Verily, DC Drivers Are the Worst
D.C. drivers […] — the worst I’ve ever seen. Incapable of understanding such basic terms as “merge” and “yield.” — Robert Stacy McCain
I don’t know what it is about DC, but the city hosts a kind of driver that I have never encountered before: aggressive, yet hesitant. — Megan McArdle
My wife suffers from road rage. Not long ago — perhaps two years — she suffered also from my skeptical chastisement. “How can DC drivers be the worst?” I asked. We had both spent many years in LA, where drivers make merging onto the freeway an act of Nietzschean recklessness and traffic is so deep on city roads that left-hand turns can only be completed on a red light.
Another eight months or so of riding around with the Mrs., however, brought the rage to my brain. “Honk again,” I took to muttering. I found myself screaming out of windows, pointing provocatively at indignant street divas, laughing snidely at lane drifters, and bitterly cursing motorists either too lazy or too overwhelmed to manipulate the turn signal device.
It is true. LA drivers are horrible, but they are also horribly competent: riding through LA is like spending an afternoon on a go-kart course with thirty drunken redneck teenagers who grew up driving tractors since age 10. Everyone cuts everyone off, and they do it well. LA drivers have destroyed what average reasonable persons recognize as the rules of the road, and replaced them with vicious, half-improvised vehicular dance moves.
DC drivers, by contrast, can neither follow rules nor replace them. They march to the beat of a handicapped drummer on Xanax. This goes for private and public sector drivers alike. It is not right, but it is true, and when cars are replaced in the ever-closer future by floating hovercars, it may destroy us all.
Aggressive yet hesitant drivers are stupid people frustrated by their own stupidity, or stiffs ground down by an inefficiency and a confusion that plagues them at every turn and seems to thematize daily life at home and in the workplace. There is a special breed of halfhearted, halfassed, alienated, put-upon, unhappy people in DC — a breed that seems, anecdotally speaking, to cut across lines of race, class, and gender — which, I hope, is irreplicable anywhere else on Earth. Though if it was, soon enough our carbon troubles would be over, because the reign of street terror into which we’d all suddenly have been plunged would lead in a heartbeat to the banning of cars … and probably, out of sheer trauma, anything with wheels and a seat as well.