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…