We’re in the final run-up to Christmas. It’s a time when many rush to finish those final bits of work before the holiday, purchase last-minute gifts and plot Christmas dinner. The fragrance of the season is in the air. Peace on Earth and goodwill toward men.
But when I draw a breath, I find the whiff of a noxious scent lurking in this festive breeze. A lot of cold-hearted motoring is going on. A lot of uncharitable acts are being committed on our streets and highways, a lot of squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous driving.
In short, a lot of Scrooge-like behaviour, a lot of petty mean-spirited acts.
If only those Scrooge drivers who edge their way along the crowded streets of our cities, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, were to be visited on Christmas Eve by the spirit of all the selfish drivers past. If only a fettered “Jacob Hyundai” were to appear, shake his chains and declare, “I wear the chain I forged in Life. I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on, of my own free will, and of my own free will, I wore it.” Frightened into goodness, the Scrooge-like drivers would awake reborn.
But, as my grandmother used to say, that’s not going to happen.
So, as I possess a spectral side, I’ll take the job this season and catalogue the sins of Christmas driving past, present and future.
The twelve DUIs of Christmas: While drunk driving is an all-season disease, it can be more noticeable this time of year with holiday parties and roadside checks. In Winnipeg, for instance, there were 35 drunk driving incidents in the second week of that city’s holiday check stop program. One driver had a five-year-old in the car and one was high on cocaine. In Richmond, B.C., a semi-truck driver who crashed his vehicle was arrested for drunk driving (he was the second that week). Kingston’s R.I.D.E. program has made dozens of arrests. And so, it goes…
People, why complicate the act of getting drunk? After a certain age, all it is, is two hours of anesthesia shattered by a 3 a.m. wake up followed by “an eternal quivering on the edge of an abyss, with everything base and vicious in oneself urging one forward and the baseness and viciousness of the world just ahead. No choice, no road, no hope — only the endless repetition of the sordid and the semi-tragic.”
Why spoil it by driving?
Parallel plodders: Some drivers can’t parallel park. No one knows how they got their licences, as parallel parking used to be a mandatory requirement, but they are on the road none-the-less. For some mysterious reason, they pick the Christmas season as the time to give it one more shot. This December, I can’t drive five minutes without encountering some fool attempting to parallel park on a busy street. Every attempt is the same. The driver makes between four to seven aborted tries before giving up and speeding away. Dear lame drivers, if you can’t parallel park, you know it. The fact it is Christmas is not going to change that. Skip the farce. If you see a parking spot that requires a parallel park, don’t kid yourself. You can’t do it. Drive on.
Parallel passers: The etiquette, when travelling behind someone who has elected to parallel park, is to wait until they have completed the job – then continue driving. When I parallel park, I put on my turn signal, check to ensure there is no one behind me, and park. It doesn’t take long. Why is it, then, that almost every time I parallel park there are impatient drivers blasting by me? Don’t swerve into oncoming traffic and pass someone when they are parallel parking. It’s rude and mean-spirited. Bah humbug!
The Christmas cut-off: By my count, there were eleven. A driver was stuck behind some “surprise construction.” She had been moving along in the right lane and suddenly found it blocked by construction, festooned in festive bright clementine orange. There had been no warning. Eleven drivers went by, and none allowed her to merge. They all shut her out. Is it that hard to slow down and let someone merge in front of you?
Christmas hazards: We all get it. You’re busy. There’s no parking and you need to stop but that does not mean it’s okay to flick on your hazard lights and block a lane, especially during rush hour. This was once a somewhat rare transgression, but it is now endemic. It’s hard to drive more than a block or two in most downtowns without encountering one or more vehicles stopped in a lane where parking is prohibited. Sometimes they go to the trouble of using hazards, which accomplishes nothing but imply an insincere “sorry.” Just as often they don’t. During the Christmas season this practice seems to increase exponentially. As each day grows closer to December 25, more and more vehicles “stop and block.”
As Tiny Tim Cratchit would say, “God bless us, every one!” (except the drivers described above).
