Bad Manners at the Stop Sign
Mirror, signal left, brake and stop before the marked stop line. Look left, look right and the vehicle that was following me stops on my right, half on and half off the roadway, making his right turn. Of course, I can't see cross traffic to my right properly, so he gets to go before I do. I'll bet that he was completely oblivious to both his bad manners and the traffic rule he failed to heed.
Passing on the right is generally forbidden in BC and having to travel off of the roadway to do it is one of those instances. No matter in this case that the gravel shoulder is smooth and available to drive on it is still not acceptable driving practice. The white line that defines the right edge of the roadway at this intersection has been almost totally worn away by drivers who have preceded this man.
There is almost no doubt in my mind that if this man was waiting in a lineup for his turn and I walked past and inserted myself in front of him I would be in for at least a dirty look, if not some verbal protest. That situation is really no different from the one at the stop sign. He took a turn that was not his to take and caused inconvenience to others. That is bad manners in my view, and probably yours too.
If anyone from Royal Canin Canada is reading this, the man is a bad advertisement for your company. You may wish to ask him to be a better representative of your company or remove the advertising from the outside of his vehicle. I might not be able to speak to him directly about his behaviour, but there are other ways of getting the point across that don't provoke road rage.
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Here is a look at some other common practices that seem to be more common every day.
The first that really is dangerous is the one where the vehicle following a vehicle making a right turn uses the left turn lane to proceed through the intersection. Illegal of course but probably so because of the potential for a head-on collision with the vehicle on the other side of the intersection that is actually going to make a left turn from his/her left turn lane which just happens to line up with the other left turn lane.
Stop lines are there for a reason. Stop before them and you don’t get into a situation where a larger vehicle that needs every bit of room he can get in order to make his left turn in front of you. The large vehicle can’t back up in an intersection and the offending vehicle may not be able to back up because of traffic that has stopped right behind it.
What has ever happened to all those people that had to drive correctly in order to get a driver’s licence? Now that they have it, do the rules of the road go out the window with the other garbage that they throw to the side of the road? Could it be that everyone is so much in a hurry that the ‘me first’ rule is the only rule that they go by?