You're a bad driver (and so am I!)

There's no such thing as a good driver.

Editor’s note: Sometimes, I feel compelled to share a strongly held opinion. This is one of those times.

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I used to think I was a good driver despite some conspicuous evidence to the contrary. Like, for example, the time I was driving a friend’s car through our high school parking lot and crashed it into a different friend’s car. Or the time I totaled my car on the way to Las Vegas for an ultimate frisbee tournament, which was an efficient way to hit several college clichés all at once

Obviously, teenagers are bad drivers. Their priorities are all wrong. I was only 19! I couldn’t even do anything fun in Vegas! But even as my driving lowlights have mostly receded into the rearview mirror (ha), I’ve gradually come to the conclusion that I’m not a good driver—because no one is a good driver.

For one thing, avoiding crashes doesn’t make you a good driver, especially with today’s automated safety features doing half the work. Bad driving is more subtle than that. It’s a holistic projection of awful vibes from the back of a black BMW. This kind of thing can hardly be measured on a simple spectrum of goodness.

I came by this realization honestly. I live in Los Angeles, which is less a city and more a series of concentric traffic nightmares. My house is right on the border of Glendale, an area considered by Angelenos (the Master Sommeliers of bad driving) to be home to the worst of our worst. You couldn’t fathom the number of Teslas I’ve nearly been sideswiped by. The moves that Glendale drivers pull are more than illegal—they’re somehow immoral.

But at a certain point, if you feel like the only sane person in a land full of lunatics, you have to consider that you might be crazy, too. That’s how I feel about driving.

Mankind simply wasn't meant to be in charge of a motor vehicle. The biggest problem is that we’re all inherently selfish when we’re alone. You can blame it on evolution—if you put us by ourselves, we will usually think only of ourselves. Cars create a false sense of isolation, tricking our monkey brains into thinking we're alone even though we're sharing the road with hundreds of others. This explains why other people do stuff that makes us go, “What the fuck, asshole?” a lot more often than we think, “Look at that upstanding citizen!”

But we’re all guilty! Anyone who’s driven a car for more than 30ish seconds has, at some point, inadvertently made another person think, “There goes the worst driver who ever lived.” In fact, it sure seems like if you put any human being behind the wheel for long enough, we will revert to some primordial form where traffic signals become baffling, and other drivers look like competition for barbecued mammoth ribs.

The most perfect expression of this driving psychology happens when someone blocks an entire lane of traffic because they missed their turn. There’s only one thought process that leads to this kind of self-centered lane-cutting: “ME NEED TURN. ME TURN NOW.” For the most part, I don’t even think it’s malicious—it’s just animal. But it’s this kind of human instinct that makes it impossible for any of us to truly be good drivers.

This is why I welcome the promise of self-driving cars, despite their development by Silicon Valley's least trustworthy figures. Robot cars may turn out to be fascist, but fascists are everywhere these days anyway—and at least the robots don’t tailgate.

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