Saturday, August 15, 2009

Road Rage

I drove my truck to White Rock. Normally I can't pay attention to the traffic because I'm on a motorcycle. Driving a motorcycle in Vancouver is a life attending event. Every second is an acid trip as your life flashes before your eyes as driver after driver attempts to kill you. In a truck I can see what normally my reflexes are alone responding to.
Most people aren't actually driving but consider their car a moving cell phone booth. At least one fellow who was weaving was very drunk. I don't know about the other weavers. Weaving in their case looked more like some kind of evasive driving routine. The starters and stoppers seemed just to be epileptic. Alternatively they may have not gone back for the follow up pacemaker visits. Another was actually reading the newspaper while driving. And some women was talking at length to to their children in the back seats. The principle disruption though was the slow driver. They created waves of chaos around them with a dozen spaces ahead of them.
Somehow I missed the sign to White Rock and ended up heading out Granville to the air port. Possibly the shocking policeman standing in the road tauting and daring us to drive him down while he presumably checked to see if we were wearing a seat belt caused another level of chaos on the road . There's no need for policemen to be in the middle of the road no matter how macho it may seem to them. If it nearly caused me a heart attack, imagine the elderly spinster worried he'd draw a tazer on her.
Unnerved I got into Richmond where there are absolutely no signs for the millions of us each year who make this mistake and want to find the American border but can't because there isn't any signnage. Who would want to go anywhere but Richmond?
Driving the truck was illuminating. I thought all the drivers were smoking dope around me when I'm dodging them on the motorcycle. They may have been snorting coke but I didn't see any reefer being passed around from the vantage of my truck. Maybe these days worried about the smell they just take a hit for the road.
It's crazier by the day out there. Seeing all the drivers completely unaware of the flow of traffic or that driving slow is equally a hazard to driving fast I'm not surprised people go postal on the road. I prefer the motorcycle even if it's a throw of the dice whether I'll get anywhere alive. Driving in the truck I actually saw how little attention people were paying to the road. That alone could explain the road rage. Some people instead are actually driving vehicles and wanting to get to their destinations alive.
Instead of police standing in the middle of the road doing silly things maybe we could allow them to drive about and pull over drivers that are just plain dumb. Then make them repeat their driver's test talking on the cell phone and reading newspapers while impaired. They only get a license if they can drive under their own preferred driving conditions.
Alternatively they could issue Walther PPK's to us motorcyclists and give us a Darwin Award'sLicense to Kill.

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