Posts Tagged ‘asshole drivers’
get in your car, everyone’s dying! »
Wednesday, April 28th, 2010
I watch the local news. I don’t watch the local news closely. The former is because I don’t have cable, the latter because it’s universally terrible.
Exhibit #328: Piles of dead people on the roads.
There’s an epidemic of drivers and their passengers ending up dead around here. (If fourteen people out of millions is an “epidemic.”) The local news is on the case.
Of course, it’s not that drivers would have been better off not being idiots. Instead, the state needs to interfere to make the roads safe (for idiots to risk their lives on).
Monday’s newscast used a lead-in that amounted to: “What are officials doing to keep you safe?” Here’s the write-up about Sunday’s fatal fender-bender out in nowheresville (which they were alluding to).
Briefly, one sixteen-year-old driver was out two and a half hours past curfew with two more people than permitted. The other was driving with a revoked license. And the roads were wet.
Those jerk officials better get on it. It’s entirely their fault.
Local “journalists” could blame the number of cars on the road or how many trucks, fueling our consumptive needs, share it. Hell, we could blame drivers for being idiots.
Instead, carmakers make cars easier for idiots to drive. They give the illusion of safety and fill their cabins with audio and visual distraction.
Brilliant.
We don’t hold idiots accountable; we provide them tools to increase their idiocy. Local officials did all they could to keep these idiots alive.
Thanks, local news, for really hitting the issue where it counts.
One caveat. This is only one example. I’m sure the other accidents were caused by state-employed men in reflector vests directing teens into oncoming traffic while they sexted.
Note: I realize I’m getting heavy on posts about stupid drivers. If you’re tired of reading such things, get me cable. (Seriously, buy me cable.) Also, I am not counting myself outside of the idiots. In fact, as an idiot driver, I feel it’s my duty to call out my co-idiots on a regular basis.
Photo courtesy Car Insurance Tips Blog
so many reasons to hate the suburbs »
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
I get it. We were afraid of brown people, looking for cheap housing and lived in our cars. Why not sprawl, right?
Things are different now and we need to call off this failed social experiment. Its detriment far outweighs its benefit.
The same faux-patriots that hate other cultures, crave war and ignore the poor saturate these once-desirable puddles of white that encircle metropolitan areas. They must be stopped.
I read somewhere that if we all lived with the population density of Brooklyn, the entire nation would fit into New Hampshire. The driving between these vastly separate locations has us dependent on nations we label enemies.
Does that make sense?
Whatever, maybe I’m just fuming over the absurd of yesterday…
HOOOOOOOOOONK!!
At first I think the giant beige (fact: color of evil) SUV is upset because I left the trail for the road after it ended. I’d just come through another intersection, though, so SUV had to hold a grudge.
Stopped at the next light, an interchange with a heavy-traffic local highway, SUV rolled down the window.
She’s about sixty but doesn’t look a day under seventy-two. A thick cake of something meant to conceal them accents her abundant wrinkles. Her eyes —
“Get off the road!” (She doesn’t even let me take in her whole horrifying face before screaming at me.)
It’s a road bike. I’m stunned, so it sounds like a question. Which is stupid because it’s obviously a road bike.
“I don’t care if it’s a road bike! Get off the road!!”
Umm.
I couldn’t do anything but laugh as she sped off to her probably-very-important somethingorother. I sighed, clicked in and went on my way.
… But yeah, that’s maybe why I’m so anti-suburb today. I don’t necessarily feel safe on my bike in Uptown, but I know the people there have seen a bike. Some have maybe even taken a drivers’ test in the last decade and had to answer bicycle-safety questions.
Maybe.
Photo courtesy Streetsblog (also: what the — !?)