One of the easiest things for a stand-up comic to do is to go into a new town and tell the audience how bad the drivers are in that particular city. It’s guaranteed to get a positive reaction, because there are bad drivers everywhere. Now, I’ve lived in New York and I’ve lived in Boston (where we sell T-shirts to the tourists saying, “I survived Boston traffic”) but by far the worst drivers are in North Carolina.
I live in a small town and I’ve co-opted a phrase from the armed forces to describe the driving conditions here – it’s not a job, it’s an adventure! Now, the automobile is a way of life in North Carolina because mass transit is virtually non-existent here. Kids get their licenses at 16 and they count down the days to their birthday months ahead of time, just waiting like an 8-year old for Christmas for the day when they can finally drive.
You would think that would create a culture which encouraged good drivers. Sadly, it doesn’t. The young drivers here are just as careless and reckless as they are in every other state in the union. But I can’t lay all of the blame for North Carolina’s bad drivers on the youths of the state. If anything, the middle aged and older drivers are the ones that cause the most problems. That is, if you discount the illegal aliens who can’t read the signs and are basically making up their own driving rules as they go along.
In the last 20 years, there has been an explosion in the Hispanic population in small agricultural towns in North Carolina. For the most part, this is a good thing. But it is not a comforting sight when you come upon an old truck weaving merrily along, with eight people riding in the back with no restraints. They seem blissfully unaware of their plight while I am terrified that the driver is going to swerve and I’m going to end up with Pedro, Jose and Juan in my front windshield.
The main problem with drivers in North Carolina is that you can’t predict the ways they are going to be bad. In Boston, you could count on bad drivers doing things in an aggressive manner. You would see a car waiting to turn left and if there was a tiny break in traffic from the opposite direction, you could predict that the bad driver (the out-of-staters would to call them Massholes) would turn, forcing all of these cars to jam on brakes to avoid an accident. If a light turned yellow, you could count on people to speed up and probably several more to run the light. It’s an accepted practice in Boston that when the light turns green, despite what it says in every driver’s ed handbook in the country, the first car turning left has the right of way.
But in North Carolina, the bad drivers are nothing if unpredictable. The drivers here refuse to use turn signals and are lax about keeping their brake lights in working order, so you often have to anticipate when someone may be turning. Which becomes all the more difficult when you consider that most drivers are talking on a cell phone and are oblivious to where they are or what they’re doing on the road, anyway.
The biggest problem with the cell phone drivers is they have no concept of what constitutes a safe following distance, either in front of their vehicles or behind. Multi-car accidents are becoming more common, not because there are too many cars on the road, but because drivers are doing everything except paying attention to the road while driving.
Most of the bigger streets in North Carolina have a turning lane in the middle of the road for both directions to use. This often creates problems, as drivers have several options on how to drive wrong with this extended turn lane.
Some motorists use the turning lane as a passing lane, a practice made all the more dangerous with the decision not to use direction signals on both sides of the maneuver. Other drivers get in the turn lane way too early and then get upset when a car from the other direction is properly waiting for his chance to turn. But my favorite is with the elder drivers, who haven’t quite grasped the concept of the turn lane. They will come to a stop in the regular lane of traffic and then turn across both the opposite lane and the turn lane when executing a left turn.
And the interstate highway system is a challenge that many North Carolina drivers have yet to master. An interstate highway will have two or more lanes, with the general idea being that if you want to go slow, you stay in the right lane and you move further left the faster you want to travel. It’s a good system and it works quite well in the other 49 states. But I’m sick of having someone traveling below the speed limit in the far left lane. At first, I used to think these drivers were conducting some kind of real-life experiment, to see what the effects of driving 55 mph in the left lane on a 65 mph road would be. But then I realized they were just clowns.
There’s an old joke about the guy who goes through every red light because that’s the way his brother taught him how to drive. He finally comes to a green light and stops. His passenger asks him why he stopped at a green light after going through all of the red lights previously and he says, “Because my brother may be out driving today.” That’s how you have to drive in North Carolina.
