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by sircastor 752 days ago
The thing that really bothers me about this is that the Jerk Threshold pushes the Overton window on Jerkiness - now if you're not participating in Jerk behavior you're disrupting "The way things work" which on its own might be jerk behavior.

I grew up and live in Oregon. I've generally thought of our drivers as relatively non-aggressive. But I've seen Californians† who are aggressively merging and weaving (And if you've ever driven down in LA, you know the lay of the land). Then the Oregonians who follow suit, and then everyone is doing it.

†Oregonians have been complaining about Californians since time immemorial. It's just pure tribalism. We blame any negative change on our state as "Californians moving in". My apologies to Californians for unfairly dished blame.

1 comments

The population of California drivers seems to have this weird bimodality of weaving lanes or never changing lanes at all; the other annoying "California Driver" thing is "If you are going slower than I want, how dare you believe that I might move left one lane to pass you. I'll only do that after tailgating you for a few minutes and then flipping you off"

Even when going 65 in the right lane I've seen this happen.

The other thing that seems more specific to SoCal that pisses me off is: "35MPH is a perfectly reasonable speed to merge onto the freeway at. Not just on short ramps, but on ramps that are 1/4 a mile downhill where even a Geo Metro could hit 55. Yes I'm going to go 80MPH eventually, but not until a half mile after merging."