Traffic
We’ve just returned from a 300-mile round trip drive to Tarrytown over two days. Not that long ago, I drove about the same distance in Italy in a car not nearly so powerful.
In Italy, on two-lane roads, drivers stay on the right except to pass. Everyone is polite. The trip is fast. Very rarely do you have to flick your high beams to remind the person in front of you to move over. It’s simply a reflexively polite driving habit.
Here, many people clog the left lanes, refusing to move, forcing dangerous passing on the right. I’ve identified three types:
- The mystifyingly oblivious. They don’t realize people are behind them, don’t look in their mirrors, never think to move over. Sometimes they’re on the phone, but mostly they’re just vacant.
- The morally superior. These people feel as long as they do the speed limit, there’s no reason to move over. The line of two dozens care behind them (and the occasional truck almost in their trunk) does nothing to dissuade them that they hold the higher moral ground, enabling them to inconvenience everyone else.
- The malicious. These are the same people who tailgate at six feet, but once in front of you, don’t want to yield and inch because they are overcompensating for huge inferiority complexes with a vehicle. They enjoy giving others problems because they’re so desperately unhappy themselves.
Fortunately, a great deal of American roads are more than two lanes, and these three types are still in the minority (but growing). I understand that we don’t have to be in a blazing hurry to get places. But I also understand that civility on the roads is reflecting the general decline in civility is society. The oblivious, the morally superior, the bully—we’re seeing them on the streets as well as the roads.
