Road rage.

I don't have a whole lot of patience with crummy drivers. Drivers who are unfamiliar with the neighborhood and are obviously lost, I can relate to and put up with. But making that into an art form is a bit too much.

I was out doing errands this morning, and heading home along a semi-limited-access residential feeder road. Four lanes (and left-turn lanes, when needed), sometimes divided and sometimes not, speed limit 35 or 40 (and people doing 45 or 50), very few cross streets. At one point, after about 3/4 of a mile without an intersection, we were approaching a fairly major intersection, with traffic lights and left- and right-turn lanes all over. I'm in the right lane, and the driver of the car in front of me decides that she really wants to be in the left lane. She slows down, and slows down, and slows down, and finally comes to a complete stop, 100 yards from the traffic light. (No one in front of her in our lane, of course.) Fine, I think to myself, she just realized that she needs to turn left at the light and has panicked into doing so right this very instant. And all I'm going to do is go up to the light and wait for it to turn green, anyway, so it's not as though I'm losing a lot of valuable time. Unfortunately, she didn't stop quite soon enough, and traffic backs up in the left lane past where she is. So those of us in my lane have to wait until the light changes and all the traffic in the left lane clears before she changes lanes and we can continue.

She then motors up to the intersection - and goes straight. Hmm. Maybe she means to turn left into the next street. Well, no. Or maybe the strip mall beyond that. Or the next street. Or at the next light. Well, again, no - none of those. She merrily continued in the left lane for about 3 miles: four traffic lights, another half-dozen streets without traffic signals, and ten or fifteen driveways to commercial establishments. Finally, she turns her left-turn signal on. And continues on past two more uncontrolled intersections and straight through another intersection with a traffic signal. After about three-quarters of a mile, she turns the left-turn signal off and immediately swerves into the right lane, just barely in time to enter an intersection where she could turn right. She goes straight, of course, as she does at the next corner.

Okay. Time for me to finally realize that I'm less likely to end up in an accident of her causing if I'm not on the same street, so I turn onto a cross street. The last I saw of her, she was tootling along in the right lane, as though none of her lane-changing escapades had ever happened.