Please. When you’re driving, don’t politely cede your right of way as your Good Deed of the Day. It’s NOT a good deed. It’s dangerous and can cause a wreck.
Couple days ago, a friend of mine was turning left across a thoroughfare to get into a parking lot. Some kind soul, seeing him waiting in the left-turn lane and signalling, stopped in the road, held up the traffic, and motioned him to go ahead. When he turned across the road, some poor soul who didn’t see him and didn’t expect someone to turn left illegally across oncoming traffic slammed right into him.
Totaled his car.
The idiot who caused this fiasco, of course, tooled off down the road unscathed.
These damn people who think they’re being extra-special, nicey-nice kind and courteous by ceding their right of way make me want to jump out of the car, reach through the driver’s-side window, and wring their necks. When somebody stops and sits there when they have the right of way, you do NOT know what they’re going to do. Are they not paying attention? Will they try to move whenever they wake up? Are they stupid? Or what?
More to the point, they’re urging you to break the law.
Y’know, I had exactly the same experience as my friend’s when my son was an infant in his car seat. I’d picked up the husband from Sky Harbor. We had to turn left out of terminal 2 to go west on the airport’s weird little ring road, which for some reason was bumper-to-bumper. Guy stops his car, holding up the traffic behind him, and motions me cheerfully to cross in front of him. I couldn’t see the oncoming traffic in the outside lane but, being a dumb kid, naively drove out because, after all, this guy here is grinning dopily and waving that it’s OK to pull out. The guy coming up beside him walloped me, of course…
Naturally, I got a ticket for pulling out in front of the poor wretch who hit me.
And just the other day I almost hit a woman under similar circumstances.
On Phoenix’s Central Avenue just north of AJs, there’s a fancy new signal that the city put in to accommodate the growing restaurant empire in the ultragentrified area just north of Camelback. Four large globes strung overhead, this array turns red every time a pedestrian hits its button, stays red not long enough for anyone over 25 to get all the way across five lanes, then starts flashing red. While it’s flashing, you’re supposed to drive with caution through the crosswalk, preferably without running down any pedestrians or their dogs.
Guy ahead of me is in a Toyota Highlander, a behemoth that you can’t see around even from my Sienna, which is pretty far off the ground and fairly massive itself.
He’s already proven himself to be a nitwit…in the fast lane puttering along like he’s out for a Sunday drive.
I’ve been stuck behind him for a couple of miles and am fully fed up with him. He stops on the red and the pedestrian ambles across the street. The light starts to flash on & off, and he just STANDS there. I figure he hasn’t read the sign that says you can move on flashing red after the nuisance pedestrian has gotten out of your line of fire.
The light shuts off altogether, but he’s still gathering wool. By now I’m mightily annoyed, because he’s not the first nitwit who has blocked my progress down Central on this trip. The car that he’s been pacing (by way of blocking all the traffic backing up behind him in the fast lane) moves on.
So I start to pull into the right lane, which is clear, and because I’m pissed and because I’m going to want to turn left into AJ’s — which will require me to cut the dunce off within a block and a half — I floor it. With no seats in the back and its handy little six-banger, the Sienna is relatively light and can take off from a standing start…shall we say, promptly. Which it does…
…just as some woman turns left in front of me!
Shee-ut!
Life goes into slow motion, providing plenty of time to think. I jam on the brakes and steer to the right into the west-bound side street, which thank God has no oncoming traffic. The ABS brakes are pretty amazing: the car does NOT skid and not only that, it maintains some degree of steerability. Amazingly, it does let me steer out of the woman’s way.
Fortunately she saw me bearing down on her and jammed on her brakes, too, so we managed to evade each other.
Oh well. It’s nice to know, in an ironic way, that even an old guy with 80-odd years of experience with the morons of this world falls for the “Let Me Do You a Favor” gambit…
Oy! What a mess these people make! So glad you ended up physically unscathed by the latest near-incident.
Thank you! And thank the heavens the innocent woman who was trying to turn left escaped harm.
