My driving skills have evolved considerably since living here in Washington, D.C.
For example, you get used to navigating some of the worst bumper-to-bumper traffic in the country, which is quite a change from rural North Dakota driving. The kinds of factors you deal with as a driver up north are quite different—the possibility of black ice on the road for as much as 8 months out of the year, the likelihood of hitting a deer and having it crash through your windshield, or driving through mad snowstorms where you literally cannot see your car’s hood past your windshield in the blinding, white-driven swirl.
But as a driver in D.C. these days, my sole goal now is to attract attention to myself. You know, to somehow allow others to see me when I signal that I’m about to change lanes. Or to make certain that everyone sees my “turning right” signal in plenty of time. Or that a driver behind me will remember to look up and observe my sudden brake lights due to the near-accident in front of me.
Any number of other drivers seem to truly believe my car and I are cloaked in Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak. (I am frankly amazed every time I drive when there *isn’t* an accident.)
And what is this magic charm of invisibility that can make a 3,000-pound car disappear in front of your very eyes?
Two words: cell phones.
Nothing could have prepared me for the potent impact of hand-held cell phones on this ripe traffic powder keg.
Almost every time I am on 495 or 66, if I look to both my right and my left in preparation for signaling, I will see folks on hand-held cell phones that almost completely obscure their sight of me. Since they are essentially driving blind on the car’s side where the cell phone is being held, this leaves me an unenviable Russian-roulette-style choice to make: shall I hope they see me in time and just go ahead with my lane change? Shall I assume they have more visibility than it appears they do? Or shall I not chance it, miss my exit, and turn around/catch up at the next one?
Split-second choices based on the best information and estimation I have at that moment are all I can act on—and I have been wrong on occasion. Then come the resulting white-knuckled split seconds when you realize that the blue-car lady with the rhinestone-pink cell phone really *isn’t* going to look up within the 10-second time frame she was given, but since you gambled that she would—now you can only gun your engine and hope for the best.
In general, I now watch cell-phone yakkers very carefully whenever they are between me and my destination—and if they never bother to even glance at the road around them during the entire time I watch them indulge in their hand-held chat, I just don’t chance it anymore. The risk is simply too great—and there are far too many drivers on the road who simply can’t be trusted to have two conversations at once: the one on their private hand-held and the conversation they’re sharing with all the other 3,000-pound vehicles whipping by them at almost 70 miles per hour.
I think it’s pretty obvious which conversation should take precedence, don’t you? (But for some reason they never call me to ask me that question. Hmm…)
The attitude of such drivers (that they’d be doing “nothing” while driving, anyway) is succinctly summed up in the dry wit of the someecards image below:
Do your level best to stay safe on the road today, everyone~~and may you not be cursed with an Invisibility Cloak of any kind.