Vehicular Narcolepsy

Guest Post by Eric Peters

People aren’t asleep at the wheel – they are unconscious behind the wheel. The Safety Cult has done its vile work, turned most people into narcoleptics who operate in ultra slow-motion –  like watching the Zapruder film frame-by-frame.

The light goes green – and nothing happens.

After awhile, they notice – and the herd creeps forward. Herd is exactly the right word, too. A herd moves as one. So do most drivers. The car in the left lane keeps pace with the car to its right. The car in the left does not move any faster – or move over to the right. This would open up the left lane – formerly known as the fast or passing lane – so that traffic could un-glut and people could get going rather than mooing along in vacuous, gadget-addled unison.

Just like a herd of ear-tagged bovines.

When they do move over, they almost never just do it. First, they wait for cars behind them to accumulate. So that those cars are forced to brake and slow down. After another while, they signal that they are thinking about a lane change. But not yet! After some more while, they gradually begin to drift over to the adjacent lane.

-----------------------------------------------------
It is my sincere desire to provide readers of this site with the best unbiased information available, and a forum where it can be discussed openly, as our Founders intended. But it is not easy nor inexpensive to do so, especially when those who wish to prevent us from making the truth known, attack us without mercy on all fronts on a daily basis. So each time you visit the site, I would ask that you consider the value that you receive and have received from The Burning Platform and the community of which you are a vital part. I can't do it all alone, and I need your help and support to keep it alive. Please consider contributing an amount commensurate to the value that you receive from this site and community, or even by becoming a sustaining supporter through periodic contributions. [Burning Platform LLC - PO Box 1520 Kulpsville, PA 19443] or Paypal

-----------------------------------------------------
To donate via Stripe, click here.
-----------------------------------------------------
Use promo code ILMF2, and save up to 66% on all MyPillow purchases. (The Burning Platform benefits when you use this promo code.)

The process often takes several minutes. You can almost feel your beard growing.

It is as rare as sound money for a driver to neatly, cleanly move over to the right lane in anticipation of faster traffic coming up behind him (having noticed it coming up behind him because he is scanning his rearview) such that the faster-moving traffic isn’t forced to brake, slow and wait.

Anything quickly and efficiently done in a car is now considered “unsafe.” Hypercaution is the watchword.

This includes even slowing down itself.

As cars approach a red light, they taper to a crawl and then inch forward – leaving enormous gaps between them and the cars ahead. This effectively doubles the number of cars occupying a given space, due to the multiplication effect of the Ghost Cars in between the actual ones.

The conga line grows even longer than it has to – and you wait longer to access left and right turn lanes, which are routinely blocked by three or four cars taking up as much physical space as six or seven because of the great Air Gaps in between them.

Few will ever inch forward, even a little – so as to close the gap and make it feasible for you to access that oh-so-close (but so far away) turn lane. Even when they see you would like to squeeze past and maybe catch that left or right turn signal.

They are either grossly uncivil, indifferent to the inconvenience – or they are incapable of closing the gap due to a stunted sense of spatial relationships.

Each explanation seems equally likely.

On the one hand, people’s sense of their car in relation to other cars – and the physical environment – has been badly gimped by lack of development in the first place (new drivers are no longer taught/expected to become proficient at such things as parallel parking; the cars now park themselves) and by cars designed such that outward visibility has been badly gimped.

People are afraid to pull forward out of fear they might bump into something.

They are also afraid to pass anything.

Even in a legal passing zone. Multiple cars will back up behind one car whose driver won’t quite do the speed limit. But as frustrated as everyone obviously is, none will pass.

Because that would require speed in excess of the posted limit – even if briefly – in order to execute the pass (cue irony) safely.

But people are terrified of receiving a ticket for speeding.

This is is reasonable. Armed government workers have always been among us, but they didn’t used to be the mortal threat to us which they are now. Even if we’re not Tazed or otherwise physically brutalized, the fines are brutal. OJ can get away with killing people and not paying his victims’ families – but if you are caught “speeding,” you’ll pay.

And so, people are fearful of doing anything which might lead to an encounter with Officer No Longer Friendly.

