And While I'm Ranting....

Here's a Public Service Announcement about Spatial Awareness While Driving. Get some. Please.

Offense #1 - and this was so egregious, I remember it a week later.

When you are stopped for a light on a two-lane road with many cross-streets, and some poor SOB is trying to make a left to get to his home, possibly because he really needs to go to the bathroom, perhaps, just perhaps, you might consider backing up your land yacht to let him make the turn? This happened last week. I was the car behind the land yacht. I watched the Poor SOB struggle to communicate with the driver of the car in front of me, begging, pleading, offering his firstborn child, if she would just please back up her very big gas-guzzling land yacht about two feet so he could turn down the street where he lives? Please?

I was the car behind the yacht, and I saw this little tableau as I approched the line of stopped cars, so I stopped a FULL YACHT AND A HALF'S LENGTH back, so the bitch in the land yacht could back up the, oh, two or three feet, max, that this poor guy who was already 2/3 through the turn needed to get onto the side street.

Oh no. Driver of the yacht sat there, immobile and apparently oblivious to the small car (I pictured it tapping on her bumper like a small dog trying to get her attention by tapping her leg). The light was very long - made longer by the absolutely insane act of passive aggression I was observing. There was no way this driver wasn't aware that someone needed her to just move a foot or two so he could get off the road. Absolutely NO WAY. And since her nice new car cost at least $35,000 it had plenty of functional mirrors, so a quick glance would have revealed a tractor-trailer's worth of room in which to back up three feet. But, no.

Eventually the light changed and the yacht proceeded. I let the poor SOB who had probably peed himself by now turn down his residential street.

Offense #2 - the flipside.

If you are on a multi-lane road with many left turn arrows and such, is it too much to ask that you don't leave, like THREE car lengths between you and the car in front of you, so that those of us who would like to avail ourselves of one of the left turn lanes would not have to sit through two extra cycles of the light because you couldn't move up to a reasonable space between you and the next guy? I'm not suggesting you get fresh with the car in front of you, you know, but cars don't carry transmittable social diseases and you won't catch one by getting, say, half a car length from the guy in front of you, so a grand total of four cars at the light don't make the 8-car-lengths-long left turn lane inaccessible.

(Of course, if some poor SOB did need to get into your lane, you would immediately bunch up like the car in front of you was offering life-sustaining oxygen and not let him in.)

Just a couple of random commuter moments I thought I'd share. I need to get one of those nifty blogs with categories, so I can file under "People Are Assholes."