R – Rants and Reckless Drivers

What if Reckless drivers had immediate consequences?

You’re driving down a two-lane road and you notice that the car behind you is about a foot from your rear bumper. You’re going the speed limit. If you can, you pull over to let the driver behind you pass. They speed by you 10 or more miles per hour faster than you’re doing. If you don’t pull to the side they manage to bob and weave around you at that high speed and continue to do so to any other driver that doesn’t accede to their full-throttled speed desire. Sometimes a driver in the lane to your right chooses to cut in front of you, with inches to spare, to do some bobbing and weaving of their own.

You are approaching a stop sign and watch the cars in front of you just glide through the stop sign, sometimes slowing down and sometimes not. And as we all know when the traffic light turns orange, it means we should speed up.

How many drivers do you pass, when you’re out on the road, that are on their phones? I’ve also seen drivers in their cars putting on make-up, shaving, and brushing their teeth; and not all doing these things when their cars are stopped.

Every one of these actions is reckless and dangerous. Most of the time there are no police around to stop and ticket any of these individuals. There are no consequences. But what if there were immediate consequences?

In my head, I always see my car loaded with photon torpedos, like in Star Trek, and when someone cuts me off or travels close to the speed of light, I have the ability to fire upon them.

My wife would like a maglev device that activates immediately when those cars speed by, raising them above all of the traffic at the exact spot that they are, holding them in the air for the appropriate amount of time before letting them down to continue their journey.

Imagine, instead of those traffic “gotcha” cameras that record you when you run a stop sign or red light, there would be paintball guns that automatically fired at your car as you pass them. Everyone seeing your car covered with assorted paintball splotches would know exactly what you were doing.

Texting or calling on your phones, without a handsfree device, would automatically disconnect your calls, or provide some sort of electrical jolt to the hand holding the phone or better yet, immediately slow your car down.

It’s very frustrating and scary at times when driving and you watch all of these drivers risking your life. I wish there was something that could be done on a global scale, other than letting my imagination run wild, which even though at times reduces my anger and road rage, but also distracts me.

I don’t claim to be perfectly innocent. There are times when I’m traveling faster than the speed limit allows, but never to extent that it is more than 5-7 miles over the speed limit. And having been on the receiving end of a running a stop sign ticket and not making a full stop at a right on red for a long enough period of time fine, I’ve learned not to do that.

There are real laws out there that give consequences to reckless drivers. In some cases, it is a fine, in some cases jail, and yet in others revocation of driving privileges. There are just not enough people to enforce it. Until we find ways to increase the way we catch these drivers and hold them accountable, the roads will remain places of anxiety and danger.

What if we could develop something like Star Trek’s transporter system, where we could beam ourselves where we want to be and not drive at all? Considering how crowded some of the roads are, I would be a little concerned about complications of beaming through all the rush hour people and getting to where I want to be in one (totally me) piece.