Book Smart Driving

This past month was the third anniversary of selling my car and riding the buses around Seattle. As I've written before, my reasons for this were not due to the price of gas or out of some desire to save the environment. I did it because the northwestern U.S. has the absolute worst drivers anywhere.

So last week, a survey came out saying that Washington and Oregon drivers were the most knowledgeable in the country. A few days later, I stopped laughing and tried to understand exactly what happened. The important thing I realized is that knowledge of the basic traffic rules is only a small part of driving, and in cities like New York, completely inconsequential to being a good driver. To truly understand how pointless this survey is, Vermont ranked third, even though to some of my New York relatives, calling someone a Vermont driver is a standard insult.

I don't even care enough to look at all of the questions on their survey, but the example I hear most is about the crosswalk rule, which says that you must yield to a pedestrian waiting at a crosswalk. This is technically a law, although Seattle and Portland are the only cities where people obey it. If people obeyed this law in New York or Chicago, they'd never get anywhere, or worse, they'd get rear-ended. And a pedestrian in those cities would never, in their right mind, step out in front of a fast-moving car expecting it to stop.

On that note, there's a guy named Tim Ellis, a Kenmore resident, who started up a blog a month back called Seattle Traffic. At first, I had no idea if Tim was an out-of-towner fed up with the natives or the typical native who doesn't understand why it's wrong to call the left lane the "fast lane" rather than the "passing lane". But Tim posted something this week that answered both that question (he's a native, alright) and also explained why Washington drivers may be knowledgeable, but knowledgeable does not exactly translate to good.

I feel a little bad picking on Tim here because he seems like a cool guy, but his story is just ripe for ridicule and really demonstrates my point. You see, Tim had an accident with his car on the offramp from Route 520 onto Southbound I-5 (pictured below from Windows Live Local)



According to him, there were no weather factors, he wasn't speeding, and there were no other cars involved. He just drove right into the guardrail. But he showed up in court last week expecting to have his citation for "driving too fast for the conditions" thrown out because - well - in his mind, he was following the rules. And this is the main difference between a knowledgeable driver and a good driver. A good driver tends to understand that when you lose control of your car and drive it into a guardrail, you were going too fast. It doesn't matter what the signs say. Every car is different and can handle turns at different speeds in different conditions. You can't rely on speed limit postings to help you understand your vehicle. Good drivers know one very simple rule: Damaged car = I fucked up.

So when you see a survey that shows that northwest drivers are the most knowledgeable, that means that they're more likely to use their turn signals as they drive into a ditch screaming about how they were just following the rules.