Bumper Cars

When you're driving around DC, you see very few really nice cars. You have your occasional Mercedes or BMW, but that's about it. It's because DC has the worst drivers in the world. On the road, it's all or nothing. I've never driven so defensively anywhere.

You have to parallel park almost everywhere, and odds are that your car will make contact with another car sooner or later. (I confess, I may have tapped a few while parking, but no scratches yet.)

The road is even worse. Point in case, today I was driving to pick up my CSA share, which is located all the way across town. I saw a car that was parallel parked up ahead on my right. I was in the left lane of a 4 lane road. I noticed the car start to inch up. To jump into the flow of traffic in the right lane, right? Not even close. The car hurriedly swung around and did a U-turn right in front of me and in front of cars that were coming from the other direction. I gave him a very long honk, and he in turn told me I was #1. Stuff like this happens all the time.

If you notice in the picture above, there's a very long scratch along the tire along the rear driver's side and a loosened mud flap. This all occurred the other day when Collin was driving my car in front of Union Station, which is a 3 lane traffic circle. He noticed a guy directly on his left starting to come into his lane (he was in the middle lane). While honking, he quickly ran through his options, which were to get into the right lane, speed up, or slow down. The right lane had a charter bus so that option was out. He went for speed up, so instead of taking out the whole left side of my car, the guy only got the back half. Things must happen like this all the time because Collin wasn't sure if the guy was going to stop afterward, which he reluctantly did, and if the vehicle is not totaled or there's no injury, the police don't even make a report! They just show up and act as a mediator. My insurance is working on taking care of it all right now.

The last bit of DC driving annoyances are tickets. Now, I've had a few tickets in my day, but they were all given to me by real, live policemen. When I came home today, I had 2 lovely little notices in my mailbox from the DC DMV. On the top in big bold letters, it said "Notice of Unsatisfied Photo Enforcement Ticket." It continued to tell me that I had an outstanding ticket that I had not paid, and they were now adding a penalty to my fine. Now, this is the first I've heard. They snapped a picture of my car (on a 4 lane road where the speed limit is 25 mph), issued a ticket, and forgot to tell me! I'm going to let my sweet lawyer boyfriend handle that one and take the bus/metro from now on.