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Do you live in LA/surrounding area?
The culture of "we don't let people in, so if you want to change lanes don't signal so you can swerve in an take them by suprise so they don't defend their lane" is one of the most ridiculous cultural own-goals this side of sub-saharan Africa.
Only Americans could design their society around cars and then get mad at each other for having the audacity to... drive cars nearby.
I can see how you might think the hoons are the problem, but it's actually the 'safe sensible' drivers who inspire this behaviour, because they legit get mad if you 'cheat' and get in front of them. For example, in Australia when they're going 20km under the speed limit and you are already only going a max of 110kmh (70mph) on any major highway. So they sit there in the right (left) hand lane doing fucking 90 (55) - but if traffic clears up in the lane next to them and you put your indicator on, they will speed up until there are cars in that lane again. But if you just drop a gear and go for it you can usually pass them before they realise.
Or those pricks who decide to merge as soon as they reach broken lines, instead of going to the end of the lane because that's how it was designed. If you give the appearance of not following suit by not putting your indicator on there, they will decide to teach you a lesson by riding the line between lanes, not giving you enough room to pass. But if you put your indicator on and wait for them to merge enough to let you past, you can flick your indicator off and merge properly.
Driving defensively is cool, but not nearly as cool as driving offensively.
I don't mind the skilled aggro drivers.
I was talking more about the common cultural practice (which I understood to be in LA, but I guess NJ too) of deliberately stopping people from changing lanes if you see them signalling.
It seems less about aggressive/defensive driving, and more about a weird adversarial relationship with other drivers predicated on the belief they'd do the same to you.
Everyone on the road should be allies in keeping the traffic moving. You (I think? I just woke up from a nap) are describing oblivious idiots who are neither ally nor enemy, just in it for themselves. I'm talking about the explicitly adversarial dynamic that seems to exist in those places where everyone just makes everything worse for everyone else on purpose.
Oh you reckon they're just selfish? I assume anyone who doesn't drive like me is my enemy. I was using other examples to show its a bigger problem than just a guy being a dick and not letting you in, I considered them of a kind. But it's true I haven't experienced it in LA or NJ - there are only three states I'm willing to drive in in the US - Idaho, Tennessee and Texas. I would probably drive in Utah too, but that would mean going to Utah.
Ah, you enjoy breaking the speed limit while the other drivers pass you constantly.
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Personally I find drivers with aggressive agency to be incredibly rare.
I find most people are incredibly unaware of their surroundings. I've started to pay close attention to the delay between the light turning green and people going (or the car in front of them moving and them going), so many people's reaction time is measured in actual seconds.
I'd posit most of the times I'm cut off it's not a deliberate choice to shark me, they just didn't look at their mirrors or blind spot. We also have a ridiculous # of uber drivers from India who I shall politely say drive with less conscientiousness than is perhaps ideal.
I'm Canadian but I was actually just in Texas and I was driving there. It was quite fine, people were normal and orderly.
I hope to never drive in a place where someone signalling to change lanes is an challenge to do everything in you can to prevent them entering though. I really cannot emphasize enough how much of a lose/lose that culture is. Take that shit to the third world.
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New Jersey. We don't get mad, we get even.
Oh wow I didn't realize it was an east coast phenomenon too.
"Get even" for the great offense of... Driving on the same road you too are driving on?
I really don't understand this, it just seems like you're all making each other more unhappy while driving for no other reason than because you're unhappy while driving? It's a prisoners dilemma situation except there's no payoff for defecting, but you all defect anyway.
Parts of Chicago do it as well, despite the acceptable public transport infrastructure and decent city planning.
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There is payoff for "defection", and it's not even prisoner's dilemma payoffs. If you're "nice" and let people in front of you who you could have beaten out, they will typically be slow and sluggish drivers who hold you up. If someone aggressively cuts you off, they will typically want to be going fast and won't hold you up (but not always, the asshole who cuts you off and slows down is prevalent, though his natural territory is Pennsylvania)
The common thread between LA and NJ is there's just too damn much traffic.
If only there were other transportation methods that scaled better.
Indeed, there are not. If you think NJ traffic is bad, NJ Transit brings whole new levels of bad.
Well except subways (or streetcars, or even buses if done well) which you have a great example of across the Hudson. NJ transit doesn't suck because transit is inherently bad (might I introduce you to Europe or Asia, mostly Asia). It sucks because Americans refuse to fund it properly and instead triple down on driving.
And then also hate driving, lmao
Also bike lanes (we're back baby) scale amazingly, they have significantly higher throughput for the area they occupy.
Not really, no. The subways in Manhattan work because it's a long and skinny island with very high density. Once you're outside Manhattan there are large areas poorly served or unserved by the subways even in NYC.
London/Asian megacities do it well and they're not long skinny islands
It's doable, it's not easy, but it's doable
And it's definitely better than doing nothing and drowning in gridlock
I understand your complaints, I guess I don't really understand what your forward looking thoughts are?
If the status quo (gridlock, people hating driving/each other) sucks, why shoot down every potential solution to wallow in the status quo?
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Americans will not do these things, and throwing money at it won't work any better than it does for public schools.
If you want Americans to suddenly start taking mass transit, build trains(not busses) going from commuterville to the downtowns everyone actually works in, boost ridership through heavy advertising as a premium for avoiding traffic, with tickets only sold as monthly passes, and fare evasion punished harshly.
This will not happen. Most Americans like driving, they like privacy in their own cars, and they aren't particularly price sensitive. Mass transit for traffic reduction suffers from the free rider problem and mass transit for cost reasons will never see widespread adoption in a country where even the very poor have cars.
I mean aside from the fact long driving commutes demonstrably make people miserable.
And the fact this misery results in crazy cultural self-owns where people start blocking other people from entering lanes to the point you have to suddenly change lanes without signals (or fake them out with a signal so they speed up to block you so you can sneak behind them) to take the other people by suprise so you can change your lane.
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You're forgetting that downtowns are dying. Prominent transit critic Randal "Antiplanner" O'Toole has proposed for several cities bus plans that have many small hubs rather than one big hub.
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Of course this requires that you have that hub and spoke system. Once you have a significant number of suburb to suburb commutes, you can't even do that.
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