PA to Drivers: Please Stop Being Such Raging A-Holes
Understand, neither the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania nor the Philadelphia Inquirer used the phrase “raging a-holes” to describe a forthcoming crackdown on “aggressive drivers” in today’s paper. But that’s totally what they meant, because here’s how they describe those “aggressive drivers”:
Tailgating. Running red lights. Weaving. Giving too little space to cyclists and pedestrians. And, of course, there are more directly aggressive moves – honking, flipping the bird, yelling, even assault – associated with road rage.
See? Total, raging a-hole behavior. And if you’re driving in Pennsylvania over the next few months, well, the authorities are going to take a dim view of it. “For the next month, law enforcement agencies along the 350-mile Route 30 corridor will work overtime to target and ticket aggressive drivers,” the Inquirer reports.
Why Route 30? Because, the Delco Times reports, the road is a perfect breeding ground for raging a-holes:
PennDOT officials at the Monday event said that Route 30, otherwise know on the Main Line as Lancaster Avenue, is a great location for the aggressive driving campaign because of the way the road has been designed.
“US 30 is a perfect location for this discussion. It’s a historic road and as such it can be frustrating to drive. It was clearly never designed for the volumes that it experiences. So many traffic signals, parking issues, no room for turn lanes … and so many pedestrians along it. Driving US 30 requires patience and caution and not adrenalin and aggression,” said Lou Belmonte, district traffic engineer with PennDOT.
In other words: The state designed the road poorly. Now it’s going to punish you for getting angry about it. Which also seems to be the behavior of a raging a-hole, when you think about it. But that’s OK, because this stepped-up enforcement is scheduled to last only a month or so—after which everybody can go back to being a-holes as usual.
