I am a bit of a road-rager. Every time someone forgets to put on their turn signal or swerves in front of my car, I react by either saying they “should go back to driving school” or “never drive on public roads again.” I probably get this trait from my dad and my rule of only going five miles per hour over the speed limit from my worrying mom.
Driving is really fun if the people around you are aware of what they’re doing and how it affects the drivers around them. But oftentimes I find other drivers making mistakes that everyone should be aware of (especially in downtown Cleveland).
However, I realized this weekend that I am unsure if I have room to talk in the driving department. As I made the drive from campus to my childhood home in Ashtabula, I started to notice that some of my driving tendencies would also have me yelling if I were in another car. While my complaints tend to be the result of reckless driving, I can assure that it is not how I act behind the wheel.
I also get very nit-picky when drivers decide to forget certain rules surrounding driving etiquette. For instance, I hate when I drive in the right lane and someone tries to pass me, but it takes them an eternity to press down on the gas and make the lane change. Unfortunately, I have noticed I do the exact same thing when in cruise control because I do not feel like taking the time to turn it off to speed up and then immediately turn it back on.
On top of this embarrassing admittance, I also start slowing down while still in the right lane before I move into the exit lane on the freeway. To me, any way to save gas is the way to go, but cruising in the right lane a hundred feet before I actually get out of the way of other cars is a habit I need to kick.
Finally, as a topping on the cake of failure, I also remember a very specific encounter with a semi that makes me feel bad every time I think about it. One night, I was driving my brother and his girlfriend back from a movie we had just seen and a semi-truck was going about the same speed as me, if not faster. I passed it going 10 mph over the speed limit and then got in front and slowed down to the speed I had just been going (this was my first mistake).
The driver decided to pass me on the left because he, in hindsight, was most assuredly going faster than me. Instead of accepting this fact, I sped up to make sure he could not get back in the right lane until I passed him on the right. This was probably the worst thing I could have done in this scenario and I am still embarrassed to this day.
So as I was driving this weekend, I took a step back and realized that I am still a part of the bad driving problem. However, I think we all are. No matter what, there is always a driving scenario where someone’s feelings get the best of them and they end up making a poor decision while trying to drive safely on the road. There is also always going to be a person who is shaking their head at the decision and ranting to themselves about how the driver could have handled the situation in a better way.
All in all, I hope to get better at avoiding driving mistakes and to give people grace when they make a bad driving decision. This will not happen overnight, so I apologize in advance to those unfortunate enough to encounter me on the road on a bad day. I promise I won’t yell.
