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I'm not saying floor it and pass them, but it wouldn't hurt to increase speed slightly just to get around them. As long as you're passing, and not riding side-by-side with the car in the right lane, you're doing great.
Nope, if you're going over the speed limit and you're passing the traffic on the right, there is no reason to increase speed further just because someone behind you is trying to get their speed fix. As I said, those in the left lane ARE making their "best effort" to pass, and they are doing so.
It's interesting how you can tell who the tailgaters and speed addicts are on these threads.
It's interesting how you can tell who has Cop Envy in these threads.
In either case threads like this lay bare that this country desperately needs to adjust its licensing, legislative, and enforcement schemes to stop accommodating the lowest-common-denominator "drivers" among us.
By lowest common denominator, you mean those that are incapable of comprehending or obeying the most basic of traffic laws or, if they can't, accepting responsibility for the easily predictable consequences of their actions? The speed addicts, texters, etc., and others that fall into that category of irresponsible drivers?) THAT lowest common denominator?
As for Cop Envy, not hardly. As said, I drive in the middle lane and let the speed addicts go on past to pick off the cops up ahead. I just decline to pretend that they aren't the originating cause of the very problems they whine about incessantly because other people don't seem to agree with them that they own the road and are SUCH good drivers that basic traffic laws (not to mention the laws of physics) don't apply to them.
Sorry, but I'm not going to suddenly start thinking that they're wonderful drivers OR that their fancy new clothes aren't invisible just because they think they are. I got over falling for that kind of thing along about age six or seven.
I estimate that more than 40 percent of cars tailgate so I find it hard to believe all of the posters here who condone it actually don't tailgate. Also, people drive way too fast especially in instances where traffic breaks up during a heavy traffic jam. Everyone essentially speeds up to stop a couple hundred feet ahead. Pisses me off. Same thing as people who tailgate you as you try to coast to a red light. Just the other day, I was coming around a bend and there was a long line of cars stopped at a light. I knew it was going to be a hard brake but I applied the brakes moderately to allow as much time for the people behind me. Well, as I'm coming to a stop I hear the unsettling sounds of a car's tires locking up. I thought I was going to get rear-ended but somehow their car came to a halt on the shoulder. Close call most likely caused by tailgating
By lowest common denominator, you mean those that are incapable of comprehending or obeying the most basic of traffic laws or, if they can't, accepting responsibility for the easily predictable consequences of their actions? The speed addicts, texters, etc., and others that fall into that category of irresponsible drivers?) THAT lowest common denominator?
Add among them people who believe traffic laws justify their own existence without any regard for whether they're actually reasonable, practical, enforceable, or sensible.
Like I've said before, if you think certain laws, traffic or otherwise, are not appropriate, by all means work to get them changed. In the meantime, however, they are not optional. Or, rather, they are optional, if you're the kind of person who thinks that way (but that doesn't mean, of course, that you're right - you could just suffer from entitlement syndrome and think that anything that doesn't get you your own way is not reasonable, practical, enforceable, or sensible).
But that doesn't mean that anyone else has to think that you're just the coolest thing since sliced bread or anything less than a menace on the roadways BECAUSE of that kind of thinking. You're responsible for the consequences of your own chosen actions, period. Nothing you can do is going to change that.
Like I've said before, if you think certain laws, traffic or otherwise, are not appropriate, by all means work to get them changed. In the meantime, however, they are not optional. Or, rather, they are optional, if you're the kind of person who thinks that way (but that doesn't mean, of course, that you're right - you could just suffer from entitlement syndrome and think that anything that doesn't get you your own way is not reasonable, practical, enforceable, or sensible).
But that doesn't mean that anyone else has to think that you're just the coolest thing since sliced bread or anything less than a menace on the roadways BECAUSE of that kind of thinking. You're responsible for the consequences of your own chosen actions, period. Nothing you can do is going to change that.
And this is precisely the kind of rigid thinking that's far more likely to get you and others injured or killed on the highways around here where traffic routinely flows at 15 to 20MPH over the posted speed limits while the state troopers stand guard and let it happen because they're smart enough to know that selective enforcement is more dangerous than letting traffic set its own consistent pace. So you can spare me the finger-wagging schoolmarm lectures. Your piety won't impress IDOT while they're scraping your remains off the highway with a shovel because traffic laws are more important to you than situational awareness.
Among other people, we need to stop issuing drivers' licenses to people who are utterly incapable of critical thinking when confronted with a decision between what a sign on the side of the highway tells them and what basic self-preservation ought to tell them.
Have you even read what I've typed? I do NOT try to enforce the law on the highways - I've stated that repeatedly. I simply decline to buy into your self-delusion that you're something so special that you get to pick and choose the traffic laws you'll obey based on YOUR opinion of them, or that you're (speeders with this attitude in general) not the initiating cause of any problems you might encounter.
If you can't live with the fact that there are quite a few people that think you're (drivers with this "I get to pick and choose which laws to obey" attitude) a dangerous driver with delusions of grandeur who doesn't have the first clue about taking personal responsibility for the consequences of their actions (one of the first and primary requirements for being even a half-way decent driver), that's too bad, because you're going to have to. It doesn't matter how special your Mommy told you you were, the rest of the world is not required to take on that view of you, especially when you give them good reason not to. Tailgating, or whining when other people don't choose to cater to your need for speed, are good reasons not to.
That's not being "rigid", that's refusing to buy into someone else's sense of entitlement. I don't have to block someone from breaking the law in order to recognize that they're just as bad and dangerous a driver as someone who texts while driving, with just as faulty an idea of what constitutes safe driving.
We should also stop issuing drivers' licenses to people who are so slow-witted that they think others who possess situational awareness and drive accordingly regard themselves as "something so special that you get to pick and choose the traffic laws you'll obey based on YOUR opinion of them."
I'll say it again -- when it comes to keeping myself safe or obeying a sign on the side of the road, I'll do the former every single time, no matter how often doing so earns your useless scorn and condescending lectures. In fact I'll consider it something of a bonus that it pisses you off so much.
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