Northwest Drivers

Every part of the country has their driving peculiarities.  There's the Pittsburgh Left, the California Stop, and the Northwest Oh Dear God Why Did You Just Do That.

I really think this area has the country's worst drivers, and here's why:

1. Completely incapable of merging above five miles per hour.  If you've heard about Seattle's horrible traffic, this is the major cause of it from what I can tell.  Yes, that's right, I think the biggest cause of the horrible traffic out here is the bad drivers and not the incredibly bad road design; the drivers are not good enough for that to be the major cause.
2. They get freaked out driving in rain.  Yes, I know.  I know.  I know.
3. Driving in the "fast lane" while steadfastly going the speed limit or less.  This is the famous Northwest Passive Aggressiveness.
4. Their mistakes are your problem, not theirs.  People out here have no problem backing up on the highway to an exit they missed, turning left from the rightmost lane on four- or five-lane roads to avoid the inconvenience of extra turns, or just plain random moves without warning.
5. If you think rain is bad, you don't want to even imagine snow.
6. They have no. freakin. idea. how to do a four way stop.  No idea, none whatsoever.  You can imagine how joyous this made the power outages last year.
7. They don't know what the horn means.  Seriously.  An elderly woman did a left turn right in front of me soon after I arrived here, near Microsoft.  I honked her as I would anywhere else.  I had to brake hard to avoid hitting her, it is reasonable to honk her, right?  SHE VEERED INTO ONCOMING TRAFFIC.  As a friend of mine said when I told him about it "I've had nothing good ever come of using my horn out here."  Thank goodness it was a light traffic side road.
8. There are simple understood norms of driving they don't understand.  I'll give you an example.  A friend of mine who used to work at Microsoft was in a group with one native Northwesterner.  All the non-natives were talking about the poor driving and decided to ask her, if she were in the left lane of a highway, and someone came up behind her and flashed their brights, what did that mean?  She honestly didn't know, maybe that her lights were on?
   
   So far so funny.  I was flying to interview at Microsoft sometime after I heard that and was sitting next to a nice woman from Eastern Washington.  I figured they must know what they're doing there, it was just a Seattle thing, so I told her the story.  She laughed politely, and then asked... so what does that mean?
   
   (For you Northwest Drivers it means you are going too slow in the fast lane, merge right and stay out of the way).
9. They enjoy stopping at a light one or more car lengths behind the line (or even sometimes other cars).  I've seen up to three or four car lengths.  If your eyesight is that bad you should not be driving.
10. OMG!  A bicyclist!  WhatdoIdowhatdoIdowhatdoIdo OMG OMG OMG HEEEEEEELP MEEEEE.
11. Worst. Parkers. Ever.  When we go home to Colorado and see the rare person parking over a line, we say "Oh I see someone from Seattle is visiting."  The amount of keying that would be done just blows my mind.

Other transplants (and rarely natives) chiming in:

• Chris Pirillo
• Seattle Drivers Suck
• I really expected more, but I couldn't find it deep in Google and Technorati is full of search result spam.
• Sigh: From the comments on a post on Raymond Chen's blog.