People are naturally bad drivers. However, it takes skill and a little time required to perfect that skill that we, today, refer to as “driving”. Whether you are driving from your apartment to the grocery store up the street or whether you are preparing for an extremely long trip up to someplace like Main, it seems that driving on the roadways has become increasingly dangerous, especially since the invention of the cell phone.
Recently, I’ve been testing out this new theory of mine. It involves simply driving the speed limit. I do not allow myself to go any more than five over the speed limit now, and it is absolutely incredible to see not only how much gas I’ve been saving but how horrible the drivers are out there. Since I’ve slowed down to normal, I actually feel more unsafe on the roads than before. Needless to say, my defensive driving skills are as sharp as ever.
Take entrance and exit ramps on highways, for example. Now, the rules are that if you are in a lane where the traffic entrance ramp is going to be dumping highway or freeway traffic onto, you are supposed to allow at least one vehicle in front of you onto the highway (if it makes sense). But people don’t do this. Instead, they would rather run the person who is trying to merge off of the road before they’ll allow anyone to get in front of them. Sometimes you’ll get an aggressive entrance ramp driver who will actually race the other driver to get in front of them. It seems to be a vicious cycle.
There are also those drivers who don’t care about driving so much as they do with what is going on outside of their vehicle. There is a difference between being alert and aware of your surroundings versus being plain nosy, which will just end up causing you all sorts of problems. If someone has gotten into an accident and is getting the medical attention or police intervention that they need, there is no need for you to slow down the flow of traffic so that you can take a peek. Don’t speed, but definitely KEEP MOVING. It is this same notion of movement that may help to prevent you from getting into a vehicular accident someday.
More people get into car accidents each year, and it has been a long known fact that driving in a car is much more dangerous than any other sort of transportation out there. If we can reduce the number of people crowding the roadways with options such as carpooling, RideShare and even biking, it should work in some small capacity to rid the roadways of problems that cause overcrowding. A good way to remember how to drive in bad weather is simple: DRIVE SLOW. For starters, if it is raining outside to the point where you cannot even see, then perhaps it is time to take your foot off of the accelerator this way you don t hydroplane!