| Monday, August 24, 2009 |
10:48 - California driver comin' through
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Is this something that's becoming suddenly more prevalent just in recent weeks, or am I only just now noticing it?
I refer to the practice of everybody driving in the left lane of a multi-lane highway or parkway. Normally. At the speed limit. During lightish traffic. With nobody in the right lane to pass.
It's getting to the point where I can round a bend, observe a half-mile of highway ahead of me, and notice that every single car in visual range is happily trundling along in the left lane. And I can simply stay right and pass them all.
Is the right lane now the new official passing lane? Is "keep left" now the law of the land? Because if so, that's fine; I can deal with it, no problem. We can start importing right-hand-drive cars and be happy. But I just want to be clear on things first.
I've been trying to figure out what it is that makes people do this; and all I can think is that they believe they are themselves going fast, fast enough to justify hanging out permanently in the left lane. They think they're saving themselves effort by not having to switch lanes to get around slower people in the right lane.
But the fact is that they're going so slow themselves that they're not passing anyone on the right; they're just blocking other people from passing them. Yet rather than admit to themselves that they are only traveling at the prevailing speed of traffic, and not materially faster, and switching to the right lane accordingly, we instead get to witness this absurd spectacle of a line of grim, chin-jutting contestants to determine the fastest driver below a firm and inviolable mutually agreed speed ceiling, where dropping to the right lane signals an admission of defeat.
UPDATE: Further observation seems to indicate that the cause, insofar as correlation implies causation, is cellphones.
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Brian Tiemann
