Aggressive Driving

There was an interesting post on Twitter this week showing drivers interacting with pedestrians at the intersection of Cambie Street and West Broadway in Vancouver. The photo showed 3 cars facing a green light trying to turn onto Cambie from Broadway, 2 eastbound turning left and one westbound turning right into their respective lanes on Broadway. There was a steady stream of pedestrians crossing Cambie against a red don't walk signal.

This is another instance of where most drivers would shake their heads and ask themselves “Just what were they thinking?” I’m speaking of a video of two drivers on a freeway using the left lane during an instance of congestion. The pickup noses up the the rear end of the car and the car driver spikes the brakes resulting in a minor collision. I’ll venture to suggest that in this case, neither driver was thinking at all.

I'm one of those odd drivers who tries their best to drive at or below the posted speed limit. I include the word below here as sometimes there is a need to slow down to less than the posted speed limit for safety reasons. This often has consequences for me when I have to share the road with other drivers who do not subscribe to my philosophy on road safety. A good example of this is looking in my rear view mirror and finding the Volvo logo on the grille of a heavy transport truck following me closely enough that I could count the bugs stuck to it.

This case was sparked by a driver who felt that he was entitled to be next in line at a Tim Horton's drive through in Mill Bay, B.C. He attempted to assert his place by bumping the tire of the pickup truck he felt that he should be in front of. Giving way because of the size difference, this man caught up to the pickup on the highway after they had exited the drive through. He pulled in front of it and braked suddenly several times, finally coming to a stop in the curb lane.

You may be able to disregard the rules in the Motor Vehicle Act and survive, but flouting the laws of physics when you drive will eventually result in a collision. I spent a decade dealing with concepts like perception - reaction time, coefficients of friction and maximum acceleration when I did a forensic examination of a collision scene.

Deliberately bad drivers seem to be appearing more and more often on our highways. If e-mail to the DriveSmartBC web site is any indication, other drivers are no longer shrugging it off and report offenders in the hope that they will be held accountable. Some, including myself, have taken to posting photos or video of selfish, inconsiderate or dangerous drivers in that hope that public shaming might improve that driver's behaviour.

Imagine making a lane change and crashing into a fully marked police vehicle stopped at the side of the highway with all of its emergency lights operating. I can only guess that the driver was not properly scanning his environment and looking far enough ahead to anticipate issues before they happen.

Kenneth Malcolm wanted by. He sped up and tailgated a vehicle in the fast lane. When it didn't move out of his way, he changed to the slow lane, overtook and tailgated the vehicle there. That driver braked briefly so that both vehicles had to slow, eventually dropping behind the vehicle that Mr. Malcolm initially hoped would get out of his way.

Perhaps you can comment about the bad habit of so many drivers following too close to the car in front of them. In order to combat this I have decided that, if I am unable to actually see the licence plate on the car following me in my rear view mirror, I activate my four way flashers.

You may have seen the road rage video on social media lately where a woman doing the speed limit refuses to move out of the left and lane and a man driving a pickup wants by. He eventually passes and then drops back to wave a single digit and yell at the woman. He finally accelerates heavily and gets back into the lane in front of her, losing control and crashing in the median. She stops to laugh at the outcome.