Shout out to the woman who trapped me in my car in Tesco car park
It finally happened. I saw a driver getting caught breaking a red light. Just when I had almost given up on any kind of policing of the decline in motorist behaviour, the flashes of an unmarked Garda car brought back a smidgen of hope.
Driving behaviour since Covid has been steadily declining. Speeding, impatience, phone use, complete abandonment of the rules of the road and abject rage at anyone obeying them is now commonplace. In January it was promised that red light cameras would address some of the problems, but I drive through and across various parts of the city several times a week and things are still deteriorating. So much so that I've started keeping a mental running tally of the very worst of drivers currently terrorising the roads.
The white van man who overtook me as I dared to stop at a red light.
The junction in question is a busy crossroads near where I live in Dublin 8, with four sets of traffic lights and two pedestrian crossings. The car in front of me went through on orange and I stopped on red. Enraged, the man behind me leant on his horn and then sped up to overtake my stationary car on a fully red light, careening through a – thankfully empty – pedestrian crossing with a green man. I can only assume this man was a paediatric cardiac surgeon on his way to a life-saving emergency. Nothing else could explain his behaviour.
The woman in the Mercedes who beeped at me for not moving
into
a yellow box
. She had looked up from her phone long enough to see that I hadn't closed the gap between my car and the one in front to her required two millimetres and was immediately incensed. She didn't care that I was respecting the very obvious and bright yellow box as required by the rules of the road. She cares not for yellow boxes, only rage and terrible driving. And her phone.
READ MORE
Ninety-eight per cent
of people using roundabouts.
What happened to indicating? What happened to being in the correct lane? What happened to humanity?
The man watching TikToks on the M50, while driving at 100km an hour.
I know he was doing this because I was driving behind him, aghast, as he flipped through cat videos and Gen Z vintage clothing hauls. Well, actually, I couldn't see what the content was. It's just that my TikTok feed (which I watch mostly while sitting on my bed in a towel with wet hair) is cat videos and Gen Z vintage clothing hauls. His is probably '13 of the worst traffic pile-ups ever' or similar.
The woman who trapped me in my vehicle in the car park of a Big Tesco.
To give her an iota of grace, I will acknowledge that the car park in question has ludicrously small spaces and is in a salubrious part of Dublin where the cars are all wider and taller than any city vehicle needs to be. I had tucked my Nissan Juke into a space with the passenger side mere inches from a wall. She then promptly reversed her combine harvester in beside me as I was gathering my bags for life and trolley tokens, and left about 11cm of space between her door and mine. I tried to gain her attention as she abseiled down from her vehicle but to no avail. I simply had to wait the 15 minutes for her to return.
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Changing your playlist can make you a safer driver, claims Allianz research
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Anyone who 'swan necks' around corners.
I had an amazing driving instructor in my early 20s who told me that the very worst motorists will take a big swing out to get around a corner, usually oblivious to other cars in the lane to their right. Unless you're in a bus or a truck you don't need two metres of clearance. I'm
this
close to advocating for new driving tests every five years.
The man in the obnoxious pickup truck who blocked the yellow box at the gate where I live.
He failed to move forward even when traffic allowed because he was on his phone, made an obscene gesture when I gave the politest of bips to alert him to the obstruction he was causing, and then, to add insult to injury, had a 'climate denier' sticker on his tailgate. Maybe the roll bars on his preposterous giant tractor will save him when the apocalypse comes.
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