Stereotypes on the Road

Thursday night at the new members’ class for the church I’ve been attending here in Northern Virginia, the volunteer leader made an observation on her holiday driving habits that I found rather insightful. Visiting family in Wisconsin, she said it took her three days to adjust to the rhythm of Midwestern country roads: not honking when it took the driver in front of her more than a second to react to a red light, expecting farmers to be out on a slow-speed cruise around the county, etc. That echoed my feeling of displacement driving from the Indianapolis Airport to Columbus, IN last Friday night, as I realized my recently-developed NoVA driving style stuck out like a sore thumb on I-465.

So Friday morning on my commute (40 minutes, only one major tie-up at the Dulles Connector/66 east merge), I thought about how I’d characterize the driving environment in several of the places I’ve visited recently, and decided it might be interesting to poll my readers as well, whether on these places or others they know.

So, to start off:

• Northern Virginia — the best way I’ve found to describe it is moderate aggression combined with a hair-trigger temper. Bad combination. In an ordinary situation, you can expect the average 703-lander to be rather impatient about stoplights, quick to change lanes without much advance signaling, and not too worried about proper following distance. All of that is somewhat anti-social, but tolerable. But the temper problem means that whenever traffic is bad (on the major highways, that’s from 6 AM-9 PM weekdays), people jump straight from zero to psycho in no time flat.
• Massachussetts — the term “Masshole” was invented specifically for drivers here. ‘Nuff said.
• South Florida — some of Dave Barry’s best columns, in my view, were about his hometown of Miami and what he described as the “craziness” of South Floridians. That description fits their drivers like a glove. You run the gamut there, from retirees who view 30 mph as an absolute upper limit, no matter the road, to Benzes, Lexuses and import motorcycles that draw no reaction as they fly down I-95 at speeds in the low triple digits. Anything can happen and usually does, so just be aware.
• Atlanta, on the other hand, is more predictable: where South Florida drivers are crazy, Atlanta drivers are just stupid. If you’re wondering what a driver is going to do, just figure the dumbest possible thing and get ready. They run the I-285 Perimeter like it’s the Atlanta Motor Speedway; they make right turns from left lanes across 3 through lanes of traffic and think nothing of it; blind curve passing/lane changing foolishness is just par for the course. And don’t even get me started on the 75-85 northbound split, where traffic engineers contributed to the problem. Looking at a map, you’ll see that 75 goes northwest and 85 goes northeast from the split point; the obvious solution would be for lanes for 75 North to split left and lanes for 85 North to split right, correct? WRONG — if you work for GaDOT, that is. Far better to reverse them and have the exiting lanes immediately cross over one another.
• Pennsylvania — these folks are actually remarkably calm, given the roads they have to drive on.

What do you think?