Courtesy Corner

The lack of common courtesy that I witness and experience on a daily basis is astounding. I think its safe to say that the majority of the general public has a complete lack of othersmindedness (this probably isn't really a word but you know what I mean by it). Allow me to choose the simple topic of courtesy out and about on the roadways. When driving on the freeway it is not necessary to be in the far left lane if you are driving the same speed as the cars in the middle or the right lane. My understanding is that the left lane is for faster traffic, if you are going the same speed as the car next to you, you are not faster traffic and therefore should not be in the left lane. I've heard it said that if you are going the speed limit or even slightly over it which is common practice, you should not feel compelled to move out of the way of vehicles that want to go faster than you. My response to this is that basically this argument breaks down to something like "I should be able to drive as fast as i'm comfortable with and if other people don't like it they can go around me" and yet by having that attitude and driving that way you are making a case against that argument because you won't allow others to adopt the same practice. They would like to drive as fast as they are comfortable with and are being prevented by your stubbornness. It's just rude, I say if some one wants to drive faster than you, let them go by, changing lanes to get out of their path is really not that big of a deal.
Next, I would like to target semi-trucks, dump trucks, junky vehicles that can't go fast, and people who for some strange reason are afraid to get remotely close to the speed limit. We are all taught that the right lane is for slower traffic, but I am going to make a revolutionary statement here and say that slow people should drive in the middle lane. Here's why. Traffic is primarily caused by people merging on and off of the freeway therefore anything that potentially slows down the merging process is going to cause traffic. In Riverside particularly a lot of the onramp's don't give you much time to merge onto the 91 freeway. This being the case a large truck or something that is going 50-60mph rather than 65-80 can seriously get in the way when attempting to merge. If these slow moving vehicles had any sort of dexterity that would enable them to move quickly to accomodate cars merging in then things would be fine, but they of course don't. Therefore, if these vehicles were in the middle lane they would be completely out of the way of the cars that are getting on and off the freeway. If you happen to be responsible for a slow moving vehicle I recommend you try using the middle lane, also try speeding it up a little bit, just try it. I promise you won't die and hey, you may even like it, you may even get to where you are going on time!
Lastly I would like to point out a lack of courtesy in pedestrians. I understand full well the purpose of crosswalks but it seems to be that pedestrians using them seem to lose their understanding of why the intersection at which they are crossing has a crosswalk to begin with. Allow me to remind them, the crosswalk is needed because at that particular place a lot of cars want to go in all directions thus it is necessary to stop them in order for any pedestrians to get across the street. That's fine and dandy but when a pedestrian presses the button, waits a little bit, then steps off the curb when told to walk they seem to instantaneously develop a mentality that is telling them the whole world has just been paused so that they can perform an extraordinary show of walking across the street. Due to most people's desire to have their 15 minutes of fame, they really don't want to squander this spotlight they've been given, thus they draw out this time as long as possible. What they fail to realize is that some cars are allowed to go as soon as the pedestrians are out of the way which means, as the performance of walking is going on, others must sit waiting with whatever patience they can muster. Let me wrap it up with this, if you use a walker to get around or are blind by all means take the full time all the way up until the hand becomes solid red to cross the street. Everyone else, haul your butt across there at the double quick because we all have somewhere we need to be and a performance of you walking across the street is not worth the admission to the show. Remember people, we live in California, this is a fast paced place and it's never gonna change, if you can hack it, I hear there are cheap houses in South Dakota.