I gripe about driving quite often on The Blog, but frankly people irritate the crap out of me with their driving and here’s why:

The first thing is merging. Sweet lord do people stink at it here. In case you were curious (which obviously no body is) the proper way to merge onto a major interstate is to get up to speed before actually merging onto the interstate. Now let me define the “get up to speed” part because that apparently confuses people too. Now I understand that by definition speed limit means that is the fastest you should be going. But in reality this means that by all means you should be making your best effort to maintain this speed, if not go 5 over. I’ll come back to this after I finish my gripe about merging. So yeah, when you cross that white line to officially be on the highway you should at that point be going the speed limit. The actual highway is NOT where you should be accelerating. If you are, you merged completely incorrectly and I am now flying past you, staring with a confused look on my face that says, “What the flip are you doing?” in the left lane. The same goes when getting off the highway. Decelerate once you are off the actual interstate. Now there are times when the deceleration ramp is too small to do this, in which it is okay to slow down before getting on the ramp, but frankly here in PA, rarely will you find this. We have obsessively large entrance and exit ramps for our interstates and we should use them as such.

Now, back to the speed limit grip. Yes I understand sometimes the weather calls for you to slow down to under the speed limit. However one example when this is not the case is when there is snow on the side of the road (key words there are side of the road). If there is no snow on the driving road, or there are perfectly dry 2 feet wide tire paths, the speed limit should then be maintained until driving actually does become hazardous. Also just because its nighttime doesn’t mean the speed limit has decreased; remember that. 50 MPH during the day is the same speed as 50 MPH during the night. Just like Shakira’s hips, your speedometer doesn’t lie. Oh yeah and just blatantly ignoring the speed limit by going slow is just irresponsible and obviously tells me that you are not paying attention to road signs whatsoever and you should be removed from the roadways immediately.

I’m not exactly sure why these things bother me. I’m not really in a rush to get anywhere. I guess I just think if we are allowed to drive vehicles weighing thousands of pounds and affect tons of people all around us, we should not be driving in a idiotic, brainless, dim-witted matter. Of course, just like everything else on The Blog, this is my opinion.