trigger. We stayed at 45 the entire way to Newburgh, even through the 30 mph section. I don't understand.

(Yeah, I did 45 through the 30, too, but it was because there was a long line of cars ahead of and behind me, and if I'd slowed down, twenty cars would have climbed into my trunk.)

Another thing I noticed was that when we stopped at a traffic light, and the line of stopped cars extended to cross another intersection, people blithely blocked the intersection, so that oncoming cars could not make a left turn into the side road. That stopped traffic on the other side, too. How stupid is that? Do they really not notice? Is everyone completely self-absorbed?

What's going on? Do we have a new generation of drivers who've never taken driver ed? My friend, back in the first example, has noticed the speed-up-at-lane-change problem in several states, so it's not a local thing.

Well, I made it to the dinner later than I meant, but still in time. I had to stop in Newburgh to pick up a friend, and I called her as I entered Newburgh and told her to go to the end of her driveway, "and hold your purse strap out so my side mirror can hook it as I pass, and then hang on tight!"

There were 12 of us at dinner, and I did manage to sit in the middle of the table, as I wanted. It was a pretty good group. Roman gave me a birthday gift of Israeli body lotion after dinner, and a CD of photos from his trip. I hadn't realized that although we'd talked on the phone several times since late October and his trip, I hadn't seen him since mid-October. How odd.

Now we have to get together sometime so he can narrate the photos.
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