Bill-on-the-Hill

Haven't updated this in ages, largely because I've been a stay-at-home lately, so until I resume traveling, a question for the readers assembled: what, to you, is the quintessence of bad driving, and where do you find it?

I've always considered my home state of New Mexico to have possibly the worst drivers in the United States, all things considered. They're certainly not the most aggressive (there's nowhere quite like New Jersey or California for that one, although Colorado is getting frighteningly close) or rudest (NJ is terrible again, and the Washington, DC metropolitan area is right up there too). Rather, the driving badness of New Mexican drivers revolves around three things(*): basic cluelessness about the rules of the road and their environment, complete inability to maintain an appropriate speed (with ridiculously slow drivers being as common as insanely fast ones), and above all, alarmingly decrepit vehicles that have a tendency for dangerous objects to fall off of or out of them without notice. You'll see bales of hay, all manner of furniture, construction tools, you name it flying out of the back of pickup trucks that look like they're hauling all the driver's earthly belongings in the bed. You do well to assume, when coming up behind a decrepit pickup truck, that something threatening is going to emerge from the truck, because at least once every 100 miles or so, it will.

The quintessential New Mexico bad driving experience to my knowledge was had by my son, who was a student at New Mexico State University in the generally pleasant town of Las Cruces. He was coming home for the weekend from college one day and came up behind a pickup that had two golf carts in its bed. He'd just noticed that the carts had NMSU university markings on them when he realized that they were in motion relative to the pickup. He had just time to switch lanes (the interstate between Las Cruces and Albuquerque is sparsely traveled, fortunately) when BANG, out popped the golf carts where he would have been if he hadn't changed lanes. They followed in the slipstream of the truck for a short distance and then considerately got off the road. And the driver just kept going. He didn't even slow down to check on what had become of his cargo. (Well, there was a reason; my son was working for the campus police at the tim, and he discovered once he got back to campus that the university's golf course was reporting the theft of two golf carts.)

So on that note, over to you. If you can top that story with other road hazards that aren't supposed to be there, be my guest.

(*) Oops, four. I forgot about drunk driving, and that's a real joy here -- but that's a subject for another blog.