Why I hate Philly

Are driving students in the Philadelphia area taught this basic rule of the road?

This happens all the time. Yesterday’s example:

I’m driving on 76 and there’s a car in the left lane going about 60. In the right lane, cars are plugging along right around 55.   There’s a line of at least fifteen cars behind the sluggard in the left lane. No one can get around him and he won’t move to the right lane.  That person is setting the rate of traffic on a major local highway and causing traffic to pile up behind him.

(I’m using “him” here generically. The culprits are both genders. No one has exclusivity on this one.)

OK so the speed limit is 55 on that road but let’s be realistic. The rate of traffic is usually around 70 on this road when all is clear. What causes someone to decide that it’s perfectly fine to drive 55 in the left lane, and all the cars behind be damned? They obviously have no consideration for anyone else on the road.

Sometimes this causes serious traffic jams. It happens in the Philadelphia area more than anywhere I’ve ever seen in my life.

Stay right, pass left is a golden rule. Just another one that gets ignored in Philly.

Almost every day I’m out driving in Philly, I come across a traffic jam. OK it’s a city, you have to expect that. It’s the cause that sometimes irritates me.

Let me explain this concept very clearly:

When you see a yield sign, you wait for other traffic before entering the roadway.

Seems simple, yes? Yet when I get on 95 and there’s a car coming up the other entrance road, the one marked with a yield sign, do you think they slow down and allow me my right of way? If you don’t live in Philadelphia you may think they would. Not so. Not here. If anything, they speed up to get in front of me. I’m not lumbering slowly up the ramp so anyone would feel a desperate need to get ahead of me. There’s no reason for it other than the lack of respect again, not only for me as a fellow driver but for traffic laws.

In those cases, traffic is usually flowing so this doesn’t disrupt traffic, only my mind.

So let’s take the case of  traffic getting onto 76 west from 676 where there’s a back up half a mile long. I come across this day after day. When I get closer to the highway intersection, I see the cause of the traffic. No accident, no lanes closed. This is a classic spot for the good old “can’t merge two lanes into one without a fight” spectacle.

When two lanes merge to one, a sign shows which lane ends, where the traffic must merge. The standard procedure for this difficult operation is for the cars to fold in like cards, one after another from each lane. In normal places, it’s an easy thing called taking turns. Traffic doesn’t  build up when cars merge in an orderly fashion, except during normal congested times.

In Philly, there’s always a car that refuses to let one in front of it and another that tries to jump up two places in line. Then there’s always the car driving up the exit only lane, getting off and squeezing in at the last second. When I’m driving my big SUV, I use it as a barrier against these driving cheaters.

All of these vehicular games tend to cause a traffic back up as cars jostle for position. If everyone  just minded the rules of the road and had courtesy for one another, this could be avoided to a large extent. But then again, this is Philadelphia.

When I was around 19 I bought a 280zx from a private seller in eastern PA. I don’t recall where exactly it was. I only remember I had to go through Flemington to get back to Morris County so it was probably somewhere in Bucks County.

My father took me to pick up the car. On the way there, he warned me about Pennsylvania drivers. I don’t think he elaborated, I believe he just told me “they’re crazy, watch out for them”. My father is a wise man (except for his politics) so I listened and remembered.

I made the trip back to NJ with the 280zx unscathed. At that point I was probably a more likely road hazard than any crazy PA person. Prior to this drive, I had only driven a stick-shift a few times. So my concentration was divided between the road and trying not to stall out during my clumsy clutch work and shifting.

My father was being kind when he called PA drivers crazy. In my experience, the majority of them are rude and careless and just plain scary sometimes.

My first experience driving in Pennsylvania worked out fine. It was only when I moved here that I started to understand the full extent of the lunacy pervading Philadelphia roads.