What’s the No. 1 Form of Road Kill? It’s Etiquette, Thank You Very Much
An oncoming semi the length of the Oklahoma Panhandle turned left in front of me the other day, plowing over my right of way and causing me to miss the green light.
That gave me a few extra moments to contemplate the demise of common courtesy--not to mention common sense--on the roadways of Southern California.
“Automobile etiquette is thought to be for wimps,” says Miss Manners, the doyenne of decorum.
Jeff Baugh, whose job as a traffic ‘copter jockey for news station KFWB-AM (980) gives him a grim bird’s-eye view of once-civilized drivers run amok, agrees that manners “go right out the window,” especially on freeway on-ramps. Stymied in their efforts to merge, drivers play high-stakes bumper cars, often to lethal effect. Even when motorists survive the ensuing crashes without a scratch, bodily harm sometimes gets inflicted afterward on the pavement.
“I’ve seen people pushing and shoving each other by the side of the freeway,” Baugh says. “It’s the most bizarre thing.”
The signs of “road rage,” to use the pumped-up term embraced by the media, are all around. A beefy 37-year-old man was recently dragged to his death after exchanging angry words with a 69-year-old driver who refused to move over on a Santa Monica street. In San Francisco, an advertising executive who helped concoct such brand names as Rogaine and Prozac was shot to death by police at the wheel of his Mercedes convertible after he used it to pin an officer against a parking meter.
A friend of mine from high school days was also shot dead after a minor traffic altercation, as was a good Samaritan who stopped to help. And that wasn’t in hot-tempered California but rather in rural Indiana.
People, people, people. Have we gone collectively bonkers? Is it too late to bring back the Golden Rule to the Golden State Freeway?
To paraphrase that famed motorist Rodney King: Can’t we all just get along politely on the road?
The answer, apparently, is no.
“We used to have good drivers, bad drivers and drunk drivers,” says Judith Martin, a.k.a. Miss Manners. “Now we have enraged drivers.”
“Enraged” is perhaps too strong a term for the way most of us feel on our daily rounds. “Exasperated” is closer to the mark. I would never whip out an Uzi to fire on somebody who cuts me off or blazes through a red light just as I’m lurching forward on the green, but after 17 years on California roads I’m a lot quicker on the trigger--when it comes to honking my horn, that is. Then again, with all the shoot-’em-up talk, I usually hold back on even that time-honored tradition.
What ever happened to defensive driving, a watchword of driver’s ed. when I was coming of age? These days, UAVs (urban assault vehicles, my pet name for sport-utes) seem to have given ordinarily mild-mannered folks a license to drive like fiends in tanks.
We won’t even talk about the Hummer, the street-legal cousin of the Humvee military vehicle. Who in urban America needs one, anyway, when it is better suited to Persian Gulf sand dunes? Most of my pals who own UAVs never venture beyond the city limits. What is the point of driving one of these vehicular Bigfoots, then, if not to feel invincible, cocooned in thousands of pounds of hurtling steel?
Sure, they’re fun to drive. I once rented a Ford Explorer for a solo camping trip. It was great for hauling gear. I felt like James “I’m King of the World!” Cameron. But with all the gasoline I was guzzling on my 3,000-mile trek, I might as well have been throwing $20 bills out the window.
Instead of Chevy Suburbans, we should all be piloting Chevy Urbans, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, only smaller. Think of the savings on gas and the improvements in air quality and all the parking spaces you could squeeze into. And while we’re on the subject, Dodge Rams and Jeep Grand Cherokees are not, repeat not, compacts and therefore do not belong in the compact spaces at the shopping mall ! Whew, I feel better.
Let’s face it. It’s not much of a stretch to say that anarchy is a few small steps away from blatant red-light running, failing to yield the right of way and flashing your brights in the other guy’s rearview mirror to get him to move the hell out of the fast lane, buddy.
It’s a quick trip from violating the etiquette rules of the road to violating the law, and that’s what road rage is all about. Topping the list of “aggressive driving,” as the California Highway Patrol delicately terms the patterns that trigger mayhem, are unsafe lane changes, speeding, passing on the right shoulder and the flickering of high beams by drivers who are following too closely.
All the aggression and obscene gesturing, Mrs. Martin/Miss Manners says, is “symptomatic of the idea that what counts is doing what you wish to do and not weighing it against the community good, which in the end is to your own good.”
On any given day, it takes both hands to count the times that inconsiderate or inattentive drivers impede my progress or otherwise make me feel peevish. Among the usual suspects:
* The clueless ones who drift over into my lane as we’re both turning right from the two right-turn lanes.
* The passive-aggressive ones who won’t let me merge but won’t go fast enough so that I can scoot in behind them.
* The dazed ones who leave their blinker on for miles, finally remember to turn it off and then suddenly merge in front of me.
* The cocky ones who swerve into my lane first and glance over their shoulders later to make sure it’s safe.
* The thoughtless ones who fail to signal their wish to turn left until the light turns green, leaving me to cool my jets behind them as others zoom around.
* The entitled ones for whom I slow down so that they can merge in front of me yet who offer not even a simple wave of thanks. People, your mothers raised you better than this!
* The multi-tasking ones who bear down on me from the on-ramps, cell phone in one hand, newspaper in the other and wheel in neither.
And then there are the obviously extremely important executives, real estate agents and surfers--so important that they must use their cell phones on the way to the office (or the beach). But in their conversational zeal they bob and weave and slow down, costing them and me precious moments. Why not just concentrate on your driving and get more quickly to the office, where you can make those calls from the relative comfort and safety of your desk (or your board)?
Figuring that a semi driver wasn’t likely to pull out a shotgun to use against a defenseless woman in a Toyota Corolla station wagon, I laid on my horn when the guy turned in front of me the other day. Then in my rearview mirror I noticed a cop speeding my way. “Oh, great,” I thought. “Now I’ll get a ticket for aggressive horn blowing.”
Imagine my delight when he followed the trucker onto the freeway. Perhaps there is a commuter god after all.
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Times staff writer Martha Groves can be reached via e-mail at martha.groves@latimes.com.
