Obligatory Traffic Rant

It's bad enough that Texans and Californians move to Colorado and fail to learn how to drive here. (That white stuff is called snow… you can't drive through it if it were sand or cottonwood fluff! It is cold, slick, and often hides "ICE" beneath it.) But when foreigners move here and don't understand that the rules of the road, they should return to their own country.

I know, you're sitting there thinking: "Don! You were a foreign driver in a foreign country! Give them a break… and anyway, how do you know the guy was a foreigner."

Fair points both! On point one, I learned (to the best of my ability) to drive like the British when I was over there. I stayed on the left side of the road (most of the time at least) and even learned how to decipher the cryptic signs that come before every roundabout.

As to how I knew the guy was a foreigner, again, fair point. He could have been born and raised here in Colorado. (…or anywhere else, for that matter…) The truck he was driving was licensed to Chihuahua. (The State in Mexico, not that fast-food spokesdog.)

So, now that we have that established, what is it that has got me so hot under the collar today? Well, this morning, on my way into the office, this idiot goes racing toward the intersection at Morrison Road and Alameda (presumably to get through while the light was still green) and then slammed on his brakes at the last second because the light had turned red.

Now I hear you saying "But, Don, you wouldn't want him to run the red light, would you?" No! Absolutely not… I would, however, want him to run the green arrow that was above our lane. It is a good thing that I saw him stop because I knew that the light stayed green in our lane for the next minute while Alameda had its turning lights on. (I do go through this intersection almost every day.) So, when it became clear that he was stopped, I tooted my horn. He stayed there…

I had to go around him to make the light. For all I know, he is still parked there. Had that been that, I would probably have had nothing to write about this morning, but getting onto the Colfax viaduct some idiot (this one sporting a license plate from Oaxaca) had turned around the corner into the merging lane to a point where he was completely obscured from traffic on the ramp by the retaining wall and come to a dead stop. It's a good thing the ramp wasn't icy!

Wherever you are today, I hope your morning is less exciting than mine has been thus far!

Don Bergquist – February 15, 2008 – Denver, Colorado, USA