Land of Creative Driving

That's Sacramento this past week.

I've noticed three or four original driving techniques in the last week or two. Yesterday a forty-something female driver in a mid-sized sedan drove up onto the sidewalk in an attempt to pass a line of ten cars waiting at the San Juan and Madison stop light. A telephone pole forced her to stop about four cars from the intersection, where she cut off someone else waiting to turn right. I also turned right and followed her down Madison, meeting up with her again at the stoplights.

In almost all cases, driving that I react to with nervousness seems to originate with impatience in the other driver. Running red lights, driving on sidewalks, turning left from a right-turn only lane, zooming back and forth between lanes to get ahead one or two car lengths, and so forth. About 90% of the time it seems to involve teenage or twenty-something males, but 10% of the time it involves a thirty-year-old or up person, sometimes even white-haired people.