Submitted by leadfoot9 t3_yrve96 in pittsburgh
Not going to lie: I'm starting to feel very unsafe using the roads around here and have an urge to start carrying weapons with me everywhere, even though I know it's a bad idea.
My commuting/shopping habits have changed several times over the past decade, so maybe I'm not making a fair comparison or just not remembering well enough. Has it always been this bad, or have I just been unlucky? Am I just picking the same routes as the crazies? Is this some sort of weird outgrowth of political polarization where conspiracy theorists view people who follow traffic laws as commie socialist beta ****s?
Even if 98% of drivers are courteous, that still means you're going to run into a deranged maniac about once a week.
I saw this post on Reddit the other day, and I've been having plenty of bad experiences of my own this year.
When I'm driving, it's people leaning on the horn behind me for yielding to non-jaywalking pedestrians or for not running red lights. Or I'm one of the pedestrians in the crosswalk that's being yielded to.
When I'm biking, the occasional asshole will scream at me or attempt to run me off the road (even when I'm doing the speed limit... not that it's legal to run slow-moving vehicles off the road, either).
Now, screaming and honking are one thing. Idiots have always screamed and honked, but I've had two face-to-face confrontations this year with Boomer men who were very angry that I wasn't following whatever version of traffic laws existed in their head. <redacted joke about getting your license back when state troopers administered the test... use your imagination>