Infrastructure is Insidious
How will our children survive in a dystopian future if we don’t teach them how to drive offensively?
On I-5 out of Bakersfield around 4pm the traffic headed toward Sacramento gets thick. In the right lane there are trucks, mostly, with an occasional Prius or a pickup pulling a horse trailer. They move at around 50–60 mph.
In the left lane, light cars and trucks move between 85–95 unless a semi pulls out the right lane, and they all slow to 50. It’s stop and go, and people get crazy. Cars are moving at 85 bumper to bumper.
There are several “moves” a car can make
There are several “moves” a car can make to beat getting stuck behind some crazy person doing the speed limit.
One move is breaking free into open road, and going at high speed across the space to the next line of semis, where cars are passing in a tight line to block one popping out in front of them before they have run the guantlet. If you make it in time you are at the end of that line instead of at the beginning of a new one.
This requires imagination, like pole vaulting
One of the most daring skills is pulling into the right lane and accelerating at high speed past a line of cars, slipping in just before being trapped behind a truck in the slow lane. This requires imagination, like pole vaulting or the high jump. You imagine yourself getting in front of people in the same way as you imagine clearing the bar to the acclaim of your relatives. You have to have faith that someone will lose their nerve when you start moving left into the space just ahead of them.
The end game is to get past the car that’s going slow and keeping a safe distance. A semi will pull out in front of that car and if you are behind it, you will never get past them. Another semi will pull out, and a half hour later everybody is still lined up behind that one car.
Sure, it’s dangerous to pass on the right, but so is bull riding and dueling. As things get more and more desperate, these skill sets evolve, and aggressive drivers who are not afraid to die slither like nerve gas through situations that trap and impede more timid drivers.
If there was another lane or two, these skills would begin to vanish
If there was another lane or two, these skills would begin to vanish, and the traffic would move along with a fast lane reserved for fast drivers, a middle lane for slower traffic, and a slow lane or two for the semis. This requires little nerve or skill, as there is less anger, intensity, and hormonal imbalance involved in an orderly progression than in a dog fight at 90 mph.
Driving in two lanes of this description, built 50–60 years ago, our children learn how to get in front of other people in a line by threatening their lives. Without being pushed to this point they might not have these survival skills. A young truck driver won’t know how to whip out in front of a hesitant car as the drugs kick in, and she finds herself high above the highway, looking down at brakes flashing on and off like red Christmas lights, as Leader of the Pack simultaneously comes on the oldies station. Sometimes synchronicity is like a triple rainbow.
Children who face the solar fires, social collapse, statin drugs and sugar diabetes have to be prepared to fight for a cup of water and a crust. Traveling bumper to bumper at 90 to block invading parasites from the right lane makes them aggressive enough to handle anything life throws at them. Show them how it’s done. They’re watching you.