Behaviour

The left lane is so popular lately that when I keep right I often find myself behind fewer vehicles at the next red traffic light. In fact, at one particular intersection on my commute many times I can be first in line. Everyone else seems stuck in the left lane trying to get ahead, fuming, following too closely and making sudden lane changes.

Few of us like to live life on the edge. We save money for a rainy day, plan ahead in our lives and expect that everything around us has a built in safety factor. If it turns out that an insufficient safety factor injures us we expect someone to be responsible for it.

It's that time of year again, sunny and dry with a chance of careless smokers. I watched another one take the last puff and then toss the smouldering butt out the window onto the highway while he waited in front of me at a red light.

The theme last week among those that I follow on X seemed to be "doesn't play well with others." Whether the subject of the post was a driver, cyclist or pedestrian their behaviour showed that they had no intention to behave properly.

Dan is a friend that I occasionally get together with to discuss road safety. He's a commercial trucker and driving instructor with a lot of experience behind the wheel. The last time that we had lunch together he made a comment that struck me and I promised to borrow for a column topic. "Don't let that become your default setting" made a lot of sense to me.

Everyone has a pet peeve related to driving, right? I know what mine are, but I was curious about what others might say if I asked, so I did. My faithful weekly newsletter readers responded without hesitation and I want to share their thoughts with you.

My question is, what do we do about stress and anger on the roads due to drivers that are endangering lives of others? What do you recommend to help get your mind off a negative experience while driving?

When shopping at our local Country Grocer, please stop being 'courteous' by blocking the lane in while waiting for people to back out of their spots.

Mirror, signal left, brake and stop before the marked stop line. Look left, look right and the pickup that was following behind stops ahead of me on my right, half on and half off the roadway, to make a right turn. Of course, I can't see cross traffic to my right properly, so he gets to go before I do.

Here's another question from the DriveSmartBC inbox: I've noticed recently that often drivers are impatient of people parallel parking and pass them on the left rather than waiting in the right hand lane for the driver to finish parking before moving forward. In the event of a collision who is at fault - the person parallel parking or the person trying to go around the parallel parking car?