So relieved that you managed to avoid disaster! I stress about something like this happening whenever I drive my 2002 Hyundai Accent. The car is worth next to nothing and being a struggling student with a crappy-paying part-time job and a small pension, I can’t afford car payments. I’d have to take a chunk out of my IRA, pay a 10% penalty and pay cash for another vehicle. Oh, HELL to the NO! And don’t get me started on what would happen if I was seriously injured.
This is a very interesting scenario that I actually saw “adjudicated” in Court a while back. I was in Rent Court a while back and good ol’ Judge Murphy called the Court to order and explained there would be a couple of traffic cases before the rent case would commence. They were all very interesting . The case that was very much like the situation you describe. A young lady, represented by an attorney, was leaving Church, of all things,on a Sunday and there were two lanes coming and two lanes going along with the center turning lane. A “samaritan” waved the gal out and as she was crossing traffic a guy was flying down the center turning lane and T-boned her….totaling her car. No tickets were given and the gal only had liability insurance on the car. Her attorney’s argument was that there was an “expectation” of safe passage as the “right of way” had been granted and the speeder in the center lane took that “right of way” away. It WAS very interesting and the three attorneys were all trying to prove their clients innocent. The gal was out a car thru no fault of her own and had been without a car for over 6 months waiting to go to trial. Judge Murphy did an excellent job and apologized for having to declare no one at fault as there was no ticket given despite eye witnesses. He encouraged the young female attorney who capably represented the girl with the totaled car to appeal the case to an Appeals Court as he felt this was a case that needed to be heard . And he felt that indeed there is an expectation and that the folks in the traffic are required not to block the Church entrance and exit and she was within her right to cross traffic….AND he maintained that the police may have erred by not measuring the skid marks of the guy flying up the center lane who eye witnesses had testified he was exceeding the speed limit…But this had to be considered “hearsay” as their testimony was but “an opinion”. When the dust settled….the gal was out a car despite excellent representation…the speeder went free…and the Good Samaritan felt awful…..
Not quite the same, but there’s a circumstance that’s happened a few times to both my wife and i recently that has caused some hair raising experiences. On two lane roads they’ll often put in a passing lane so that people turning left don’t create a huge line of cars. Works pretty good for the most part until someone decides that, instead of passing on the right, they’ll just sit behind the car turning left. Not a problem until the original person completes their turn and the dope behind them just goes straight…starting off from 0 MPH while the person passing is going 45 MPH or so. The passing lanes aren’t that long, so t’s happened at least once or twice a month where my wife or I is passing, using the intended lane, and we either have to slam on the brakes to avoid either running out of lane or sideswiping the dope that didn’t use the passing lane as they should have.
And, I’m sure if we did get into a wreck, it’d be the person passing that got the ticket and not the dope that actually caused the accident.
Gaaaaaahhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!
You prob’ly wouldn’t survive that trick in these parts: some cowboy would shoot you.
You realize, some people believe it’s against the law to pass on the right. They believe that’s true no matter how many lanes grace a given road…so, for example, in their minds if a person is dawdling in the fast lane on a freeway and you’re in the center lane, you’re not allowed to pass the dawdler.
That of course is not true. It’s illegal to pass on the right ON THE SHOULDER, but if a paved right-hand lane is clear, of course you can pass a ninny on the right.
It could be that’s what these chuckleheads are thinking: they may stop because they think they’re not allowed to use the righthand lane to pass someone in the left lane.
They used to have passing lanes on Yarnell Hill, back in the day when we owned the ranch. This was before the state rebuilt the road up there, easing the grade a bit and providing more two-lane stretches. It was VERY steep.
When a flatland tourister got on that road, the poor soul would be so petrified he’d ride his brakes all the way down from the rim to the desert floor. It would be hilarious as long as you weren’t stuck behind the wretch. Everybody who lived in the area, of course, knew where these passing lanes were, so we would bunch up behind the guy and the instant the road widened, FLOOR IT to get around him. A half-dozen cowboys would streak around the guy, no doubt terrifying him even more.
😀
Some of them would be so scared, it wouldn’t register with them that they were supposed to get right (probably had their eyes glued to the road so tight they couldn’t read the traffic sign…), so people would take their lives in their hands and pass the guy on the right. That, I always thought, was pretty dangerous: you never know what a ninny is going to do.
On the other hand, life’s a gamble anyway…