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| | My Personal Experience
I live in Kingwood, Texas. Kingwood is within the city limits of
Houston, but is 26 miles from the center of the city and 37 miles from my office
on the Katy Freeway. Thanks to some unreasonably slow road construction,
it takes me about an hour each day to get from my house to my office. I have
carefully observed the behavior of people as they drive to work. The most
important lesson that I have learned is that one can drive with reasonable
caution and care, or one can drive like a bat out of Hell. Either way,
you'll get downtown at about the same time. Stretching it, there might be
a difference of one minute in the amount of time that it takes the cautious
driver to get downtown, as opposed to the bat out of Hell. That, of
course, assumes that no one has either run into, or shot the bat out of Hell,
which frequently does happen here. With that in mind, here are a few
observations that I have made:
 | Don't get angry with the traffic. It doesn't help. Your blood
pressure rises, you threaten to stroke, you burn a lot of extra gasoline
which is getting quite expensive these days, and when all is said and done,
the traffic really doesn't care if you're mad with it or not. |
| If driving with the flow of traffic does not appeal to you, that's
okay. If you want to go faster, understand that this will not be an
easy task, and you're only setting yourself up for frustration. If you
want to go slower, please get the heck out of the left lane, thank you very
much. |
| Do not, please, do not spit tobacco or toss your lit cigarette out your
window. I drive a convertible, and might be right next to you. |
| When honking your horn, try a little toot-toot instead of just laying on
the horn. The latter wears out your horn faster, and only makes the
driver of the other car jumpy while he reloads his .38 |
| Read the newspaper before you leave the house, or after you arrive at
work, not while you're driving. I assure you that there is nothing in
there about the accident that you are about to have. |
| Hang up the damn phone and drive. |
| Look out for the car that has the fish emblem on the back. Give it a
wide berth. He (or she) has put that emblem on his or her car to tell
you that he or she is a Christian. This is an important message,
because it is my experience that you would never be able to ascertain this
information from their road manners. |
| Merging is not a test of your manliness. You are not less of a man
because you let a car in. Even Braveheart would have let a car in now
and then. |
| Your Honda Accord is not a four wheel drive off the road vehicle. If
you wish to cut across the ditch because you can't wait to get to the on
ramp, go ahead, as long as you are prepared to accept the laughs and
derision that you will receive from the rest of us when you rip the muffler
off the bottom of your car, or get stuck in the mud that you didn't know was
there. |
| OK, so you have a 4WD OTR vehicle. Go for it. But, don't
forget the four wheel drive rule. "The better your four wheel
drive, the deeper the mud is when you finally do get stuck." |
OK. Enough fun. The point is, we can all get to work in a
reasonable amount of time if we just show a little courtesy to each other.
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