The Crazy Rants of Samantha BurnsI'm going mad! Mad! Mad - I tell you!
I swear, highway drivers are completely maddening - at least they are from Vancouver.
To give context, Vancouver highway 1 has three driving lanes. The inner lane is reserved for carpooling only (thanks enviro-weenies).
Now, I must digress here for a moment. Can anyone explain why it’s better environmentally to pack a whole heap of virtually idling cars into a massive parking lot day after day, on a highway while one lane sits practically empty? This logic makes especially good sense when I hear enviro-weenie radio advisories to never to idle the car for more than ten seconds while gazing at an entirely empty highway lane, eh?
The two outer lanes are for those of us who work for small business, which statistically seem to employ the majority of populace. Some interesting things about working for small businesses and carpooling are finding a person who shares the same schedule, lives in the same area, and whom you can tolerate for a ride every day. Altogether, that seems to be about the same odds as a box of cream puff donuts lasting at a Rosanne Barr look-a-like convention.
You'd think that given the lack of lanes, those who insist on driving 10km/hr (about 5 mph) below the average speed would want to keep in the slower lane (which is usually the right lane for those just learning road etiquette now) for the benefit of other drivers who would like to spend time with their family before the next great Canadian caribou migration. You'd think that, but you'd be dead wrong.
I’m not sure if these drivers keep in the left lane out of paranoid fear of changing lanes, lack of good medication, or if they are simply oblivious to the lane beside them being empty. Passing the rows of these drivers at mach speed in the right lane yields no greater pleasure release. Well okay, that’s exaggerating a tad, but it’s up there in the top 10 list.
Now slow drivers, who maintain a pace within car bumper distance from the driver to their right, tend to block both lanes making passing impossible and making blood pressures rise. They drive me mad. Mad I tell you. Mad! Down Mongo! Down! [Insert Monty Python laugh track here] Worse, these driving parasites are inattentive to the traffic jam building in their rear view mirror. Would it kill these drivers to keep right? Hmm... perhaps it might, if these traits are a sign of bad driving.
KEEP. RIGHT. PASS. LEFT.
... got it Vancouver? Good.
Update: Incidentally there is a Twilight Zone(tm)-like barrier where suddenly drivers learn the "keep-right" skill somewhere when driving outside the lower mainland of BC. Can someone do a scientific study on why this mysterious barrier exists?
