What is with drivers?

Ok, so I am sure there are at least a million rants online about the bad driving on the road, but I can officially be objective since I have (mostly) taken myself out of the drivers seat.  I now commute on Mass Transit 90% of the time but last night my wonderful wife picked me up at the "End of the Line" Trax station and we spent some time at Barnes and Noble with the kids just checking out books and drinkin hot chocolate and eating Pumpkin cheesecake.  What a great evening right?

Well a little after 8 pm we decided to head for home and we got stuck behind a massive traffic jam.  it was one of those wonderful kind you don't know about until just pas the exit you "could" have taken.  Traffic was jammed from just past the Main Street American Fork Exit to somewhere near Fillmore. Well probably not Fillmore, but it sure felt like it.  It is 3 miles between The AF exit and the 1st PG exit which took us about 1.5 hours.    Now comes the rant part.  Some tanker truck ran off the road and went from southbound traffic into the norhbound freeway lanes dumping the contents of the vehicle. I don't know exactly what happened and I sincerely hope no one was hurt, but come on how selfish!!! Selfish? you might ask.  Yes!! Selfish!  Some self-centered person decides that their time and life is so important that they can't tear themselves away from on self serving pursuit to leave for an appointment on time and so the feel compelled to drive like a maniac because what ever self serving appointment they have must be reached on time.  What this whole attitude does is basically subverts the needs and safety of everyone else on the road to the one guy (or gal I don't discriminate)  who can't have the patience to drive safely along with traffic.  This persons ovewhelming self interest tells them that it is perfectly fine for them to risk the safety of hundreds of other people on the freeway not to mention delay thousands of people when they do finally cause an accident.  Now some accidents are just that, but come on we have all had the person blast past us giving the one-fingered salute as if to say "You are such a jerk to intentionally prevent me from using the whole freeway as my own personal playground"  I really do believe that many of the hyper-aggresive drivers must believe that everyone on the road is intentionally trying to block them and delay them.  Talk about delusions of grandeur.  Yup buddy, I've got nothing better to do with my petty little life than interrup you.  Can't we all grow up.

Speakikng of that though.  Clearly some people do feel it is somehow their responsibility to keep the jerks in line.  The accident was bad enough last night, but adding to the frustration was the fact theat allof us knew that we were only a couple of miles (just two minutes) from freedom.  As we got closer and closer to the next exit people were creeping onto the shoulder trying to see what was going on.  Eventually somedrivers pulled out on the shoulder and sped along to the exit.   Until,  someone decided that it simply wasn't right for others to get ahead.  No... nobody better problem solve and get out of the mess.  Somebody in a Subaru a couple fo cars ahead of us pulls onto the should and crouches.  He doesn't pulll along the should and off the freeway.  Just crouches.  Apparently he had received some kind of mandate from the aliens that it was his job to prevent anyone from driving on the shoulder.  Now, I am not advocating for the folks sneaking past the traffic.  There had already been two or three emergency vehicles travel down the shoulder and I was concerned that these folks using the shoulder might block the next emergency vehicles, but the person in the Subabru was not just potentioally blocking traffic, but intentionally blocking it.

Well, this is probably more than anyone would want to read ever in a blog, but since this is mostly for me deal with it.

By the way I found the details.  And apparently this wasn't so much a matter of selfish, reckless driving as not knowing how tall your truck is.

check the link http://www.heraldextra.com/content/view/279489/17/