The god with four wheels
I recently conducted a random
experiment in driver
psychology. Worried about a strange noise from under our car, I decided
to
‘limp’ home and have a look at it before committing
the beast to the garage.
The speed limit in Hudson is 40Kph. That’s reasonable until you try driving under the legal maximum. 40 seems terribly slow. It’s designed to create a safer environment for pedestrians, animals, cyclists – and drivers – in areas where the unexpected can occur. I wanted to get home without incident and stuck to 40.
Silly me. A Very Important Person was on my rear bumper all the way up Cameron. Frustrated by my attempts to hinder his Very Important Schedule, he overtook me between stop signs.
The ‘baby on board’ sticker in our window did not impress upon him the need for caution: he was so Very, Very Important and my wounded car, my baby boy and I were simply obstacles to his continued success.
I have lost count of the number of near misses I’ve suffered while running on the streets of Hudson. The culprits often didn’t even know I was there, being too busy talking on their cellphones, changing the CD or applying make-up. Jasper is lucky to still have a Dad.
Our laziness as a race is well-established, but reversing into a parking spot takes less time than the preferred habit, driving in forwards and then having to reverse out blindly into danger.
Every year, Canadians are killed by cars reversing out of parking spots. Canadians are killed using cellphones behind the wheel (good riddance), and kill others (a crime which should carry a lifelong driving and cellphone ban). Tailgating at any speed causes infinitely more accidents than rolling through stop signs at 5mph or doing 25Kph over the speed limit on highways.
But the SQ make up their quotas sitting behind residential hedges and skulking under highway bridges.
Jasper has a while to wait before joining this crazy world, where there are already too many cars, but every other commercial sells motorised lies of speed and personal freedom. I hope by then somebody with at least half a brain is in charge of all this mess. But I doubt it. Sleep well.