This has led to a weird situation: Powerful cars in abundance – a family sedan such as a new Accord or Camry is quicker than most V8 muscle cars of the ’60s and faster on top than most Ferraris of the ’70s – whose power is generally wasted. It’s like a celibate supermodel.

What’s the point?

This, more than anything else, probably explains the general enthusiasm for the automated car. It will be possible to actually go to sleep behind the wheel – once there’s no longer a wheel to worry about.

9
Leave a Reply

avatar
  Subscribe  
Notify of
Jack Lovett

I drove long haul truck for 7 years. I can assure you driving 500+ miles per day I saw some stupitity that was off the charts. The one that has always angered me was a slow “driver” in the hammer lane that takes forever to move to the slow lane. In some cases refuses to move over. Stupid ego or whatever. And forever waiting to be stopped by the extortion pigs.
Btw, if you end up in traffic ct. Simply ask the commisioner
(normaly not an art 3 judge), regarding the $ that you are going to extort from me today, will that $ be used as restitution to my victim? And then say, I assume the pig produced the corpus delecti? It works.
(most

Dutchman
Dutchman

What I hate the most: I’m in the left lane, one car in front of me, we’re stopped at a red light, there is a tractor trailer or bus in the right lane. When the light turns green, the fuck-up in front of me accelerates (at a snail’s pace) and matches the speed of the large vehicle to our right.

Tommy
Tommy

Say what you want, but I find it’s usually, by no means always, a boomer who thinks whatever speed they’ve chosen for themselves is good enough for all – in the left lane no less. The idea that it’s called ‘the passing lane’ is foreign at best….I suspect most just don’t care. Same goes for turning right on a red…..it’s like they don’t know you can. And when they do appear to understand the concept, they need a quarter of a mile to the left and right ‘to go’…..and my God don’t even ask me about turning left.

Wip
Wip

How about how almost nobody can make a simple right turn onto a side street without practically coming to a full stop? That one bugs the shit out of me. No way is it possible that all of these drivers are carrying wedding cakes in the back. It’s as if people can’t handle even a small amount of centripetal acceleration around a turn.

Anonymous
Anonymous

My favorite is how everyone wants to use their phones to post on Facebook while driving. Everytime the line is slow to move and I’m able to see the driver in front of me, they’re glued to their phones instead of paying attention.

C1ue
C1ue

+1 to that.
Someone working a cell phone – either texting, talking or even using the internet – is most likely to blame.

Oilman2
Oilman2

Between all the driving rules, loss of driving etiquette, automated bullshit in cars, idiot traffic engineering, constant construction and much more…well, drivers that once were sub-par are now scared to make a move.

Then you have those who were taught by their Mom to save money. These are the ones who believe a blinker is also an instant right-of-way. I have 2 collisions and may near misses because of this.

But the true cause of most of this is the damned “smart”phone – the device that is singularly responsible for raising our insurance and accident rates over the last couple of decades. Hell, kids and adults canot even walk and text (google that for some laughs). How in hell are they supposed to drive and text?

Bluetooth takes 2-3 minutes to set up in a car, but it also makes attention go elsewhere. There is no (and I do mean zero) situational awareness anymore on roads and freeways. Any spec of unused awareness is taken over by smartphones, bluetooth fiddling, adjusting the movie for the kids in the back, listening to the son-of-a-bitching GPS, and so on.

The source of this is the nanny-state growing into the auto world while the phone giants are exempted from any responsibility. Tying the phone manufacturers into lawsuits for accidents would solve the problem. They would make the phones shut off when in a car – poof! Now people have attention to pay…

Doc
Doc

What really blows my fuse is sitting in the left turn lane and the left turn arrow turns green. There is plenty of time for everyone to make the turn IF everyone gets their acts together – BUT NOOOOOO. 5 car lengths apiece, only 4 or 5 make the light. It sometimes takes THREE lights to make a turn %#@*&%^!

My other favorite is the guy in front of you that waits at the stop sign for the cars a half mile down the road. It’s probably a good thing that you can’t buy rocket launchers – I’d have a dozen mounted on my front bumper.

Great article – thanks!

Macumazahn
Macumazahn

What kills me is the damned cruise control. Nobody passes anyone on the freeway anymore, they just drift by at whatever speed differential their cruise control dictates.

Discover more from The Burning Platform

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading