Destination: US Border, Train to Zone
Vancouver BC seems to be populated by suicidal lunatics with driver licenses.
I won't say that this is a commentary on all Canadians, or even all BC residents, but I almost died yesterday. Several times, in fact. Maybe it's something in the water, or maybe they've just watched too many American action movies, but the people I encountered on the road up there have apparently no regard for personal safety, and no manners.
We went up for a day trip. I had never been to Vancouver before. I had been to BC several times, but always visited the eastern parts. MagneticCheeks was doing a final interview for her visa (she got it! Yay!). The_Raif and lady_absinthe were along as well. We left Everett at 6:10am, and crossed from Blaine into Surrey without event. About 8:30am, we drove smack into Vancouver's rush hour traffic, and that's when the trouble started.
On the outskirts of the city, what I saw could have been discounted as generic aggressive driving. Total disregard for the speed limit, people weaving in and out of traffic, and the like. Getting cut off became habitual. Every time I accidentally backed off and left myself more than a meter or two of following distance, somebody would merge (shove) in ahead of me. The only way to make progress was to tailgate. Whenever there was an exit-only lane or merging lane, there too was the endless cabal of drivers who would run right up to just before the barricade and force their way in. Those that couldn't force their way in before the merge simply drove up the shoulder until they could. Trucks did this too. Big trucks with trailers. You can't make this shit up.
Oh yeah, and I don't think that blinker technology has made it as far as Vancouver yet. Something for the trade organizations to think about.
After leaving the freeway and getting in on city streets, the situation only got worse. Although drivers can't be completely faulted for city planning which includes busy intersections with no dedicated turn lanes - at the rate of one left-turning car per cycle of the light, it took about six minutes to get through one intersection - I still found myself amazed and terrified. They tailgated, they stopped randomly, and they would frequently (and without warning) switch lanes in bumper-to-bumper traffic without regard to relative speed, or even whether there was another vehicle where they wanted to move.
I even discovered an interesting paradox of road rules in Vancouver. When the light turns green, you have the right-of-way. If the light is yellow, you still have the right-of-way. If the light just turned red, but you don't feel like waiting for another cycle, you apparently also have the right-of-way. A few near-misses after learning this, I was pretty tentative about entering the intersection regardless of what color I saw.
My favorite maneuver, however, is probably the left-turn-onto-busy-boulevard. See, the way I learned to do this maneuver is to wait until there is a gap simultaneously in all of the right-bound lanes and in the nearest of the left-bound lanes. As you can guess, this can take a while for the gaps in all of these lanes to coincide, which is why I usually just go right and turn at a light. The Vancouver way is much more efficient (for the car turning, not for the boulevard traffic, but who cares about them?) and doesn't rely on luck. All you have to do is wait for a gap in the nearest lane, and pull out into that gap. Thus blocking the lane, you can now wait for a gap in the next one, and work your way into the lane in which you want to travel.
So going, we reached our destination. Kreely and I spent a lovely afternoon in one of Vancouver's beautiful waterfront parks, where I let most of the tension and anxiety drain away. Lunch was a cute little bistro, and as mentioned, Mags got her visa (Yay!). Traffic notwithstanding, it was really a fun day. Alas, I had to get back behind the wheel to go home.
Getting out of the city was very much like getting in, but I think the worst was behind me. After a while, I ended up in a sort of shell-shocked trance, flinching at the sight of each car on the road (there were a lot of them). I'm certain I pissed off a number of other drivers, persistently occupying a lane when they wanted to merge at high speed. I don't actually think these people were all complete morons. But they were all homicidally selfish, putting their own desires over common courtesy and over the desires and safety of everyone else on the road. And they enforced it with a multi-ton high-speed ram.
By the time we again reached U.S. soil, I felt as though I had aggro'd an entire city worth of terrible drivers, but as we crossed back into Washington, I thankfully left them at the zone boundary. Driving home from the border was positively serene, surrounded by people who value their own lives and acknowledge that the person in the next car over might even value his. Coming down I-5, we only had one close call. A gray SUV doing about 85mph nearly clipped my bumper in the process of weaving back and forth through heavy traffic. As I muttered unflattering speculation about the driver's parentage, kreely pointed and confirmed what I suspect I had known by instinct the moment it passed us.
The SUV had BC plates.