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Monday, April 20, 2009

More Bad Drivers In Austin

If you thought I was cherry-picking the bad examples, you are sadly mistaken. I took some more shots on the way home that day and caught a few fine examples of UT Team Spirit in action.

The white stripes on the road are 10 feet apart. You do the math.

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The examples of [deleted]ty driving including this particular [delted] in the white Ford Explorer. I don't think it was O.J. . . .

Notice the empty #3 lane (slow lane on the right). Then notice that this joker is going full highway speed, in the rain, on a wet street, in an old truck with brakes that probably don't stop very well. This is what he did: He zoomed up behind the white mitsubishi sedan, and finally figured out that wasn't going to make the mitsu's driver speed up or move over. Then he went to follow the red Jeep within 10-20 feet also. When that didn't work, and it looked like the Mitsubishi was speeding up, he cut back over to the #1 lane (no turn signal of course). Finally, notice the lights on the back of the jeep. The driver of the white Explorer cut off the jeep within what looked like single-digits of feet of his bumper, and the Jeep driver had to brake.

This is a common occurrence in Central Texas highway driving. Once again, note that all the Explorer driver had to do was go to the #3 lane to pass them both, even at the much greater speed at which he surely wanted to be traveling.

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And they do it rain or shine! Note we have all lanes of traffic going 60MPH and all the roadway excepting the space immediately in front of me is full of cars following at unsafe distances from each other. Then we have a couple of shots on the way to work this morning (lovely weather thank God). This is a car, tailgating a semi, and the semi tailgating a truck, tailgaiting a car, tailgating a truck! Just amazing.

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My Darling Wife raised a concern of legality posting these pictures. This is on public roads, so I'm not too worried, especially with the low resolution of these images. She also mentioned a concern for my safety. You don't know how many pictures I discarded (the preponderance, at least) because I had the camera on automatic point/click mode. Also, these pictures are zoomed way in. The angles are severe because I was well behind the car in front of me, always, during these shoots. The camera was typically held in one hand that was also resting on the steering wheel, and the other hand held the wheel in a firm grip. Furthermore, I am such a driving superhero that I could do this while shaving, putting on mascara, and eating a pizza simultaneously, so I didn't feel like I was taking any extra risk with 3 minutes of camera time. Yes 3 minutes. It doesn't take long in Austin to see this sort of bad driving.

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