Highway 61 Revisited

I had a discussion the other day about HOV lanes -- actually, it wasn't a discussion, it was one individual ranting about what a waste HOV lanes are because no one drives in them and they take up space on the highway he could be driving in. What he failed to realize was that HOV lanes are not a highway issue, they are a mass transit issue. Here in Dallas, for example, our HOV lanes are not provided to us by the Highway Department, but my DART.

I commute 100 miles a day --half of it in a rural setting and half urban -- and I would love to be able to use the new HOV lanes along U.S. 75 north of LBJ. I recently registered with DART's rideshare program hoping that I might find others who have to navigate roughly the same route that I do, but so far my voice mail has not been flooded with calls.

The commute does give me the opportunity to see all kinds of drivers, most of them bad. Texas, I think, relishes bad driving, takes ownership of it, wears it on its chest. A dozen or so years ago, my son and I took a car trip to New York and back and that was when I first realized how bad Texas drivers are -- when I found myself in locales where the overwhelming majority of motorists actually drove sensibly. On our return trip, we noticed some automobile wackiness as he drove through Arkansas, but after we crossed the border at Texarkana we realized we were back in the land featuring the graduates of the Kamikaze Driving School.

For some reason, drivers in Texas believe it is their inherent right to merge into another lane, even though that lane might be occupied my another vehicle. But that's just one of the problems I have with Texas drivers. Another is the belief that on a multi-lane rural highway, cruising in the left-hand lane is OK. Many states have laws forbidding this practice; the California Highway Patrol, for example, is particularly known for ticketing those left-hand lane drivers. Texas has come up with signs posted sporadically that say "left hand lane for passing only" but no one pays any attention to them and I'm not sure that notice is backed by law.

My thoughts about HOV lanes and bad Texas drivers bubbled to the surface today when I read this hilarious article in the Onion about the an innovative solution that makes far more public safety sense than inane laws about using mobile phones in school zones. But that's a subject I'll address at a later time.