Driving.....

Pet peeves:
1) people who cannot judge speed and distance.

2) People who tailgate in the slow lane, with no intention of passing.

3) People who do 35-45 MPH in a 55 zone where everyone else is doing 55-65. You're not being safe, you're impeding traffic. if you or your vehicle cannot maintain highway speeds, use sidestreets (if available) or put on your hazard lights (because you are a hazard) or just stay home.
Also: it's not speeding that kills, it's the people driving radically different speeds than each other.

4) We have a very large store in town sitting on a large road. (two lanes each way, plus a turn lane.) It has two exits, one of which is at a controlled intersection and the other is just a wide driveway. If you can't judge speed and distance, don't just pull out blindly across traffic.

5) People who want to tell me horror stories about motorcycle injuries. Just shut the **** up. I knew someone who died in a pickup truck that was hit by a logging truck. No one is safe.

Growing up in Chicago, I thought I'd seen it all. I mean literally, there's places here that, if you don't have a car, you simply can't get there (no, walking is NOT an option when you're talking 20+ miles from the nearest public transportation stop).

So a few years back, I'm visiting my parents in Vegas and taking my mom out to lunch. As I'm getting on the express way, she looks over at me and nearly screams "FLOOR IT!"

Now this is the woman who taught me how to drive, completely white-faced, screaming in terror and with both feet firmly braced up on the dashboard. So I just about blew my eyes out onto the passenger side window wondering who this crazy lady was. Thing is, out there, if you're not doing 5+ getting on the expressway, there are idiots who'll literally plow right into you at 90+ mph

The worst I ever saw was Seoul South Korea though. Gridlock there is a frigging nightmare. 3 lanes of traffic, 5 cars across (oh, yeah, the pavement markers and lane dividers, they're sorta treated as suggestions).

Or the one time coming back from dropping a patient off at 121 MedEvac (one of the side-effects of serving there is I understand roughly 90% of the military and place references in M.A.S.H. now) and we pass up one of the post shuttle buses in our Humvee Ambulance and are waving to a buddy who decided to take the bus instead of riding back with us.

A couple minutes later and FWOOM! The shuttle bus comes screaming past us (and we're doing 80! ). Our buddy is smirking at us and waving back as the bus pulls out ahead of us.

Then we see a set of lights come on down the road and the bus pulls over...

Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.

A pet peeve of mine is people who don't even slow down much less stop to check for traffic before going right on red. I've seen a lot of very near accidents because of it.

I didn't know how frightening young adult drivers could be until I started working at a college.

There is a certain intersection which is horrific. Coming right off of the main city street, a road runs right through the area used by the college. This street separates parking lot 1 and 2 from 3 and 4 has no stop signs. It always has the right-of-way unless pedestrians are crossing. The street intersecting it which takes you from the parking lots closer to the college to the parking lots on the other side of the road...I've nicknamed maniac drive.

About ten minutes before classes begin the traffic in that area starts to get pretty heavy, and it never ceases to amaze me how selfish those drivers seem to be. During the time I have spent there I have seen a pattern.

The college kids seem to enter and speed through the closer parking lots (a whole different rant altogether) only to find that there are no more parking space to be had, which is quite typical during the noon hours. From there they pull into maniac drive to try and cross over to the other parking lots. That annoys me (After the first few days of trying to find a parking spot and failing...you'd think they would go to the farther parking lots first) however I realize that on some days they would get lucky. It's what they do next that makes me rue the day I started working there.

The 'smart people' who go directly to the farther parking lots, and the non-college traffic, keep the main road flooded to the point where the people in maniac drive are pretty much stuck. After a while though, they somehow inherit the right-of-way. I don't know if it's the "I've been sitting here for 30 seconds" or "My class starts in five minutes" or "People should realize they need to let us out" mentality or some combination of the three that somehow 'grants' them the right of way to pull out, but it scares the heck out of the rest of us.

People crossing the street? Hey they have legs, they can jump or fit under my car.
Other cars crossing in front of me? Too bad, I want to be on the other side of the street.

Thank goodness the college started paying a bus company to bus people from one side of the street to the other. If they hadn't I know I would have been run over by now.

From a few years ago: I was waiting at a red light to turn right. Then, for lack of a better term, a *discontinuity* occurred. There I was, wondering why my seat was reclined ALL the way back such that I was staring into the car's ceiling, and was no longer wearing my glasses. I didn't realize until much later that I had been lucky to have kept my foot on the brake the whole time, as the car was idling and pointed downhill. Took a minute or two to find my glasses, put it in park, and get out of the car. Wandered around to the back and found the rear driver-side bumper had been pushed in. I was the only car on the road. I remember standing there and turning back and forth between my bumper and the empty road behind me, pondering "The car was hit. But there's nothing here. But the car was hit....."
Fortunately that wore off after another minute or two, about the time the police arrived. It turns out I had been rear-ended by a stolen pickup truck; a witness said it hadn't particularly slowed down before, during, or after the impact. It was found about a mile away in the middle of a grass field with the front smashed in and the door hanging open. The thief was never caught. My car only had 2950 miles on it; was scheduled for its first oil change the next morning.
And to add a CoH element to this thread: While I've often said that I wanted to "Stop Crime", this was not quite the intended technique.

And a lesson learned from this: If you need glasses, be sure to keep a spare set in your car in some secure location like the glove box. Mine flew off my face, and I'm nearly blind without them. Searching the interior of a car by feel *after* every lose object has been thrown into the footwells along with them can be quite a bother.