Eight lanes of Chaos

Living in a college town I’m accustomed to bad drivers and bad driving. Every year we get a new crop of wet-behind-the-ears kids with little to no experience behind the wheel who use the town like a drivers ed course. Naturally it doesn’t help when many of these kids have parents who possess crappy driving skills as well. Many of these kids come from the Atlanta area, and the roads around Atlanta are the movie “Deathrace 2000” incarnate. Anyone who’s ever driven on I-285 or I-75/85 has had at least one experience where their life flashed before their eyes.

Which is why I’m surprised yet not surprised to find some of the worst driving in town not in or around campus, but at my daughter’s elementary school. Within the past year the county has upgraded the four-way intersection in front of the school from four lanes to eight lanes, adding a turn lane to each direction. I thought they would be adding a traffic signal to help control the flow of cars but that’s not going to happen. Without any signal or a cop to direct traffic, it’s eight lanes of chaos each weekday morning.

Traditionally the rule of thumb is if you’re first to the line, you’re the first to go. The rule of thumb is chopped off each morning as lines of self-absorbed parents jockey their way to get their kids to school on time, regardless of who they cutoff or, sometimes, even if the crossing guard is hold her stop sign as kids cross the street. One morning only a few weeks ago the guard was starting to escort a young girl across the intersection. They had just entered the crosswalk, the guard holding her stop sign well in hand so everyone could see it. The asshole in front of me figures he’s got time before they’re in his way so he proceeds to ignore the stop sign and go anyway. I see him and his piece of crap, rust-covered white van almost every morning, and every morning I shoot him an “eat shit and die” look. How self-absorbed can one be that they’re willing to run over someone else’s kid so that their kid makes it to school on time.

I had noted this bad driving parent phenomenon quite some time ago. On those occasions when I found myself driving through a school zone in the mornings it never failed that I would be passed by a parent driving well in excess of the 25 mile per hour limit and watch as they would cut off oncoming traffic and pull into the school driveway. Long before I was a parent I was looking forward to the day when having a carseat in my vehicle would grant me sovereign immunity from speeding tickets in school zones.

Once you’ve managed to get through the four-way intersection in front of the school, the front driveway turns out to be worse than the intersection. If I had a dollar for every thoughtless, rude, and downright stupid act of “driving” I’ve seen in the front driveway at my daughter’s school, I could retire right now. On many occasions I’ve been cutoff by other drivers who had just dropped off their kid(s), one instance requiring that I slam on the brakes causing my daughter, who was just getting out of her booster seat, to go flying between the two front seats of my van and into the dashboard. How one misses a large silver van with the headlights on is beyond me. Just last week someone parked at an angle in front of the building; with a line of cars coming in, this one, thoughtless person effectively blocked in the four cars already there when he/she/it decided it was more important to get their kid to class on time—and then walk them in, perhaps to argue with any teacher who dared give their kid a tardy.

Sure, we’re all dropping our kids off in hopes that they’ll learn something useful on any given day. It seems some of the parents need to spend some time at the desks as well. As I’ve said before, for a college town we’ve a lot of stupid people around here.