Forward Progressives — Driving Miss Dixie & the Consequences of Duck-Headedness
There is only one solution: Ban motor vehicles in Tea Party infested regions. They like the 17th century so much, they can go back to horses and buggies or tramp through the horse droppings in their western boots (which were, after all, designed for the purpose). They could have the option of bicycles, but probably consider them a gay/communist/European plot.
Once upon a time, I thought Haitians were the worst drivers in the world. Then, on January 1, 2003, I moved to Columbia, South Carolina, and immediately came to respect the controlled chaos of Tap-Tap drivers careening about Port-au-Prince like a flash mob of alkali metals with electrons to burn.
I had never seen anything like the smash-up derby drivers of the Palmetto State.
The winter of 2003, an ice storm befell the South Carolina capital. (As a Minnesotan by birth, I use the term ‘winter’ only in its strictest seasonal sense.) A not-terribly-funny thing happened: when semaphores went out across the city, drivers everywhere categorically rejected the “rule of the road” that states a disabled stoplight is transformed into a four-way stop sign.
To my stupefaction, drivers flew through intersection after intersection at the normal speed limit, somehow oblivious to the following critical thought: “If Driver X were to approach this intersection simultaneously from a perpendicular direction as Driver Y, an emergency room visit would surely ensue.”
There are some amazing statistics and graphs at the link. I labeled this humor but such a correlation does seem to exist.
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